She was quiet for a moment. Her thumb moved across my knee the way it had when I was small and couldn't sleep.
"When you have a child — and I can only speak from my own experience as a mother — it's like watching your heart walk around outside your body. It's the most unimaginable love. And Callie would throw herself under a bus a million times over if it meant protecting Maisie. That's not weakness, baby. That's the fiercest thing a person can be."
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and looked at the sky and breathed through it.
Doesn’t she know by now I’d throw myself under that bus, too?
"She's wrong," Momma said. "But she needs to figure that out herself. You can't argue someone out of fear. You can only outlast it."
"You told me that before."
"Because it's still the answer." Her grip tightened on my knee. "So you outlast it. You're a Blackwood. We're stubborn."
I put my hand over hers. Held on. Something in my chest cracked open just enough to let air in.
"What if stubborn's not enough?"
She turned her hand over under mine and laced her fingers through and squeezed. "It's always been enough in this family. You just have to survive the middle part." She held on for another beat. Then she stood. Smoothed her skirt. "I'm going tobake something. When I don't know what else to do, I bake. It's a character flaw, and I'm not working on it."
She went inside. The screen door closed behind her. I sat on the porch and didn't drink my beer and let the dark come.
I walked into the kitchen the next morning for coffee and stopped in the doorway.
Momma was on the phone. Notepad out, pen moving in her precise handwriting. Savannah — I could tell from the cadence, the legal terms she was writing down, the way she tilted her head when she was processing information she intended to act on.
Dad was at the table across from her. Reading glasses on, a folder open, the family attorney's voice coming through the speakerphone tinny and measured. Dad was making notes in the margins. When Dad wrote things down, it meant he wanted receipts.
Maggie was at the counter with her laptop. She looked up when I appeared.
"Clara Mae Henderson has written her character reference," she said. "I haven't read it yet, but she called me crying, which means it's either devastating or unhinged. Possibly both." She scrolled. "June Parker's is done. Dottie's working on hers. Sheriff Martinez said he'd have something by Friday. The school principal is pulling Maisie's attendance and behavior records."
I stood in the doorway.
"Nobody asked you to do this," I said.
Momma covered the phone with her hand. The look she gave me could've peeled paint.
"Nobody had to." She went back to Savannah.
I called Weston that afternoon from the south paddock fence with the yearlings grazing behind me and the wind coming across the valley cold and sharp.
"She ended it," I said.
"I know. Savannah told me. I’m sorry, man. I know that doesn’t fix anything, but it’s still true.”
"What do I do?"
"What does your gut say?"
"Drive to her cottage and tell her she's wrong and hold her until she believes me."
"Don't do that."
"I know."
"That's the boyfriend move. You show up and argue and make it about what you need. You don't get to be the boyfriend right now." Weston paused. "You get to be the army."
"Meaning?"
