The thought hurts so badly it almost breaks me.
And I understand with terrifying clarity:
They aren’t just trying to control my life.
They are trying to close every door I might use to escape.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Dallas
January 28th
It’s been days.
Not the kind you can count cleanly. Not the kind marked by meals or sleep or anything that’s progress. Just days that bleed into one another, gray and heavy, stacked on top of each other as hay bales you don’t remember lifting but somehow still have to carry.
It would be easier if there was anything to hold on to. One text, one missed call, one message to her mother or Charlotte. But there’s nothing. No one’s heard her voice since the moment she stepped outside to wait for me, and that leaves three options that keep rotating in my head: she’s choosing silence, she’s being made to stay quiet… or she doesn’t have her phone at all.
But whatever the truth, the ranch keeps moving.
That’s the cruel part. Cows still need feeding. Fences still need checking. Paperwork still piles up on my desk as if the world didn’t crack open three days ago and swallow someone whole.
I’ve learned that life doesn’t pause for grief. It never has.
I’ve also learned grief doesn’t care if you’re busy.
It finds you anyway.
It shows up in the middle of a routine chore, when your hands are occupied, and your brain is unguarded. It shows up when a song plays in the diner. When a truck passes on the highway that looks like hers. When you catch the faintest trace of vanilla and pine on the sleeve of your coat, and your chest caves in.
I’m standing in the office with a mug of coffee that’s gone cold, staring at the same spreadsheet for the fourth time without actually seeing it. Numbers blur together. Dates refuse to make sense. My eyes track across rows and columns because that’s what they’re supposed to do, but my mind is somewhere else. Always somewhere else.
Lila’s drawings are still pinned to the corkboard. Horses with impossible legs, a stick figure me holding her hand, a woman with yellow hair standing beside us. She drew that one after Christmas. Said it was “Faith when she comes back.”
I turn away before I can think too hard about it.
Because if I think too hard about it, I’ll think about the way Faith looked at Lila when she thought no one was watching. She could see a version of herself that belonged here. She wanted to believe she could be part of this life.
And then I’ll think about how quickly that was taken.
I tell myself not to go there. I tell myself it’ll kill me if I do.
So I focus on the spreadsheet.
I focus on the little mundane tasks that keep my hands busy and my mind from spiraling.
It works for about ten minutes.
Then my phone buzzes.
My heart jumps so hard it physically hurts, my body has been waiting for that vibration for three straight days, and it doesn’t know how to react anymore.
I snatch it up.
Not her.
Never her.
