Page 73 of Thunder

Just his head, just enough to throw it over his shoulder, and it's aimed at me. "Almost fifteen years, Thunder."

Quiet. No heat left in it, which is somehow worse than the yelling.

"You've been my sword for those years. There's not a man alive I trusted more."

"I know it," I say.

"I'd have told you. I wanted to tell you a hundred times. I hated every day I didn't."

"Then why?"

"Because she asked me not to, and she'd already lost everything. I wasn't gonna be one more person who let her down."

His stare doesn't waver and neither does mine. "You'd have done the same for a woman you loved. You did do the same. That's the whole damn problem in this family, Harlan. We're all willin' to burn ourselves down to protect our women, and not one of us knows how to just tell the truth and trust the people we love to survive it."

Something moves behind his eyes.

It's not forgiveness. It's a long way from forgiveness.

But it's not the door slamming either, and after years of reading this man I know the difference.

"We're not done, you and me," he says.

"No, sir. I don't reckon we are."

"But not today." And then, lower, almost too quiet to catch: "Take care of her. Since I'm apparently the last to know she's yours to take care of."

And he walks off across the yard toward the clubhouse, and doesn't look back again.

He leaves me standing in the gap between the barns with the woman we both love coming apart beside me.

She holds it together until his truck starts up somewhere past the shop.

Then she breaks.

It comes out of her all at once, the whole day, every held breath since the spring, and she folds in on herself right there in the dirt with both hands over her face and her shoulders heaving.

The sound she makes goes straight through the middle of me.

I don't say a word. Words are no good for this.

All I can do is get my arms around her and pull her in against my chest and hold on.

She grabs two fistfuls of my shirt and cries into it like something's tearing loose, and I stand there in the open where anybody could see and I don't care, not anymore, because the secret's out and the worst has happened and there's not one thing left to hide.

"I've got you," I tell her into her hair. "I've got you. Come on. Not here."

She lets me walk her to my truck.

I drive her to her cabin because it's closer and because right now she needs walls around her and my body between her and the whole rest of the world.

She cries the whole way there with her hand fisted in mine over the console, and I hold it the entire drive and don't let go once, not to shift, not for anything.

I get her inside.

The door shuts behind us, the two of us finally alone with no yard and no father and no club.

She turns around in the middle of her own living room and looks up at me with her face wrecked, her eyes wet and something else coming up underneath the grief now.