I refill his coffee.
He looks up. "Thank you, ma'am."
"You're welcome."
I move back to the stove. My back is to the room. My hand goes to the bare place at my throat for the third time today before I catch myself.
I drop it and crack four more eggs, needing to stay busy.
My mind is a mess.
* * *
The afternoon comes on slow.
Rogue is at the cypress desk at his cabin, or maybe I should call it our cabin since we pretty much live with him now.
The brothers cycle through. Lunch is sandwiches I prepped two trays of and left on the bunkhouse counter under a clean towel.
Mama Lou pulls up in her station wagon in the early afternoon. Nash is out of the passenger seat and across the gravel before she has the engine off. "Mama!"
I'm on the bunkhouse porch when he hits me. He's grown three inches in twenty-four hours, I swear it. "Hey baby. You have a good time?"
"Mama Lou let me help make biscuits this mornin' and Raine and me watched a movie about a horse, but it wasn't as good as the next one we're gonna watch. I ate three sausages!"
"Lord, Nash."
"Mama Lou said it was okay."
I lift my eyes to Mama Lou, who has climbed out of the station wagon and is walking across the gravel with the slow ease of a woman who has been on her feet for sixty years. "Mama Lou. How are you doing today? The kids suck the soul out of ya?"
She giggles cheerfully. "Hadley, sweetheart, I'm quite all right, and soul, no. Energy, yes."
She comes up the porch steps and pulls me in. She smells like lavender and biscuit flour.
When she pulls back, she takes my face in her hands. Her thumbs brush my cheekbones once. Her eyes go to the place at my throat where the chain used to be. They go there once. Then they come back to my eyes.
She doesn't say a word about it.
But her mouth pulls into the small slow smile that women give other women when they have seen something and are deciding to keep it. "You take care, sweetheart. I'll come by for the boy whenever you need. Just give me a couple of days to recoup. He and Raine have kept me busy."
"Of course, thank you, Mama Lou. Nash loves spending time with you and Raine."
She tips her head at me, climbs back in the station wagon, and backs down the drive.
Nash runs into the bunkhouse hollering for Diesel.
I sit down on the porch steps because my knees go a little.
Mama Lou is the second woman in two days who has *seen* my bare throat without commenting on it.
I don't know what to think about that yet.
* * *
Phantom and Marlena pull up at the cabin just before supper.
The dust hasn't settled before Marlena's door is open and she's spilling out of the cab with Cal on her hip. Her face is wet. Her hair is in a knot that's coming apart. She's wearing a cardigan over her sundress like she's been on the road since first light and hasn't taken it off.
