Clay:I meant what I said. Every word. I'll wait.
I read it seven times. The screen blurred and cleared and blurred again.
I didn't reply.
I put the phone face-down on the linoleum beside me. Sat there until my legs went numb and the cold came through my clothes, and the house settled into the held silence of a place where someone is missing.
Then I stood. Walked to the front door.
The porch light was on. The one Clay had told me to leave on. The one that meant someone was home, and someone was waiting.
I turned it off.
The switch clicked. The porch went dark. I stood with my hand on the switch and my forehead against the door.
I went to bed. I didn't sleep. I lay in sheets that smelled like cedar and hay and something underneath that made my whole body ache with the specific, physical pain of missing someone who'd been there twelve hours ago. His pillow still had the indent. I could see it in the dark — the shape of his head, the depression in the fabric, a man in negative space.
I stared at the ceiling and waited for the decision to feel right.
It didn't.
I waited longer.
It still didn't.
Outside, the porch was dark. The street was empty. And somewhere across town, driving home on roads I couldn't see, a man I'd just broken was carrying the words I'd said in his chest the way I carried the filing in mine — sharp and wrong and impossible to put down.
I closed my eyes.
I didn't sleep.
Chapter 20
Clay
I drove home and didn't remember a single mile of it.
The truck found the ranch on its own — muscle memory, tires on gravel, the automatic left at the county road and the right at the Blackwood gate. My hands were on the steering wheel at ten and two, and they hadn't moved since Callie's driveway. My jaw was clenched so tight my back teeth ached. The radio was off. The heater was off. The windows were up and the cab was cold and I didn't notice any of it until I parked at the house and reached for the keys and my hand was shaking.
I stared at it. My hand. Shaking on the ignition key. I'd ridden two-thousand-pound bulls at full spin. I'd taken a horn to the ribs in Tulsa and walked out of the arena under my own power. Copperhead had cracked two ribs on the dismount, and I'd stood in the dirt and tipped my hat to the crowd.
Callie Monroe saidyou've known her for a few months,and my hand wouldn't stop.
Just because it had been only for a few months, didn’t mean I didn’t love her with every piece of my heart. Both of them.
I sat in the truck until the cold seeped through my jacket and my breath fogged the windshield. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and closed my eyes and stayed there until the ache in my chest dulled to something I could breathe around. Then I went inside and lay on my bed fully clothed and stared at the ceiling until it got light.
I was in the barn before dawn.
Mucking stalls before the sun cleared the ridge. Not because the stalls needed it — Jack had done them yesterday — but because the pitchfork was heavy and the work was repetitive and every forkful was something I could control. My shoulders burned. My eyes burned worse. I kept going. Drove the pitchfork in harder. Threw the hay further than it needed to go. Worked until my shirt was soaked through and my arms shook, and the only thing I could feel was the strain in my muscles instead of the hole in my chest.
I mucked the first stall. The second. The third. I cleaned stalls that were already clean. I reorganized the tack room. I swept the aisle twice. The barn cats watched me from the rafters with the patient, unblinking judgment of creatures who understood obsessive behavior and wanted no part of it.
Hunter came in with coffee.
He didn't say anything. Just set a mug on the stall partition and leaned against the opposite wall with his own and drank. That was Hunter. He didn't announce himself, didn't ask questions, didn't fill silence with noise. He just showed up where he was needed and stayed until it was done.
I stopped. Leaned on the pitchfork. Picked up the mug. Black, strong — coffee as a structural material, not a beverage. The barn was quiet except for the horses shifting and the cats rearranging themselves in the hay.
