The silence of the predawn morning summons the fragments of last night.
You were supposed to watch out for her. That was the deal.
Deal? What was I? An auction piece?
I know.
I should have told you.
Yes, you should have.
I've been turning those four lines over since midnight. Arranging them in different ways, trying to find a version that doesn't mean what my gut says they mean. I haven't found one yet.
The thing about growing up as someone's little sister is that you get very good at reading between the lines on what people say and what they mean. Tyler never saidI love you.He showed it in different ways, like the way he checked the tire pressure on my truck before every long drive. Mom never said I'm proud of you. It was implied in the way she spoke to others. Bo?—
I stop.
As Frank continues crowing outside my window even after the Kleenex box, I give up and get up instead.
The ranch doesn't care about my feelings. The horses still need feeding regardless of what happened on a dance floor last night, and Hank will still eat through the fence rail if I don't get out there, and Frank is still going, so I pull on my boots and my oldest jeans, and I go do the work.
Mischief gives me trouble at the gate, which is expected. Annabelle leans her head over the stall door and breathes warm air on my neck, which helps a lot. Muddy follows me around the yard like a small shadow, and I love it. He’s done it since I got him.
I'm halfway through the morning cattle feed when I hear Tyler's voice.
He comes around the side of the farmhouse. His hair isa wreck, and his cast looks at odds with the man I know him to be.
“I’d been knocking at the front door for half an hour. Should have known you’d be out doing chores at o’crap o’clock in the morning.” He's in jeans and a t-shirt, and he looks like he slept about as well as I did, which is to say not at all.
I keep working. “The animals can’t feed themselves.”
"Falon."
"I've got twenty minutes of chores left," I say. "You can wait, or you can help."
On a ranch with a cast, there isn’t much he can do except throw some chicken feed, but he opts to wait.
When I come out of the barn, he's sitting on a partially broken round bale of straw, the way he used to sit when we were kids, when he was seventeen and thought he knew everything about everything. He looked smaller back then. Not so much anymore.
I lean against the gate and look at him.
"Say what you came to say," I tell him, folding my arms.
He looks down for a moment. Then at me. "I handled it wrong."
"Which part?"
"Most of it." He exhales. "I came home, and I saw you and him and I, I didn't think. I just reacted."
"You've been reacting to my life for a long time, Ty."
He flinches. Good. I'm not going to soften it for his ego, because it's true and we've been dancing around it for years, and I am twenty-three years old, and I am done dancing.
"I know," he says. Quiet. Like the words cost him something. "I know I have."
"You made a promise with Bo when you were both teenagers about my life. My life, Tyler. And nobody askedme." I keep my voice even because if I don't, it'll crack, and I'm not ready for that yet. "Do you understand how that feels? Finding out that the people I love most were making decisions about me like I was something to be managed?"
"I was trying to protect you."
