Page 155 of Wild Sanctuary

My fingertip finds the dash between his dates, the small carved line that holds his whole life on it.

“Well, surface it has, Dad. Most of it, anyway. The rest of it—Silas Blackwood and his dirty deeds—I’ll surface them myself.”

My hand presses flat to the granite again.

The wind moves the cottonwood again, longer this time, like a held breath letting go.

“I don’t quit a story, Dad. You taught me that.”

Wyatt steps closer, and then he’s lowering himself down beside me, the brim of his hat in one hand and the other settling flat against the small of my back. His knee brushes mine in the grass.

He doesn’t speak right away. Just looks at the granite. The peonies. My dad’s name carved into stone two feet from his face.

When he does speak, his voice is rough at the edges in a way I haven’t heard before.

“Tom.”

That’s all he gives him for a long beat.

His hand on my back hasn’t moved. I can feel the breath he’s gathering through it.

“Three years I’ve been comin’ here. Mostly to see Dad. Mostly with something on my chest I couldn’t say at the house.” He swallows. “I haven’t been able to say this part to you. Not once. Till now.”

The cottonwood is quiet above us.

“You should be the one standin’ here, Tom. Not me.”

His hand tightens once against my back.

“I know what Marcus did. I know he kept me back from that truck deliberately. I’ve thought on that, and most days I can carry it. What I can’t carry is the version where you’re not standin’ here with your daughter where you’re supposed to be.”

I stop breathing.

“She lost three years of you. Three years where you should’ve been at her shoulder. Sunday dinners. Bad jokes. Rides up the ridge.”

A long breath in. A long breath out.

“You told me somethin’ that Christmas, Tom. Said she wasn’t a girl to date. That she’s the girl a man marries. Said she needed to chase those big city dreams, and not to be the thing that stopped her.”

The cottonwood shifts in the breeze above us.

“I held that to the letter, Tom, these last six years.”

Six years that I read as rejection.

His hand curls in against my hip.

“She’s twenty-six now. Done the chasin’ you knew she’d do, and came home under her own steam. I’m not the thing stoppin’ her. Never was gonna be.”

My eyes flood without permission as I tug my bottom lip between my teeth.

“What I can do is be the man who’s here. The one she counts on when the next thing comes. I don’t deserve the seat you’d be sittin’ in. But I’ll fill it the best I’m able, every day she lets me.”

His thumb moves once against the curve of my hip.

“That’s my word, Tom. To you and to her. Both of you, now.”

The cottonwood stirs once, slow and full.