Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Banshee
I wake before she does.
Early light. The kind that comes through the window of my room on the ranch like it's asking permission—thin, warm, gold at the edges.
Mornings in Texas have this quality, this pause between the dark and the heat, where the world holds still long enough for a man to hear himself think.
Bex is beside me.
On her stomach, face turned toward me, one arm underneath the pillow and the other stretched across the mattress into the space where my body was.
Her black hair is loose—out of its braid for once, spilling across the white pillowcase in a dark wave.
Her back rises and falls with her breathing.
Slow. Even.
The breathing of a woman who feels safe enough to sleep deeply in someone else's bed.
I'm propped on one elbow, watching her. I've been watching her for a while.
Not in a way that's creepy—in a way that's necessary.
Like looking at something long enough to convince yourself it's real.
That the warmth next to you isn't a dream.
That the woman breathing in your bed will still be there when the light finishes crossing the floor.
My left hand is on the sheet between us. The ring catches the light.
I've been twisting it. Not the unconscious fidget I've been doing for years—the habitual rotation that means nothing and everything, the way a man checks for his wallet or his keys, confirming the constant.
This is different. This is deliberate.
My thumb on the band, turning it slowly, feeling the weight of it, the groove it's worn into my finger over years of never taking it off.
Not even to shower. Not even to sleep. Not even when my hands were in another woman's hair and my mouth was on her skin and the metal pressed against her body like a reminder neither of us asked for.
I'm not fidgeting. I'm deciding.
The ring is a plain gold band. Nothing fancy.
Rose picked it out—laughed at the bigger ones, the ones with engravings and diamonds and fancy settings. "You're going to be banging your hands on motorcycles and fence posts," she'd said. "Get something that can take a beating."
So I did. A band that's survived everything I've survived.
I twist it again.
The groove underneath is pale—a tan line, a ghost ring, the permanent impression of a promise made in Earl's barn on a Sunday afternoon when Rose wore boots under her dress and I couldn't say my vows without my voice cracking.
Bex stirs.
Her fingers flex against the sheet.
Her eyes open—slow, unfocused, the soft confusion of waking in an unfamiliar place.
Then she sees me and her focus sharpens.
A small, sleep-warm smile that she gives before she's awake enough to guard it.
Then she sees what I'm doing.
The smile fades. Not into sadness—into attention.
Into the stillness of a woman who reads horses and men with the same instinct and knows when something important is happening.
She doesn't speak, doesn't move.
She just gives me the space the way I give the rescue horses space—quiet, patient, letting the creature decide.
"I'm scared." My voice is rough. Morning and emotion and the effort of saying something I've never said out loud. "Taking it off feels like saying she's really gone."
Bex is quiet for a moment. Her dark eyes on mine.
Then, gentle but honest—because that's Bex, always honest, even when honesty is the harder kindness:
"She is really gone, Lee."
The words land like a stone dropping into still water.
Not cruel. Not cold. Just true.
The simplest, most devastating truth there is, spoken by the only person in the world who has the right to say it to me—because she lost Rose too.
"The ring is the last piece of her I carry every day.
" I'm looking at it. The scratch on the left side from a fence post at Earl's ranch.
The dull spot where my glove wears against it when I ride.
"Every morning I wake up and I feel it and it means she was real.
She existed. We existed. If I take it off—"
My throat closes. I can't finish.
Bex sits up.
The sheet falls to her waist.
She's wearing one of my shirts—too big on her, slipping off one shoulder, and the sight of her in my clothes with her hair wild and her eyes full of something fierce and fragile does things to my chest.
She takes my left hand. Both of hers around mine. Holds it steady.
"You're not nothing without that ring." Her voice is low. Certain. The voice she uses with frightened horses—not soft, not soothing, but grounded. Real.
The voice that says I'm not going to lie to you because you deserve better than that.
"You're the man she chose. You're the man who loved her so well that losing her broke you for half a decade.
That's not in the metal, Lee. Rose isn't in the ring.
Rose is in you. Taking off a piece of gold doesn't change that. "
I'm crying. Quietly.
The tears come the way they did with the voicemails—not the ugly, racking sobs of a man falling apart, but the silent, steady leak of a man letting something go.
Pressure releasing. Five and a half years of holding the door shut against a flood and finally, carefully, opening it.
"She'd be so mad at me." A wet laugh. Broken and real. "For wasting all this time. She'd look at me with that face—you know the one—"
"The disappointed-teacher face." Bex's eyes are wet too. She's smiling. "Hands on her hips. The look that could make a grown man apologize for something he hadn't even done yet."
"Yeah." I can see it. Rose in the kitchen doorway, flour on her nose, eyebrows raised, waiting for me to figure out what I'd done wrong.
The memory doesn't hurt the way it used to. It aches—but it's the ache of something loved, not something lost. "She'd be furious. At both of us. Years of being stupid."
"Yeah. She would." Bex squeezes my hand. "And then she'd tell us to stop being idiots and go be happy."
A sound comes out of me that's half laugh, half sob.
Because that's exactly what Rose would say.
Exactly. Not gently. Not with careful, therapeutic language. Just— "Stop being idiots, you two."
And then she'd make coffee and act like the whole thing was settled because to Rose, love was simple. You just did it. You showed up and you chose it and you didn't make it complicated.
I look at the ring. At Bex. At the ring.
Her hands are still around mine. Calloused. Scarred. Strong enough to bend iron and gentle enough to hold a man's breaking heart without flinching.
She's not asking me to do this.
She's never asked.
Not once—not in the tack room, not in the stall, not in any of the moments where the ring pressed against her skin and they both felt the ghost between them.
She held my hand with the ring on it and never said a word.
That's why I can do this. Because she didn't demand it. Because the choice is mine.
I close my eyes, take a breath that starts at the bottom of my lungs and fills every hollow space in my chest.
Slowly. So slowly. I slide the ring off my finger.
The sensation is—
I don't have words for it.
Years of constant contact, and now the air touches skin that hasn't been bare since the day Rose put the ring on my hand.
The groove is deep. The tan line is stark.
My finger feels naked in a way that radiates up my arm and into my chest and settles somewhere behind my sternum like a second heartbeat.
It feels like losing her all over again.
The grief and the relief so tangled together I can't tell where one ends and the other begins, and maybe that's the point.
Maybe that's what healing is—not the absence of pain but the presence of something else alongside it.
Something that makes the pain bearable.
Something that makes the breathing possible.
I hold the ring in my palm. Small. Warm from my skin. Scratched and worn and perfect.
"I want to give it to Earl." My voice is steady. Somehow. "She was his before she was mine."
Bex's face crumples. Not the breakdown—the release.
The way a face looks when something held too tightly is finally set down.
She presses her forehead to my bare hand—the left one, the ringless one—and I feel her tears on my knuckles. Hot. Real.
I set the ring on the nightstand. It sits in the early light, catching gold, a small circle holding an entire life inside it.
And then I reach for her.
My bare hand on her face.
That's where it starts.
My left hand cupping her jaw.
Bare.
The pad of my ring finger against her cheekbone where the metal used to press.
She feels the difference.
I feel her feel it—the sharp intake of breath, the way her eyes search mine, the recognition that something fundamental has shifted.
Nothing between us. Not anymore.
I kiss her, nice and slow.
She opens to me the way she always does—without hesitation, without negotiation, the full surrender of a woman who has decided to trust.
Her mouth is soft. Warm.
She tastes like sleep and the toothpaste she used last night and something underneath that's just her—dark, sweet, the taste I've been learning in the spaces between all the other moments.
I pull back and look at her.
Her hair on my pillow.
Her eyes, dark and deep and full of a light that has nothing to do with the sun.
Her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders brown against the white sheet.
Every inch of her is so specifically, undeniably Bex that the comparison doesn't even flicker in the back of my mind.
There is no ghost. There is no before. There is just this woman in my bed looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room that matters.
I pull the shirt up over her head.
She lifts her arms and lets me.
Underneath she's bare—she slept without anything else—and the shirt comes away and there she is.
Full breasts, dark nipples already tightening in the morning air.
The soft curve of her stomach.
The width of her hips against the sheet.
The strength in her shoulders, her arms, the body of a woman who works for a living and carries the evidence of it in every line.
I touch her the way I should have been touching her all along.