"She's pulling away."
I drove the post deeper than necessary. "Yeah."
"You going to let her?"
"I don't know how to stop it without becoming the thing she's afraid of."
Hunter considered this. He finished stapling his end. Wrapped the excess wire. Set his pliers on the post.
"Then don't stop it," he said. "Just be standing there when she stops running."
He went back to the fence. I stared at him. He didn't look up.
"How do you know that?" I said.
He didn't answer. Just picked up the next strand of wire and pulled it taut and set the staple, and the question hung in the cold air between us and I understood that my quiet brother was carrying something I'd never asked about and he'd never offered and this was not the morning to push.
We worked until the sun came up and the ranch was doing what it always did — being steady, being solid, being the thing that didn't change when everything else was.
Friday evening. The cottage.
Maisie was asleep. I was on the couch. Callie was beside me with her laptop open — case files, not law school.
I'd noticed two days ago. The UT Law admissions page — the one she'd bookmarked that night on the couch, the night she'd let herself want something for the first time in years — was gone from her favorites bar. Moved to a folder called "Later." Gray and tucked away. The digital equivalent of a dream put back in a drawer.
She hadn't mentioned it. I hadn't asked. But the absence was louder than anything she'd said to me in two weeks.
I closed the laptop gently.
She looked up.
"I love you," I said. "You know that."
She nodded. Her eyes were bright. The lamplight caught the blue and turned it something else — not ice, not sky, but the color of a flame at its center, the part that burns hottest and looks coldest.
"I love you too," she said.
It sounded like the beginning of a sentence that ended withbut.
I kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes and her hand came up and gripped my wrist and held on. Hard. Like she was trying to memorize the feel of my pulse under her fingers.
Then she let go.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Goodnight."
I sat in my truck outside the cottage, engine off, watching the porch light.
My boots weren't by her front door tonight. My mug wouldn't be on her counter in the morning. My toothbrush was still there, I assumed. She hadn't given it back. But I didn't know how long any of it would last.
I thought about Hunter.Be standing there when she stops running.
I thought about Momma.You can't argue someone out of fear.
Sitting in my truck watching the woman I loved systematically dismantle the life we'd built didn't feel like winning. It felt like watching a slow-motion demolition and being told the most heroic thing I could do was stand still.
The porch light flickered once. Steadied.
