Chapter 2 #2
Five and a half years.
He’s harder than I remember.
That’s the first thing I notice, and I hate myself for noticing, because the second thing I notice is that he’s still the kind of man who makes a room feel smaller just by standing in it.
Tall. Broad.
The build of someone who works with his hands every day and doesn’t think about it.
He’s wearing jeans and a dark Henley pushed up at the forearms, and his arms are—I don’t look at his arms.
I look at his face.
The warmth is gone.
That’s what hits me hardest.
Lee used to have a face that invited you in—easy eyes, quick smile, the kind of open expression that made people trust him on instinct.
The man standing at the counter looks like someone locked all those doors and threw away the keys.
His jaw is set. His eyes are flat.
There’s a stillness to him that reads like patience if you don’t know better and reads like armoring if you do.
I know better.
His left hand is on the counter.
The gold band catches the overhead light.
He’s still wearing it, almost six years later, and he’s still wearing it.
Something cracks in my chest—grief and anger and a longing so sharp it makes my teeth ache, all of it tangled together in a knot I’ve been carrying for so long I barely notice the weight anymore.
Barely.
He sees me.
I watch it happen in real time—the recognition, the freeze, the rapid-fire calculation behind his eyes as his brain processes the impossible fact that Bex Dalton is standing ten feet away from him in a feed store in Sharp, Texas, after five and a half years of silence.
His jaw tightens.
His body goes still in a way that isn’t calm—it’s the stillness of a man deciding whether to fight or run.
I don’t give him the chance to do either.
“Lee.”
His name comes out steadier than I feel.
Good.
I’ve had five and a half years of ignored phone calls to practice saying his name without my voice breaking.
Five and a half years of voicemails left into a void, talking to a dead line the same way he talked to a dead line the night Rose died.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It’s just not funny.
“Bex.” His voice is low. Controlled. Giving away nothing. “What are you doing here?”
“Buying feed. What does it look like?”
A beat.
The clerk behind the counter is pretending very hard to be interested in something on the computer screen.
Small-town radar.
Within the hour, the entire population of Sharp will know that Lee Simms and Bex Dalton were seen together at Holcomb’s, and the speculation will be insufferable.
“I mean in Sharp,” he says. “What are you doing in Sharp?”
“You’d know the answer to that if you’d answered your phone in the last five and a half years.”
Direct hit. I see it land—a flicker in those flat eyes, a hairline fracture in the armor.
He covers it fast, but not fast enough. I’ve always been able to read people.
It’s the superpower you develop when you grow up in a house where reading the room meant the difference between a quiet night and a bad one.
I learned to track micro-expressions the way other kids learned to ride bikes.
Lee Simms has never been hard to read.
He just thinks he is.
“Earl’s sick,” I say. No easing into this.
No soft blow. He doesn’t deserve soft right now.
“Cancer. Stage 3. He’s been in chemo for two months.
I called you. I called you when he was diagnosed.
I called you when he started treatment. I called you on his birthday, on Rose’s birthday, on Christmas.
I have left you more voicemails than I can count, Lee, and you didn’t pick up once. ”
His face doesn’t change.
But something behind it does—a shifting, a rearrangement, like watching a building take a hit to the foundation.
Earl.
The name does what my name couldn’t.
I see the pain surface, raw and immediate, before he shoves it back down.
“How bad?” His voice is rougher now.
The control is slipping.
“Bad enough that I packed up my life in Amarillo and drove six hours in two days. Bad enough that I’m sleeping in the guest room at his ranch and driving him to chemo twice a week and watching the strongest man I’ve ever known shrink inside his own clothes.
” I take a breath. Steady. Hold the line. “Bad enough, Lee.”
He’s quiet for a long time.
The clerk has abandoned all pretense of not listening and is now openly staring at a point slightly to the left of my head, which is the small-town equivalent of pressing your ear to the wall.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
“You didn’t want to know.” I feel the anger rising—the good kind, the clean kind, the kind that keeps me standing instead of folding.
“You had years of voicemails telling you exactly what was happening, and you couldn’t be bothered to listen to a single one.
Earl asks about you. Every time I come back from town, every time I walk through the door, he looks past me to see if maybe this time you’re behind me.
And every time I have to watch that look die on his face when it’s just me. ”
Something flashes across Lee’s expression—guilt, maybe, or shame.
Whatever it is, it’s gone before I can name it.
“I want to be clear about something,” I tell him.
My voice is level but my hands are shaking, and I curl them into fists at my sides to keep them still.
“I didn’t come back for you. I came for Earl.
I packed up my entire life—my clients, my apartment, my routine—because that man gave me everything when the people who were supposed to give me everything couldn’t be bothered.
He’s my family, Lee. Mine. Not by blood, but by every single thing that actually matters.
And when your family is dying, you show up. ”
The implication hangs in the air between us, sharp as a blade.
I don’t say it outright.
I don’t have to.
I showed up. You didn’t.
Lee’s jaw works.
The ring catches the light again as his hand tightens on the counter.
I watch him process it—the information, the accusation, the guilt—and I watch him do what he’s been doing for five and a half years: shut it down.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says quietly.
And there it is.
Not “I’m sorry.”
Not “How can I help?”
Not “Take me to him.”
Just the same wall he’s been hiding behind since the funeral—the reflexive push-away, the door slamming shut, the man who’d rather stand alone in the dark than risk standing in the light with someone who might remind him of what he lost.
I don’t flinch.
I’ve had a lifetime of men telling me I shouldn’t be somewhere.
My father said it when I walked in the door.
My mother said it when I needed things she couldn’t give.
Teachers, coaches, boys who didn’t know what to do with a girl who hit back.
The world has been telling Bex Dalton she shouldn’t be here since the day she was born, and the world has been wrong every single time.
“Well, I am,” I say. “So deal with it.”
I hold his eyes for one more second—long enough to make sure he sees that I mean it, that this isn’t the same girl who used to defer to Rose, who used to soften her edges to fit into smaller spaces.
That girl died somewhere on a highway in the rain along with the best person she ever knew.
What grew back is harder. Sharper. Less willing to bend.
I turn and walk out.
The bell jangles behind me.
The October sun hits my face and for a second I can’t see—everything white and bright and overwhelming after the dim interior of the feed store.
I cross the gravel lot on legs that feel like they’re made of something unreliable and get into my truck and close the door and sit there.
My hands are shaking.
Not a little.
The visible, uncontrollable tremor of a body that held itself together through sheer force and is now paying the tax.
I press my palms flat against my thighs and breathe the way I learned to breathe when I was seven and my father was throwing things in the kitchen—slow, measured, in through the nose, out through the mouth, find a fixed point and hold onto it.
The fixed point is the steering wheel.
Cracked leather, sun-faded. Solid. Real.
Lee Simms.
Five and a half years and he still looks like the man who stood at the altar and watched Rose walk toward him like she was the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life.
Five and a half years and he’s still wearing the ring.
Five and a half years and the first thing he said to me wasn’t “how are you” or “I’m sorry” but “you shouldn’t be here,” like my existence is an inconvenience he’d rather not deal with.
Like I’m just the woman his wife was driving to see when she died.
I know that’s what he thinks.
I’ve known since the morning after, when I walked into his house and said the worst sentence of my life and watched something move behind his eyes that looked a lot like blame.
He never said it.
Lee isn’t cruel—wasn’t cruel, isn’t cruel, I don’t know which tense applies to the version of him that exists now.
But he didn’t have to say it.
I felt it.
I’ve been feeling it for five and a half years, every ignored call a confirmation.
You were the reason she was on that road.
And the thing that keeps me up in the middle of the night, the thing that no amount of hard work or black coffee or controlled breathing can fix, is that he’s right.
Rose was coming to see me. I made the dinner plans. I picked the restaurant. I texted her when she was driving.
Can’t wait! Get your butt here already!
—and she texted back a laughing emoji and a heart, and twenty minutes later she was dead.
Those are the facts.
I carry them in my body the way Lee carries that ring on his hand—constant, heavy, impossible to set down.
The difference is that Lee’s grief gets to be sacred.
A widower mourning his wife.
Tragic, beautiful, untouchable.
People bring casseroles and lower their voices and give him space.
My grief is the other kind.
The guilty kind.
The kind that comes with a question mark—if you hadn’t asked her to dinner, if you’d canceled, if you’d driven to her instead.
The kind that no one brings casseroles for because what do you say to the best friend?
What do you say to the reason?
You don’t say anything. You just stop calling back.
I sit in the truck for three minutes.
That’s my limit.
Three minutes to fall apart, then hands on the wheel and move.
I still need feed.
I’m not walking back into that store while he’s in there, so I drive to the agricultural supply on the other side of town—costs more, worse selection, but nobody inside that store will look at me and see a dead woman’s ghost.
I load five bags of senior feed into the bed of my truck by myself because that’s how I do everything.
By myself.
The teenage kid behind the counter offers to help and I say no thanks before he finishes the sentence.
It’s not pride. It’s practice.
You learn early when you can’t depend on anyone that the fastest way to get something done is to stop waiting for help that isn’t coming.
Rose was the exception.
Rose was the only person in my life who showed up consistently, who called when she said she’d call, who was where she said she’d be.
Until the one time she wasn’t.
I drive back to Earl’s.
Unload the feed.
Stack it in the barn.
Check the horses.
Fix a loose board on the third stall where the old gelding keeps leaning.
Sweep the aisle.
Clean tack.
Keep moving.
Earl’s on the porch when I come out of the barn, sitting in the rocker with a blanket across his lap, even though it’s barely cool enough to justify it.
The chemo does that—messes with his thermostat, makes him cold when he shouldn’t be.
He’s got his coffee and his paper and a view of the land that’s been in his family since his grandfather scraped together enough to buy it during the Depression.
I sit on the porch step and lean against the post.
The sun is fully up now, throwing long shadows across the yard, and from here I can see the whole spread—the barn, the pastures, the tree line along the creek.
The fence along the south section is leaning badly.
The gate on the equipment shed is hanging by one hinge.
There are a dozen things that need fixing and one dying man and one woman trying to hold it all together with calloused hands and stubbornness.
“Ran into Lee at Holcomb’s,” I say. Casual. Like it didn’t nearly take my knees out.
Earl’s quiet for a moment. The rocker creaks. “How’d he look?”
I think about it. How did he look?
Hard. Closed.
Wounded in a way that’s calcified into something permanent.
Handsome, and I hate myself for that word but it’s the honest one.
“Like a man who’s been alone too long,” I say.
Earl nods slowly. “He was a good husband to my girl. Best kind of man. The kind who answers on the first ring.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Grief makes people do strange things, Bex. Makes them disappear. Doesn’t mean they’re gone.”
“He’s been gone five and a half years, Earl.”
“So were you.”
That lands. He’s not wrong.
I left, too.
Not the same way Lee left—I didn’t stop calling, didn’t cut off contact, didn’t pretend the people who loved Rose didn’t exist.
But I put three hundred miles between myself and this town and I told myself it was for work and it wasn’t.
It was because every corner of Sharp had her fingerprints on it and I couldn’t breathe without inhaling her absence.
“I’m here now,” I say.
“You are.” Earl reaches over and puts his hand on my head, the way he’s done since I was eight years old and sitting on this same porch with skinned knees and a bad report card and nowhere else to go.
His hand is thinner now.
I can feel the bones through the skin.
But the weight of it is the same—steady, sure, the hand of a man who chose me when no one else would.
“Did you tell him?” he asks. “About me?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
I think about the look on Lee’s face when I said the word cancer.
The crack in the foundation. The pain he couldn’t hide fast enough.
“He heard me,” I say. Which is more than I’ve been able to say in years.
Earl squeezes the top of my head gently and takes his hand back.
We sit in the quiet—the old man in the rocker and the woman on the step, looking out at the land that raised them both, listening to the horses move in the barn and the wind in the oaks and the particular silence of a place where someone is missing.
Two empty chairs at the table.
Rose’s.
And Lee’s.
I came back to fill one of them.
Whether he fills the other is his choice.
I’m done calling.