“Hey, you said it, not me.” He picks up a hoof pick and flips it between his fingers. “She okay? I saw her truck haul past the highway this morning like the devil was the one riding shotgun.”
My grip tightens on the edge of the workbench until my knuckles go white.
“I don’t know,” I say, and that’s the part that’s eating me alive. “She got some kind of text, freaked out, and left.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, for a guy who ‘doesn’t date’ and ‘doesn’t have time for drama,’ you sure are living inside a country song right now,” Nash murmurs.
I throw the nearest rag at his stupid, grinning face.
He catches it one-handed. “What? I’m just saying. Girl storms into your life in a wedding dress?—”
“Don’t.”
He stops. The joke dies on his lips. For once, he listens.
“Okay,” he says, shrugging. “I’ll shut up. For now. But you know where I am when you feel like being sad and pathetic at me later.”
“Can’t wait,” I mutter, and Nash wanders off as if he didn’t just crack my ribs open with one casual question.
I stand there a second too long, staring at the rag in his hand, when really the problem is the silence in my head where Faith’s voice was last night.
One minute she was in my kitchen, laughing at Lila’s “WELCUM FAIFH” sign, sipping whiskey, and talking about table layouts. The next, her whole face went white, like someone turned the lights off inside her, and she was backing away from me with panic in her eyes.
As if I was the thing she couldn’t afford to want. I force my hands to move again. Grab the invoices, shove them back into the folder they came from. Busywork. The kind I can do when I can’t do anything else.
Outside, the ranch is awake and loud in the ways it always is. An engine turns over by the shop. A horse nickers in the far stall. Rusty barks at nothing, which is his hobby. The world spins on its same axis even when mine feels off kilter.
A shadow falls across the entrance.
I don’t have to look up to know who it is.
“Dallas,” Mom says.
Her voice is calm, but there’s steel under it. Maggie McCoy doesn’t ask twice.
I set the wrench down slowly and wipe my hands on a rag, turning toward her.
She stands in the doorway in her heavy coat, hair pulled back, eyes sharp and worried in the same breath. She looks smaller than she used to, sometimes, until she opens her mouthand you remember she raised four men and buried a husband and kept a ranch running anyway.
“Come inside,” she says. “We need to talk.”
I follow her across the yard toward the house, boots crunching on frozen ground. The wind bites at my cheeks. The sky is bright and merciless.
Inside, the kitchen is warm, smells faintly of onions and coffee and whatever Mom’s been making all morning. The house is empty. Quiet.
That alone tells me Mom planned this.
She pours two coffees without asking, sets one in front of me, then leans back against the counter and studies me. I’m a problem she intends to solve.
“You look like hell,” she says.
“Morning,” I mutter.
“Don’t get smart with me,” she says, but there’s no heat in it. Just worry. “Boone told me Faith ran home this morning.”
