I've been up since an hour before sunup.
The coffee is made. The bacon is on. The biscuits Hadley brought over from the bunkhouse yesterday are wrapped in foil in the oven keeping warm. The eggs are in a bowl on the counter waiting for me to crack them when she gets up.
I'm not used to cooking for somebody else.
I lay another strip of bacon in the pan and watch the fat go translucent at the edges. The kitchen smells like a real kitchen for the first time in ten years, masking the cedar wood scent I've grown used to.
I pick up my phone off the counter and thumb open the club group thread:
*You're fendin' for yourselves at the bunkhouse this mornin. Y'all are grown men.*
I hit send, set the phone face up on the counter. The first reply comes in inside of thirty seconds.
*Banshee: Copy.*
*Spur: 'Bout damn time!*
*Blaze: Tell her good mornin'.*
*Thunder: Tell her good mornin' from me too.*
I leave the phone where it is and I crack the first egg.
The yolk goes into the pan perfectly and I stand at the stove looking down at it and the thought hits me.
*I'm going to marry her.*
It's not a thought I work my way to. It's not something I argue myself into. The thought arrives in the kitchen the way a man arrives at his own door at the end of a long day. Steady. Tired. Home.
I crack the second egg.
I'm going to marry her, and I'm going to ask her soon. I'm not going to fucking wait, and I want Nash to call me Dad before the year is out.
I move the bacon to the paper towel I have laid out on the cutting board. I add the third egg. The whites are setting at the edges of the first two.
The ring is in the back of the drawer of my nightstand under a roll of socks I haven't worn since I bought them. My mother's ring. Plain gold band with two small dark green emerald stones set flat in the metal with a two carat diamond in the center. She wore it for thirty-two years. She gave it to me the week before she died and she told me to give it to a woman who deserved it, and I told her I didn't know any women like that. She had told me eventually I would, but I never believed her.
I've had it for fifteen years. I probably haven't looked at it in twelve of them.
I'm going to look at it tonight, after Hadley is asleep, and I'm going to find the time and the place and the way to put it on her hand.
The third yolk goes brown at one edge. I flip it.
Hadley appears in the kitchen doorway with her hair a mess, and her bare throat in the pink morning light with one of my t-shirts skimming the tops of her thighs.
She stops. Looks at the stove. Looks at me. Looks at the plate I've already set at the small kitchen table—biscuits split open, butter melting, jam from the bunkhouse pantry, fresh-cut peach on the side that I drove to Buc-ee's at five this morning to get.
Her mouth opens and nothing comes out.
I lift the spatula. "Sit down, baby. Coffee's already poured."
She crosses the kitchen barefoot and stops next to me. Goes up on her toes and presses her mouth against the side of my jaw. She stays there for a moment. "You did all this?"
"For you."
"Silas..."
I take the spatula out of the pan and set it on the spoon rest, then turn to face her with my hands on her hips. "Sit down, baby. Eat. Drink your coffee. Tell me about your dreams. Then I'm gonna make you do the dishes 'cause I'm not your maid."
