Epilogue
Thunder
One Month Later…
Nobody can figure out where the red hair came from, and it's the best argument I've heard all year against a man ever bein' sure of anything.
Rose Earlene came into the world six days ago with a full head of it, bright copper, a red that catches the eye clear across a room, and both her parents are dark as creek mud.
Banshee's been walking around the clubhouse holding her like she might go off, staring down at that little ginger head with a look on his face I've never seen on the man in all the years I've known him, somewhere between wonder and pure dumb terror.
"My grandmother," Bex keeps saying, every time somebody asks. "She was a redhead. It skips around."
"Skips around," Banshee repeats, dazed, and he can't stop touching the baby's hair like he's checking that it's real.
Little Rose’s name is an ode to someone they both lost.
Rose, for the woman Banshee and Bex both loved and lost, the one who stitched the two of them together before she went and left a hole in both their lives.
And Earlene for old Earl, whose oak still stands in the east pasture where Rogue married Hadley, whose name this ranch has carried longer than most of us have been alive.
Rose Earlene.
A dead woman and a dead man living on in seven pounds of surprise redhead, and if she isn't the cutest thing in this damn place, I don’t know what is right now.
The clubhouse is loud tonight in the good way, the way it hasn't been in a long time.
Somebody's got music going low.
The ol' ladies have claimed the big table, and there's wine open.
Dakota pouring for Grace and Hadley and a couple of the others, everybody loose and laughing in a way that's been in short supply around here since the bunkhouse.
Bex isn't drinking, on account of the baby needing her, but she's got her feet up and a plate somebody made her and the bone-deep glow of a woman who's tired all the way through and happier than she's ever been.
I stand back by the bar and take it in, and I'll be honest, there's a lump in my throat I'd deny to any man who asked.
Because a season ago this room was a morgue.
Everybody tiptoeing, everybody grieving something, the whole family cracked down the middle over a buried woman and the lies that kept her buried.
And here it is loud again.
Here it is full of babies and wine and women laughing.
Presley's in the middle of it.
That's what gets me.
My rattlesnake, who spent months on the outside of this family with her nose pressed to the glass, is sitting at that table with a glass of wine and Waylon on her shoulders.
Dakota's leaned into her saying something that's making them both laugh, and nobody's looking at her like a stranger anymore.
And then there's the sight I never thought I'd get.
Marlena's at the far end of the table.
She's quiet about it, keeping small, the way she's learned to since it all came out.
But Grace passed her baby Braxton a while ago and let her hold him, and just now Dakota asked her something about the wine, some ordinary nothing question.
Marlena answered, and the two of them had a whole short exchange like regular people.
It's not forgiveness.
Not all the way.
You don't get all the way back from what happened in that salon, not ever.
But Grace and Dakota are talking to the woman who killed their mother, on purpose, in the same room, choosing it, and a month ago I'd have bet my patch it would never happen in any of our lifetimes.
Turns out this family breaks, and then it finds its way back.
Every time.
I told Presley that in the dark a month ago and I didn't half believe it myself.
Now I'm watching it happen.
* * *
"She looks good out there." I don't have to turn to know it's Phantom. I felt him coming the way you feel weather change.
"She does," I agree.
He steps up beside me at the bar, a beer in his hand, and for a minute we just watch the room together the way we've watched a hundred rooms, president and sergeant at arms, shoulder to shoulder.
It's the closest we've stood since the day in the yard, and we both know it.
"I owe you somethin'," he says finally, low, his eyes on his daughter and not on me. "And I've been chewin' on how to say it for a month, so bear with me, 'cause I'm no good at this part."
"You don't owe me anything, Harlan."
"Shut up and let me get through it." But there's no heat in it.
He turns the beer in his hand. "I handled it wrong. In the yard. The way I came at you, at her. I've had a month to sit with it and there's no shine I can put on it that makes it right." His jaw works.
"I was out of my mind. And I want you to understand it wasn't about you not bein' good enough for her, because you are, you're the best man I've got and we both know it. It was the secret. It was findin' out the two people I—" He stops.
Starts again. "Findin' out I'd been kept in the dark. Again. In my own family. After what the last secret did to us."
"I know," I tell him. "I knew it in the yard. That's why I didn't swing back."
"Secrets damn near destroyed everything I've got." He's quiet a moment, watching Grace laugh at something across the room.
"Jolene. What I did after. Two years of lyin' to my own kids, watchin' 'em grieve a woman who was in the ground the whole time.
I did that. And then I stood in that yard and found out my youngest learned to keep secrets from her own daddy.
Some part of me knew right then she learned it from me, and I couldn't stand to look at it. " He shakes his head.
"So I did what I do. I got loud and I got mean and I walked off, 'cause I've never once in my life known what to do with a feeling except swing at it."
It's the most words I've ever heard Harlan Lyle string together about his own insides, and I have the sense not to make it a thing.
"She knows you love her," I say. "That was never the question."
"I'm workin' on tellin' her better than I've been.
" He finally looks at me. "I'm workin' on a lot of things.
But I wanted to say it to you first, man to man.
I'm sorry for how I came at you. You've been my sword twenty years and you deserved better than gettin' slammed into a shed wall for lovin' somebody. "
I put my hand out.
He takes it, and then he pulls me in, one hard clap on the back, the kind of thing that says everything men like us can't.
"We good?" I ask.
"We're good." He steps back, clears his throat, all business again like the last two minutes didn't happen.
"Now. There's somethin' else."
And just like that the temperature of the night changes, because I know that voice.
That's not the voice of a man done talkin' about his feelings.
That's the voice of a president with a problem.
Blaze peels off from the wall across the room like he was waiting for the signal, and he crosses to us, and the easy comes off him with every step.
"Tell him," Phantom says.
Blaze keeps his voice down, under the music, under the laughter. "The Firm moved again. Yesterday."
Everything in me goes still and cold. "Moved how?"
"Package showed up at the P.O. box. No return address." His jaw is tight. "Photographs. Same as before, only closer. Somebody was inside the tree line at the swimming hole this time, Thunder. Close enough to read the label on Waylon's shirt." He lets that sit.
"And there was a note. Just a date. About three weeks out. Nothin' else."
A date.
I look across the room at all of it, the wine and the babies and the women laughing, at Presley with her nephew on her shoulder, at a redheaded newborn getting passed hand to hand, at everything this family clawed back from the dark this year.
And I feel the old cold settle into me, the sword's cold, the one I know better than my own name.
"They're done watchin'," I say.
"That's how I read it." Blaze's eyes are flat and grim. "Whatever this has been buildin' toward, it's comin', and now we know when."
"I'm callin' a national church tomorrow," Phantom says, low.
"First light. Everybody at the table. We start makin' plans, because I’m not gettin' caught flat-footed with my grandkids in some shadow outfit's crosshairs.
" He drains the last of his beer and sets the bottle down hard.
"We spent all summer bleedin' over old sins.
I'll be damned if I let some suits I never met finish the job. "
"I'll have the charter roster ready," I tell him. "Lubbock, Abilene, all of it. If we're callin' in help, better to know who's got what before we ask."
"Good man." He grips my shoulder once. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow we go to work."
He moves off toward the table, toward his family, the president sliding back into the father, and he drops a kiss on the top of Presley's head as he passes and she looks up at him surprised and pleased, the first easy thing between them since the yard.
The door's open.
It's gonna take time.
But it's open.
Blaze lingers a second beside me. "You good?" he asks. "With all of it? You and her, out in the open now, the whole nine?"
"Better than good." I mean it. "You'll see, one of these days. When the right one knocks you flat."
He laughs, short. "Not me, brother. I've got enough problems." He claps my arm and heads off to find a beer, and I let him go, and I don't tell him what I'm thinking, which is that every man who ever said that sentence ended up eatin' it, me included.
I find Presley by the door a while later, Rose Earlene asleep in her arms now, that shock of red hair against my woman's shoulder.
"Look at her," she whispers, tipping the baby toward me. "Have you ever seen anything so mad about being alive?"
"Takes after her mama." I get an arm around Presley, right there, in the middle of the clubhouse, where anybody can see, and nobody so much as blinks, and that's the sweetest thing in this whole loud room.
"Ready to head home? Raine's been askin' when you're comin' back all day. She wants you to see the drawing she made. It's the four of us, apparently. You, me, her, and the cat."
"The four of us." Something goes soft in her face. "Yeah. Let's go home."
Home.
A month ago I didn't have one, not really, not the kind with a full table.
Now there's a woman with my name on her back and a nine-year-old who drew our family with a cat in it and waits up to show me, and I get to drive both of them back to a cabin at the end of the property and call it mine.
I know what's coming.
I know there's a date circled three weeks out and a shadow outfit that's done watching and a church meeting at first light where we start figuring out how to keep everybody in this room breathing.
I know the dark isn't done with us.
It never is.
Not with this family.
But tonight there's red hair and wine and a woman I love holding a sleeping baby, and a president who called me a good man and meant it, and two sisters talking to a woman they've got every reason to hate because they've decided love is worth more than being right.
Tonight the family's loud again.
Whatever the Firm's bringing, it's gonna have to come through all of us to get to any one of us.
And I've spent my whole life learning exactly one thing worth knowing.
We break.
And then we find our way back.
Every single time.
I take my rattlesnake and the whole loud golden room with me out into the September dark, and I drive us home under all those stars, and I don't brace for a single thing.
Tomorrow, the sword.
Tonight, there’s only this.