“It works.”
She nodded. “What Hunter did was the same concept. A voice, a weight on the chest, pressure at the pulse point. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. What matters is that it’s there.” She paused. “That’s all Hunter did. He gave you something to follow back.”
I stared at the sky and turned that over. Hunter’s voice had found me in the dark last night, calm and specific, pulling me back from a clearing that wasn’t a clearing anymore. Tova had been doing the same thing for weeks, climbing onto my chest at three in the morning with breathing so deliberate it overrode my own. Two different forms of the same principle, and both had worked because someone was paying attention.
“I wish Reid had had that.”
The words came out before I was ready for them. They just surfaced, the way things do when you’ve been holding them under for long enough.
I knew Lark didn’t know who I was talking about, but she didn’t push. She waited.
“Reid was my best friend.” I kept my eyes on the sky because it was easier to talk to than her face. “We enlisted around the same time, ended up in the same unit. Did three deployments together. A decade of the same mud and the same firefights and the same bad food and the same nights where you don’t sleep because the things you saw that day won’t let you.”
I pulled a blade of grass from the ground and turned it between my fingers.
“He was the one person I never had to explain anything to. Everyone else, I had to translate. My parents, my friends back home, the guys I worked with after the Army. They all tried, and I appreciated it, but there was always a gap between what I was saying and what they heard. Reid didn’t have that gap. He’d been standing next to me for all of it.”
“What happened to him?” Lark’s voice was quiet.
“He killed himself. A little over nine months ago. Eight months before I came to Garnet Bend.”
She didn’t turn toward me. She stayed on her back with her face to the sky and let the words have the room they needed.
“I didn’t know he was struggling that bad,” I said. “That’s the part I can’t get past. We talked. We checked in. He called me on a Tuesday night three weeks before he did it, and we talked about a fishing trip we were planning for the fall. He sounded fine. He sounded like Reid.”
The sun had dropped below the ridgeline, and the light had gone soft and indirect, the kind that erases edges.
“I found out because his sister called me. I was in my truck driving to a jobsite and her name came up on my phone, and I knew before I answered. He shot himself.”
Lark’s hand moved in the grass between us, close to mine but not touching, and the space she left there felt like permission to keep going or stop.
“I’m so fucking pissed at him.”
Something shifted in my voice when I said it. A door I’d been keeping shut swung open.
“I know you’re not supposed to say that about someone who was in that much pain. But honestly, I don’t care. I’m so fucking furious.”
“Tell me why,” Lark said.
“Because he knew me.” I sat up. The stillness I’d found lying in the grass couldn’t hold what was moving through me. “He knew I would have come. He could have picked up the phone at two in the morning and saidI’m drowning, and I would have been in my truck before he finished the sentence. I would have sat on his floor for a month. I would have done anything he needed.”
Tova lifted her head and watched me, her ears forward. Probably wondering if this was a nightmare or not. I certainly wondered.
“But he didn’t ask,” Lark said.
“He didn’t ask. He was my family, damn it. Not by blood, by choice. By a decade of choosing each other every single day in places where that choice mattered. And he didn’t give me a chance to help him.”
I picked up a rock from the grass and rolled it in my hand, pressing my thumb into the flat side of it hard enough to feel the grit.
“You know what gets me? I’m living proof that recovery can work. You put Tova in my cabin, and that dog pulled me back from nightmares I couldn’t get out of on my own. I’m sleeping so much better, and everything feels so much more solvable because of that. I know I’m not alone.”
I set the rock down.
“Reid didn’t have any of that. No anchor. And I can’t stop thinking that if he had, if somebody had put a Tova next to him or, hell, even Clarence with all hismotherfuckersand colorfullanguage, maybe it would’ve given Reid whatever it was he needed. Maybe he’d still be here.”
The pasture was quiet. Tova had moved closer, her shoulder pressed against my leg.
“I miss the fuck out of him, and I’m so goddamned pissed.”
