Later—I don't know how long, ten or fifteen minutes maybe—she pulls her face back from my throat and looks up at me with her eyes still wet and her hand still on the back of my neck and says, "Silas."
"Yeah, baby?"
"Tell me about your mother."
So, I do.
We move to the bed. Not for sex, just to be cuddled up against one another.
She lies against my side with her head on my chest and her ring catches the light when she moves her hand on my stomach.
I tell her about my mother. Cora McCrae. Born in a Scottish-Texan family outside Snyder, married my father at nineteen, widowed at twenty-six when he went off the road in a feed truck on a county highway.
Raised me by herself on the family farm. Worked the land until her back gave out and then worked it some more.
The kind of woman who'd put her hand on the back of a man's neck once and know his entire story before she said anything.
My mother would have loved her. I let her know that.
What my mother would have done is look at Hadley's hands and the way she works in a kitchen and said, *'That's the one, Silas, that's her.'* I tell Hadley that, too.
Hadley listens, no matter how much I talk about my mom.
Her thumb moves on my stomach in slow circles.
She tells me things back.
About her own mama in Georgetown. About Garrett, briefly—the man earned the right to be mentioned without it being a wound.
About the day Nash was born, twelve hours into labor at the hospital in Tulsa, the look on Garrett's face when they put the baby in his arms.
About what she thought her life was going to look like before her husband got sick.
She doesn't apologize for any of it.
She doesn't have to.
I listen to her tell me about her life, and I rub my thumb along her finger.
After a while, the radio on my hip crackles.
I pulled it out of the bedroom safe an hour before sunup and clipped it to my belt because every patched brother on this property has been running on the radio for the last two days.
It's Miller's voice. "Prez. Y'all need to come see somethin' at the south access."
Phantom's voice comes over the channel. "On my way."
Then Blaze. "Rollin'."
I sit up. Hadley sits up next to me. Her hand goes to her bare throat and catches itself before it gets there and drops back into her lap.
She looks at me. She doesn't ask.
"I gotta go, baby."
Her hand finds mine on the quilt and closes around it. "Okay."
I tighten my grip on her hand once. "Wake Nash up. Get him dressed. Take him to the bunkhouse. Marlena and Bex are there. You stay with them till I get back. Don't go anywhere alone. You hear me?"
