Easy.
Whole.
Without conditions.
He could do that. I couldn't. Not now. Maybe never.
She'd be better off.
He'd be better off.
And that was a thing I could do for both of them, even if it was the only thing I had left to give.
I stood up.
Grabbed the duffel.
At the bottom of the stairs, I took one last look at the kitchen with its finished island and imagined all the future mornings we'd never have sitting there together.
I turned toward the back door, opened it, and walked out.
The gravel drive stretched out in front of me. My truck sat thirty feet away, parked crooked the way I always parked it, one tire half on the grass. The early August evening light was slanting long across the yard, turnin' the hood of my truck gold.
Made it to the truck while coaching myself through the burn behind my eyes.
Told myself it was the sun.
Got the driver's door open. Stood there with one hand on the frame and the other gripping the duffel strap, and I just… breathed.
Gravel crunched under tires a few feet away.
I squeezed my eyes shut quick. When I opened them, Colleen's truck was comin' up the driveway hot in my periphery, gravel spitting out from under the wheels. Rhett was at the wheel, and he pulled in hard and more crooked than I had, blocking me in. He cut the engine before the thing had fully stopped rockin' on its shocks.
A door opened. Then another.
Boots on gravel.
"Hey, wake up, bud. We're here. Let's get you out."
Rhett's voice, pitched low. A pause. A shuffle.
I kept my eyes on the seat of my truck. On the cracked leather at the top of the steering wheel. On the little scorch mark above the radio from the previous owner.
Boots again. Two sets now.
One set kept walking. The other stopped somewhere off to my right.
The slower one kept coming. Uneven. Favoring one side.
Then he was there—in the edge of my vision, close enough to touch if I reached for him. Still in the clothes he'd been thrown from his horse in, dust ground into the denim at the knee. His hand came up and gripped the bed of my truck, and I felt the whole truck settle a half-inch under the weight he was putting on it.
Didn't come any closer.
Didn't say my name.
Didn't reach out.
Didn't do the thing I'd been bracing for—the scramble, theplease, the looking at me like I was breakin' his heart.
