Epilogue #2
Not that you've lost track, not that you've become careless, you know your sobriety date, you know the number, you know the particular quality of the months.
But you realize that you've been moving through your days and the number has not been the first thing on your mind when you woke up, or the thing you returned to a dozen times a day.
Something else has been first.
I wake up in the second room on the right upstairs, which has been the second room on the right upstairs for six months now, with the window over the north pasture and the lamp Jessika put on the nightstand and the book I'm currently reading on the table beside it, and my first thought this April morning is about the pasture gate.
Second thought is about Morgan's call tonight.
Third is about Nova's math test.
The number, seven years, one month, is still there.
Still real. Still matters. But it's in the back of the room instead of at the door, and that, Dave tells me, is actually the goal.
The goal was never for it to disappear. The goal was for it to become one of the many true things instead of the only true thing.
I get up and make coffee and take it out to the morning circuit.
The circuit: south gate, east fence, north pasture, back to barn. Every morning. Not because something will definitely go wrong if I don't, but because the ranch operates best when someone is paying attention to it, and paying attention to things is something I know how to do.
In the south pasture, Callie comes to the fence when she hears me coming.
She does this every morning. She walked the fence with Jessika on Jessika's first morning home; she's been walking it with me now for months.
"Morning," I tell her.
She bumps her nose on my shoulder.
I stand with the horse in the April morning and look out at the property.
At the fence lines, all repaired and solid.
At the north barn, rebuilt with actual structural integrity now, not the beautiful patchwork of the old one.
At the house with the light on in the kitchen, Presley up early, the way he always is, and the light on in the upstairs room where Jessika's getting ready for a day that will have more in it than she'll admit to herself.
At this particular life.
I've been thinking about what I told Nova. About the thing you build.
Algebra is useful if you know what you're building.
What I'm building is this. Not dramatically.
Not with announcement. Just the daily work of being here, of being reliable, of showing up for the morning circuit and the evening rounds and the phone calls at eleven PM and the sponsee texts and the kitchen table dinners and the particular complicated ongoing project of being a person in a family who is allowed to be one.
My phone buzzes.
Derek: Ella came this morning. 7 lbs 2 oz. Amy is great. I'm great. Just wanted you to know.
I look at the text for a moment.
Then I text back: Congratulations. You did good, Derek.
He sends a photo of a very new, very small human.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I pocket my phone and walk the rest of the circuit.
When I get back to the house, Jessika is on the porch with two mugs.
She gives me one.
We stand at the railing.
"Morgan's calling tonight," I say.
"I know."
"I'm ready for it," I say. Which is true. I've been working up to it in the way I work up to things, quietly, thoroughly, on my own schedule. Ready to hear his voice and not have it land in the place of old guilt but in the place of something that's looking forward.
"Okay," she says.
"And Thursday."
"Thursday," she agrees.
I look at the horses.
"I heard from Dave last night," I say. "He's been asked to speak at a regional NA conference in the fall. He wants me to come with him."
"To speak?"
"To come. He didn't say speak." I pause. "But probably to speak."
She turns to look at me. "Are you going to?"
"Yeah," I say. "I think so."
She's quiet for a moment.
"That's good," she says. Simply.
That's Jessika. Not the performance of being proud of someone, not the managed excitement of someone who's decided to be supportive, just: that's good. Factual. Because it is.
"Yeah," I say.
We stand on the porch and drink our coffee.
Down in the pasture, the horses are doing what horses do in the April morning, moving through the new grass, orienting toward the sun, letting the warmth do whatever work warmth does on creatures built for open space.
I think about the question Dave asked me: What do you want?
Boring things, I told him.
I look at the fence line. At the house. At the woman beside me with her morning coffee and her particular quality of realness, the way she exists in a space without performing in it.
I lied to Dave, a little.
What I wanted wasn't boring.
What I wanted was specific.
This morning. This ranch. This family I found in the place I least expected to find anything at all.
And here it is.
Here I am.
The first person who stayed when things got hard.
I intend to keep that record.
Logan Vance
The cards aren't talking to me tonight.
I know it the way I always know it, that cold read in my gut, the one I used to get right before a bull threw me. A warning. Walk away, Vance.
I never walk away.
I signal for another bourbon and lean back in my chair, let the casino noise wash over me.
Chips clicking. Slot machines bleeding light in the corner.
Somebody three tables over just won something, judging by the noise.
Good for them. Luck moves in rooms like this the way weather moves across open land, you can feel it shifting, but you can't make it come to you.
I've tried.
Lord knows I've tried.
The dealer slides me a king. Then a four.
I look at them for a long moment and think about my life, which tells me exactly how bad this has gotten.
Logan Vance does not sit in casinos thinking about nothing.
Logan Vance sits in casinos thinking about odds, exits, and whose bourbon is better than his.
Except apparently now I do this.
I tap the felt. Hit me.
A seven. Twenty-one.
I don't even smile. Just rake in the chips and think about how winning used to feel like something.
The bourbon arrives. I wrap my hand around the glass and watch the room, habit, always a habit, cataloguing exits and reading faces.
My hands are steady tonight. They're not always steady. Most people never notice the difference, but I do, I always do, that particular shame of watching your own fingers betray you when you thought you had yourself under control.
Tonight they're steady.
Must be the cards. Must be the bourbon. Must be something other than the fact that I've been holding myself together with both hands since the last time I saw her, trying to be the version of me she almost seemed to believe existed.
Almost.
I should go home.
I push a stack of chips forward instead.
The dealer watches me with that practiced nothing-face they all wear, and I give him back my best one, the grin, the easy shrug, the performance I've been putting on since I was nineteen years old and figured out that if you made people laugh first, they couldn't feel sorry for you.
Nobody's laughing right now.
Just me and the cards and a casino that doesn't care whether Logan Vance walks out of here whole.
My phone lights up face-down on the felt. I see the glow from the corner of my eye.
I don’t pick it up.
And just like that, twenty-one, bourbon, the whole damn room, none of it matters even a little.
I've never loved anything I didn't eventually destroy.