Page 4 of Thunder

I'm not done.

I turn the key and the truck rumbles up under me.

I pull out slowly down the ranch road while my family dances behind me, and I make myself the same promise I've made every gray morning since she left.

I'm going to get her back.

Not today.

Today she gets to grieve what we can't have in a green dress at her friend’s wedding, same as me.

But she's mine, Presley Lyle, even if she doesn't know it yet—and I've never craved a single thing in my life the way I mean to earn the right to stand under that oak with her someday and not give a good goddamn who's watching.

CHAPTER ONE

Two Weeks Later…

Presley

Cattle don't care whose family isn't speaking to you.

That's the mercy of them, and it's why I'm out at the working pens a little after sunup instead of up at the main house where the coffee is, running a new group of bred heifers through the chute one at a time to check them against my book.

A heifer doesn't know I'm the reason her whole herd's owner won't look me in the eye at Sunday supper anymore.

She doesn't know my mother put a pair of shears in a woman and my father buried it, and I'm the one wearing the guilt for something I found out the same day everybody else did.

She just knows the chute is loud and the ground is strange, and she wants through it and back to her hay.

My job is to make that as easy on her as it can be while I get what I need.

I get what I need.

That's all the cattle ask of me and all I ask of them, and it's the cleanest deal I've got left.

I've got fourteen head to run and a clipboard balanced on the top rail and a travel mug of coffee going cold on the fence post.

I'm in the middle of reading a tag number back to myself when the next heifer balks in the alley and won't load.

A few weeks ago, I'd have had help out here.

Dakota would've been on the other side of the alley with a flag, running her mouth about something and pushing cattle at the same time, because Dakota can do six things at once and talk through all of them.

Grace would've swung by on her vet rounds and leaned on the rail and told me which of my bred heifers she liked the look of.

That's how it worked, the whole first stretch after I came home, the three of us circling the same pens, the same suppers, and the same last name.

For a little while I let myself believe I'd finally gotten what I spent twenty-two years not having.

Sisters.

A place.

A family that was mine by blood, not just the one good man who chose me.

Then the truth came out of a hospital room, and my mother's name was on it.

Now I run fourteen head alone at sunup because the alternative is asking one of them for help and watching them openly decide they don’t want to.