Page 36 of Thunder

"Good weird. Like Christmas weird." Raine shrugs and goes back to her dumplings. "I like it better than the sad weird."

And there it is.

Out of the mouth of a nine-year-old again, the truth nobody at the table was going to say.

Presley's smile falters just a little and she busies herself with Raine's glass.

I look down at my plate so nobody has to deal with my face.

Later, after Presley's gone home—after Raine hugged her at the door for a solid ten seconds and made her pinky-promise to come back, I tuck my kid in and she catches my hand before I can turn out the light.

"Daddy. Is Miss Presley gonna come back?"

"I think so, baby. If we're good to her."

"I'm always good to her." Deeply offended. Then, quieter, already half asleep: "I'm glad she came. You didn't look sad the whole time. Not even once."

I sit on the edge of her bed a minute after she goes under, and I don't trust my own voice, so I don't try to use it.

There’s a ghost on the roads.

A secret with a fuse on it.

A family of mine that doesn't know the half of what's coming.

And I haven't felt this good in longer than I can rightly remember.

A man takes the wins where he finds them.

Especially the kind that clean their room without being asked twice.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Presley

For a couple of nights running now I've told myself I'm not going to do this, and now I've ended up crossing the dark ranch to his door.

Tonight I don't even bother with the lie.

I wait until my own cabin's gone too empty and too big around me, until the loneliness of it sits on my chest heavy enough that driving to the back of the property in the dark feels less like a choice and more like gravity.

Then I get in my truck and I go, headlights off the last stretch out of habit I'm not proud of, and I let myself in the way he told me to, through the mudroom door he leaves unlocked for me now.

That ought to scare me more than it does.

For me.

He leaves a door unlocked for me.

Somewhere in the last week we stopped being a secret I was ending and turned into a habit I'm keeping, and I can't for the life of me find the moment it happened.

The cabin's dark and warm and smells like him.

Down the hall, Raine's door is shut, a night-light glowing soft under it, the cat a gray lump on the floor outside her room where he sleeps every night now like a guard dog.

I toe my boots off at the door so I don't make a sound.

And I go to Thunder's room, where he's awake, propped up against the headboard with his phone dark on the nightstand, waiting for me like he knew I'd come.