Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Presley
It doesn't happen the way you'd imagine it.
It happens at the pens, of all places, the same rail where Grace and I have done our circling for weeks, where the heifer that nearly died became the one neutral thing we could both stand near.
She's meeting me to sign off on turning 68 back out with the herd—a vet thing, an official thing, a reason to be in the same square of dirt without either of us having to call it what it is.
She's huge now.
Braxton's due any day, and she's carrying low and miserable in the August heat, one hand at the small of her back the whole time she looks the heifer over, and I keep asking if she wants to sit.
She keeps waving me off because Grace Lyle does not sit down on a job.
"Lungs are clear," she says, straightening with a wince. "Gut's good, she's back on full feed. Turn her out whenever you want, she's earned it."
A ghost of something that's almost the old warmth. "You did right by her, Presley. Start to finish."
"Learned from the best."
She doesn't answer that, but she doesn't ice it either, and that's the dance we've been doing—a step closer, then a careful hold.
It's more than I had a month ago.
I've learned to live on crumbs.
Then her face changes.
It's not subtle.
One second she's leaned on the rail and the next she's gone very still and very white, and her hand comes off her back and grabs the top rail, knuckles going pale.
"Grace?"
"That's—" She breathes through something. "That's not a Braxton-Hicks."
"What do you mean it's not?—"
"I mean my water just broke, Presley."
She says it with the calmness of a woman who's done this before and is already somewhere far ahead of me.
She looks down at the dark spreading on the dirt at her boots and back up at me, and for the first time in weeks, she looks me dead in the eye and there's nothing cold in it at all.
"And they're already three minutes apart, which means this one's coming fast, and the men are all on that run, and Shadow's an hour out at least, and I need you to not panic."
"I'm not panicking."
"You're panicking a little."
"I'm panicking a lot, but I'm trying to keep my shit together?—"
That surprises a laugh out of her, and then the laugh turns into a grimace as another one hits.
She grips my arm hard enough to leave marks, and I stop being scared all at once, because there's no room for it.
She needs me.
That's the whole world for the next little while—my sister needs me, and there’s no one else here.
I get her to my truck and I get on the phone.
Shadow's number goes straight to voicemail, which means he's somewhere out of signal on that run, wherever the run is, whatever it's about. The men rode out before dawn, tight-jawed and armed, and nobody told the women a word.
I've had a low bad feeling in my gut about it all day that I don't have time for now.
I leave a wrecked voicemail.
I text him.
I text Dakota, who at least is in town.
And then I do what I don't let myself think about too much.
I call Thunder.
He picks up on the first ring, because of course he does, because Pops benched him off the run for the hip, and he's been prowling the ranch all day like a caged animal hating every second of being left behind.
"Presley."
"Grace is in labor. Her water broke, contractions are three minutes apart, Shadow's unreachable on the run and I've got to get her to Kerrville now and I'm scared I can't?—"
"Where are you?"
"The quarantine pens."
"Two minutes." No wasted words. "Get her in your truck, passenger seat reclined, I'm coming.
I'll drive, you stay with her. Two minutes, rattlesnake."
He hangs up. And the relief that goes through me is so total it scares me almost as bad as the labor did.
He's there in ninety seconds, truck sliding up in the dust, and he's out and moving before it's fully stopped despite the hip, despite everything.
The sight of him, big and steady and calm, undoes some knot in my chest I didn't know I was holding.
He gets Grace loaded like he's done it before.
Maybe he has.
Nine years of Raine, a whole club's worth of babies.
He reclines the seat and gets her buckled and says something low to her that makes her huff a pained laugh.
Then he looks at me over the hood for one second, one single second, and everything he can't say in front of my sister is right there on his face.
I've got you.
I've got you both.
Then it's gone behind the calmness of a man handling a crisis, and he's behind the wheel and I'm in the back leaning over the seat with my hand in Grace's, and we're flying down the ranch road toward the highway.
He drives like the professional he used to be before his body broke—fast and smooth and utterly in control, taking the curves so Grace doesn't feel them.
He talks to her the whole way in that low steady voice, telling her she's doing fine, telling her first babies lie about being fast and this one's showing off, telling her Shadow's going to be there and if he's not he'll answer to Thunder personally for missing it.
Grace laughs, swears, and breathes and crushes my hand.
I watch the back of Thunder's head and his hands sure on the wheel, and I think, God help me, in the middle of my sister's labor, how much I truly, irrevocably love him.
* * *
Kerrville's ER takes her back fast.
And then it's the part nobody warns you about, the sudden stop, the fluorescent waiting, the way a hospital swallows the person you love behind doors you can't follow through.
Except this time they do let me follow, because Grace grabs my hand as they're wheeling her back and says, "She's coming with me" in a voice that doesn't leave room for argument.
A nurse looks at me, and I look at Grace, and something enormous happens in my chest.
She wants me in the room.
The sister who couldn't look at me for a month wants me in the room when her son is born.
I look back once at the waiting area as they wheel us through.
Thunder's already got Waylon—Bex must have run him over, or Mama Lou, somebody handed him off in the chaos—no, it's Thunder alone, lowering himself into a plastic chair with a two-year-old on his knee and his bad leg stretched out straight.
Waylon's already fascinated by his beard, and the last thing I see before the doors close is the Sergeant at Arms of the Shotgun Saints making a serious face at a toddler to keep him from crying.
Then the doors swing shut, and there's no more time for anything but Grace.
I won't ever forget it.
Two hours, hard and fast and primal, Grace gripping my hand and the bed rail and cursing Shadow's name and then, right at the end, going somewhere quiet and far away inside herself the way I imagine women have since the beginning of time, and then?—
A cry.
Thin and furious and brand new.
Braxton Lyle-McCrae comes into the world red-faced and screaming with a full head of dark hair.
They put him on Grace's chest and she breaks, my composed unflappable sister just breaks wide open sobbing and laughing at once.
I'm crying, and the nurse is smiling, and I’ve never in my life been so glad to be exactly where I am.
"He's perfect," I tell her, wrecked. "Grace, he's perfect, look at all that hair?—"
"Shadow's gonna lose his mind that he missed it." But she's laughing when she says it, kissing that tiny furious head. "You were here, though."
She looks up at me, and her face is stripped all the way down, no walls left, nothing but exhaustion and love and the ghost of everything we lost.
"You were here, Presley. You didn't have to be, after how I've—" Her voice cracks. "You helped me. You stayed. You held my hand and you didn't let go."
"I'll never not be here." It comes out fierce, truer than anything I've said in weeks. "Whatever else is broken. I'll always come when you call. Always."
She reaches out with the hand that isn't cradling her son, and she takes mine, and she holds it.
For the first time since a hospital hallway a lifetime ago, my sister holds my hand because she wants to and not because she's in pain.
The ice doesn't melt all at once.
But it cracks.
Right down the middle, it cracks, and something starts flowing through that I'd given up on ever feeling again.
Shadow makes it forty minutes after, tearing through the doors gray-faced and road-filthy and frantic.
I slip out to give them the room because some moments belong to a husband and wife and a brand-new person and nobody else.
The waiting room's filled up while I was gone.
Bex is there now, and she's got Waylon on her hip, feeding him crackers, which means Thunder handed him off.
Dakota's there, sitting apart with her arms crossed and her face doing complicated things—she gives me a look when I come out, and it's not warm, but it's not the flat wall it's been either.
"He's here?" she asks. "Everybody's okay?"
And when I tell her yes, healthy, screaming his head off, something in her shoulders comes down, and she nods at me.
Just once.
It's not much.
From Dakota, it's practically a hug.
And on the far side of the room, leaning against the wall with a vending machine coffee he isn't drinking, is Shiver.
I don't know when he got here.
But he pushes off the wall when he sees me and crosses over, and for half a second I brace, because I've learned to brace, because family coming toward me lately has mostly meant getting hurt.
Shiver opens his arms. "C'mere, baby sister."
And I go.
God, I go, I walk right into my big brother's arms and he wraps me up, road dust and leather and the faint smell of the whiskey he must've had waiting somewhere.
He holds on tight and says into the top of my head, "You did good today. Heard you drove her in yourself."
"Thunder drove."
"Heard you didn't leave her side." He pulls back and holds me at arm's length, and Shiver's got our father's eyes but none of our father's lies in them, and he looks at me steadily. "I need you to hear somethin', and I need you to actually hear it, not just nod. Are you ready?"
I nod. Then, because he said not to just nod: "Yeah. I'm ready."
"None of this was ever your fault." He says it slow and plain, like he's laying each word down where I can't miss it.
"Not one piece of it. You didn't kill anybody.
You didn't bury anybody. You didn't spend two years lyin' to your own kids.
You found out the same day the rest of us did and you got treated like you held the shovel, and that's not right, and I've been meanin' to say so for weeks. "
His jaw works. "I'm sorry it took me this long. Grace and Dakota, they'll get there, they're just hurtin' and you've got the face that reminds 'em. But me? I never once blamed you. I want you to know that. You've still got one sibling who never let go of your hand."
And I lose it.
I cry into my brother's chest in a hospital waiting room, ugly and grateful and a month's worth of held-together finally coming apart at the seams.
He just holds me and lets me, one big hand on the back of my head, rock steady.
"There it is," he murmurs. "Been holdin' that a while, huh?"
"You have no idea."
"I got some idea."
He lets me cry it out, and when I finally pull back and wipe my face he hands me a napkin from his pocket, and he watches me put myself back together with a look I can't quite read.
And then, quiet, just for me. "He treatin' you right?"
Everything in me goes still.
"What?"
"Thunder." Shiver says it easy, like he's commenting on the weather, but his eyes are sharp on my face.
"Saw how he came outta that truck when you got here. Saw how he watched them doors after they took Grace back, like half of him wanted to go through 'em after you. Man watches a woman like that, it means somethin'."
A pause. "So. He treatin' you right?"
I open my mouth to deny it.
It's right there, the reflex, the lie I've been living behind for weeks.
But this is Shiver.
Shiver who just told me he never let go of my hand. Shiver who's got no lies in his eyes.
"You can't tell anybody," I whisper. "Shiver, I mean it, nobody, it would?—"
"I know what it would." His face doesn't change. "I've known somethin' was there since I sat and had a drink with the man. I'm not askin' to make trouble. I'm askin' as your brother whether the man who's got his hands on my baby sister is worth a damn."
He waits. "Is he?"
"Yeah." It comes out cracked and certain. "He is. He's the best man I know, Shiver. He's the only thing holding me up right now."
Shiver nods slowly, that same slow nod I don't know how to read, and something in it settles.
"Then that's between you and me," he says. "For as long as you need it to be. But Presley—" He glances toward the waiting room doors, toward where I came from, toward a man with a busted hip who drove my sister to the hospital and made faces at a toddler to keep him calm.
"A thing like that doesn't stay secret forever.
Things done in the dark come to light. You'd know that better than anybody in this family.
" His voice gentles. "Just don't let it come out in the worst possible way.
Get ahead of it. You've all had enough secrets blowin' up in this family to last three lifetimes. "
He leaves not long after, kisses the top of my head, tells me to call him, actually call him, not disappear again.
And I stand there in the waiting room in the aftermath of it all, a nephew born, a sister's hand in mine again, a brother's arms.
A secret spoken out loud for the first time to someone in my own blood, and across the room, Thunder catches my eye.
He's back in the plastic chair, hip stretched out, and he can't come to me and I can't go to him, not here.
Not with Dakota ten feet away and Bex watching and the whole tangle of my family in this room.
So we don't.
We just look, one long look across a hospital waiting room, and he tips his chin at me the barest inch, and I know exactly what it means because I've learned his whole language by now.
You okay?
And I find, standing there, that for the first time in a very long time the answer is something close to yes.
The men are still out there somewhere doing whatever the club sent them to do, and the low bad feeling's still sitting under my ribs.
And on top of it all, there's a grave out past Big Spring and a stranger digging toward it and a whole world of trouble I can't fix.
But my sister's got her son. My brother's got my back.
And the man I love drove us through it and is sitting across the room guarding us all with a body that can barely hold itself up.
The dark's still coming.
But we're not as alone in it as we were this morning.
And I'll take that.
After the months I've had, I'll take that and be grateful.