Chapter 1 #2
The one that says she knows I’m stalling and she’s going to let me do it for exactly as long as her patience holds, which isn’t long.
“Think fast,” she says. “That bay’s feet aren’t going to wait for you to be ready.”
She walks back toward the cabin.
I watch her go and try not to notice the way her hand rests on her belly—absent, protective, the unconscious gesture of a woman growing something she already loves.
Rose used to do that.
Touch her stomach like that when she was thinking about the future.
We never got there. Never got the chance to find out what our version of that would have looked like.
The mare nuzzles my shoulder and I run my hand down her neck and breathe through it.
Church is at noon.
There’s a full table.
Phantom’s at the head, gavel on the wood, patches around the room.
The Shotgun Saints meet in the back of the clubhouse in a room with a heavy door and no windows, where club business stays club business and the only gospel is the code we ride by.
I take my seat.
Road Captain’s chair, third from the head on the right.
The same chair I’ve sat in for years—through the good times, through the Houston mess, through all of it.
Phantom never stripped my patch.
Never stripped my seat.
That means something to me, shows him he knows how loyal to his club I am.
Shadow drops into the chair beside me and slides a fresh cup of coffee across the table without a word.
I take it.
He doesn’t need to ask how I take it—black, no sugar, same as always.
Years of brotherhood and the man knows my coffee order better than he knows his own shoe size.
“Bay’s looking rough,” he says quietly.
“He’ll come around.”
“Grace says the hooves need specialist work.”
“Grace says a lot of things.”
Shadow’s mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. “She’s usually right.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
He studies me for a second.
That quiet assessment he does—the one where he’s checking my temperature without making a thing of it.
Shadow’s the only person who gets away with it because he earned the right.
He was there the night Rose died.
Drove me to the wreck.
Slept on my couch.
Stood beside me at the funeral and didn’t say a single useless word.
He doesn’t push. Doesn’t pry.
Just watches and waits and trusts me to keep my own shit together.
Most days I manage it.
Phantom calls the room to order.
Business is light today—a run scheduled for next weekend that needs route planning, some maintenance on the south gate, a fundraiser the club’s sponsoring for the county fire department.
Normal stuff. Peacetime operations. No rival MCs breathing down our necks, no wars on the horizon.
The alliance with the Reapers Rejects and the Mojave Wolves is holding solid.
For the first time in years, the biggest threat facing the Shotgun Saints is a broken fence line and a horse with bad feet.
I should be grateful for the quiet.
Instead it just gives the noise in my head more room.
Phantom runs through the rest of the agenda.
I half-listen, taking notes on the run logistics—routes, fuel stops, formation, the usual Road Captain duties that keep my brain occupied and my hands useful.
Then someone mentions needing help with the annual barbecue—plates, setup, entertainment—and Spur volunteers before pausing.
“Didn’t Jolene used to handle all that?”
The room goes quiet.
Not dramatically.
Not the kind of silence that announces itself.
Just a subtle shift—a held breath, a redirected glance, the careful non-reaction of men who know a name that shouldn’t have been said out loud.
Spur realizes his mistake about two seconds too late, his face going red.
“I’ll handle it,” Phantom says. His voice is even. Controlled. His hand on the table doesn’t move, but I see his fingers tighten around the gavel.
Just barely. A fraction of a squeeze that nobody else catches because nobody else is looking.
I’m looking.
Jolene. Phantom’s ex.
His ol’ lady—former ol’ lady—the woman who used to sit at the end of the table at every club dinner, who organized every event, who held this club together in ways most of the brothers never appreciated until she was gone, even though they were broken up for years.
I don’t know the full story.
Nobody does, except maybe Phantom, and he’s not talking.
All I know is one day she was here and the next she wasn’t, and now there’s a gap at every gathering that everyone walks around like furniture they’ve agreed not to notice.
I notice.
I notice because I recognize the architecture.
The way a man holds himself when he’s keeping something painful at arm’s length.
The careful neutrality that takes more energy than most people realize.
The way Phantom’s eyes track to the empty space beside him at the table sometimes—a micro-glance, gone before it registers, but I catch it because I’ve been making the same glance at empty spaces for five and a half years.
After church, I pass him in the hallway.
He’s standing by the back door, looking out at the compound, coffee in hand.
Not drinking it. Just holding it.
I stop. Don’t say anything.
I just stand beside him for a minute, two men looking out at nothing in particular.
He doesn’t speak. Neither do I.
That’s the thing about grief—it has its own language, and the men who speak it fluently don’t need words.
We just need someone to stand in the silence with us and not try to fill it.
The rest of the day runs the way my days always run.
Routes for the weekend ride.
Feed orders.
A call to the auction house in Fredericksburg about two more horses flagged for the kill pen that I want to pull before Thursday.
Fence repair on the north line with a couple of prospects who are eager enough to be useful and green enough to need supervision.
I stay busy.
That’s the trick.
Fill every hour with something that requires my hands and my focus and leaves no room for the other thing—the hollow, heavy thing that lives in my chest like a second heartbeat.
If I stop moving, it catches up.
If I sit too long in a quiet room, it fills the silence with sounds I don’t want to hear.
Tires on wet asphalt.
Glass breaking.
The soft, wet nothing that came after.
So I don’t stop.
Haven’t stopped in five and a half years.
The brothers think I’m dedicated.
Hardworking.
The Road Captain who never takes a day off.
They don’t realize that the work isn’t dedication. It’s a tourniquet.
Shadow knows. He doesn’t say it, but he knows.
By the time the sun goes down, I’ve eaten dinner at the clubhouse—burger, fries, two beers, enough conversation to pass for social—and I’m back in the barn.
My feet always bring me back here.
The barn is the only place that doesn’t feel haunted.
Maybe because it’s full of things that are more broken than I am, and that’s a kind of comfort.
Maybe because the horses don’t ask questions or offer condolences or look at me with that careful softness people get when they remember I’m the guy whose wife died.
The bay is in the same position.
Far wall. Weight off the left front. Watching me with one dark eye.
I sit back down on the bucket.
Same spot. Same posture.
The barn settles around us—horses shifting in their stalls, the occasional blow of breath, the creak of old wood.
A barn cat jumps onto a hay bale and curls into a ball.
Outside, the last light bleeds out of the sky and the compound goes quiet.
I twist the ring on my finger.
Gold band, warm from my skin, worn smooth from five and a half years of never taking it off.
I don’t fidget with it consciously.
It’s just something my hands do when the rest of me goes still—a reminder, a tether, the last physical evidence that I belonged to someone and she belonged to me.
Rose Ann Simms.
Maiden name Dawson.
Earl’s only daughter.
Elementary school teacher at Sharp Primary.
Made the best chicken-fried steak in the county.
Sang off-key to Patsy Cline.
Cried at every dog food commercial.
Could make anyone feel like the most important person in the room just by looking at them.
Died at twenty-eight on a two-lane highway in the rain.
Five and a half years and I still reach for her side of the bed every morning.
Still hear her voice in certain rooms.
Still catch myself buying vanilla creamer at the grocery store because she liked it in her coffee and my brain hasn’t gotten the memo that no one’s drinking it.
Grief isn’t a thing you get over.
It’s a thing you absorb.
It gets into the soil of you, changes the composition, and everything that grows after comes up differently.
The man I was before Rose died—the one with the easy grin and the quick laugh, the one who played cards and won fifty bucks and walked outside to answer his wife’s call like it was the most natural thing in the world—that man doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m what’s left.
The after version.
Quieter. Harder.
Functional enough to do my job and fool most people into thinking I’m okay.
I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay since October 14th.
But the horses don’t care about me being okay.
They just care about consistency, and I can be consistent for them.
I can show up at the same time in the same place with the same steady presence, day after day, until something broken decides to trust me.
It’s the only thing I’m still good at.
The bay’s ears flick forward, then back.
He takes a step.
Not toward me—just a shift, a rearrangement.
But he’s watching me now.
Both eyes. Nostrils working.
“I know,” I tell him. Quiet enough that it’s barely a vibration. “Me too.”
My phone buzzes in my back pocket.
I know before I look.
The same way you know a storm’s coming by the way the air changes—something tightens, something shifts, and your body braces before your brain catches up.
I pull it out.
The screen glows in the dark barn.
Bex Dalton.
The name sits on the screen like a dare.
I stare at it while the phone vibrates in my hand, each pulse a small detonation against my palm.
Bex.
Rose’s best friend since they were eight years old.
The woman who was waiting at a restaurant while my wife bled out on a highway.
The woman who showed up at my house the next morning with mascara down her face and said the words I can’t unhear: She was coming to see me.
She’s been calling for years.
Not constantly—she’s not crazy about it.
But regularly. Persistently.
Once a week at first, those early months when everyone was still raw and broken and trying to hold the pieces of Rose’s absence together.
Then every couple of weeks.
Then monthly.
Then clustered around the dates that matter—Rose’s birthday, the anniversary, Christmas, the milestones that used to be celebrations and are now just days I have to survive.
I haven’t answered once.
Not because I blame her.
That ugly flicker I felt the morning after—the irrational, grief-poisoned thought that Rose was on that road because of Bex—I know it’s not fair.
I know the rain killed Rose.
The road killed Rose.
God or physics or the particular angle of a tire on wet asphalt killed Rose.
Not dinner plans. Not the woman who made them.
But Bex’s voice is the problem.
The sound of her through a phone speaker takes me back to every call Rose ever made from the road, every casual check-in, every “I’m on my way, be there soon” that I’ll never hear again.
The phone itself is the wound.
Every ring, every buzz, every woman’s voice through a speaker drops me back into that October night—the last sounds Rose ever made, filtered through a phone I was too far away to throw against a wall.
The call goes to voicemail.
A few seconds pass.
Then the phone buzzes again—a shorter pulse.
She left a message.
She always does.
I have years of them saved in a folder I’ve never opened.
A graveyard of words I can’t bring myself to hear.
The phone buzzes a second time.
Another call. She’s doing the double—calling back immediately, the way people do when they need you to know it’s important.
It vibrates in my hand like a living thing, insistent, refusing to be ignored.
My jaw tightens.
I stare at the screen.
Her name.
The same name I’ve been sending to voicemail for five and a half years.
Across the stall, the bay is watching me.
Both eyes now, ears forward.
Two damaged creatures in a dark barn, both deciding whether to trust the thing that’s reaching for them.
I power the phone off.
The screen goes black. The buzzing stops.
The barn settles back into its quiet—hay and breath and the distant sound of wind moving through the live oaks outside.
The bay doesn’t move and neither do I.
I twist the ring on my finger, close my eyes, and breathe.
Tomorrow I’ll be here again.
Same bucket. Same barn. Same man who can gentle a thousand-pound animal with nothing but patience and silence but can’t answer a phone call from a woman who loved his wife almost as much as he did.
The gold band catches the last sliver of light coming through the barn door before the dark swallows it.
I sit with the horse and I wait.