CHAPTER 2 #3
"Especially then. She wanted to be the one holding you."
"And Wren?"
There it was, the hook under the rib.
Colt breathed through his nose. He had kept Wren out of this room because Wren belonged to the before. Before Harlow. Before Beau. Before he knew how much one man could lose and still be expected to show up with breakfast.
"Wren went away a long time ago," he said. "Before you were born."
"Because somebody was loud?"
"No."
"Because you were?"
The question might have been funny if it had not found an old bruise. He had written one letter, waited, and told himself no answer was an answer. Wren had left for Austin, and Colt had learned that wanting did not put a person in the truck beside you.
"No," he said. "Not because of that."
"Will she go away again?"
He wanted to say yes. He wanted to say probably. He wanted to say people with leaving in their bones did what they knew how to do. But Beau was watching him, and his job was not to use his daughter as a place to store bitterness.
"I don't know what Wren will do," he said. "But you don't have to worry about that tonight."
"Are you mad?"
"No."
"Your eyebrows are."
He smoothed them with two fingers. Beau smiled a little, then yawned so wide it took over her whole face.
"Sleep," he said.
"Door little open."
"Always."
"Check heifer?"
"Later."
He kissed her forehead. Her skin smelled of shampoo and warm milk. "Love you, bug."
"Love you more than all the gates."
That was new. It nearly broke him.
"That's a lot of gates."
"I know."
He turned off the lamp, left the door open the width of his hand, and stood in the hallway until her breathing found the first slow edge of sleep. Beau awake required one kind of man. Beau asleep left him with the other one.
He moved through the house quietly, rinsed the star cup, set the pan in the sink, and turned the bill basket right side up again. Numbers waited with the patience of things that did not care if a man was heartsore. He carried the basket to the desk and opened the drawer for a pencil.
The Bennet envelope was there under the records, not gone at all.
Colt stared at the corner of it. He could open it. He could let Bennet's deadlines and promises into the room. He could stop pretending tight months proved anything except his own stubbornness. A ranch did not run on pride, and Beau's preschool did not take it in trade.
Colt shut the drawer again.
He would handle the trough. He would handle the feed.
He would check the heifer before midnight.
He would get Beau to preschool tomorrow with her hair mostly even and her lunch packed.
He would stand up at Della's wedding events because Ruston had asked for help and because a man did not get to vanish just because the past had walked home in a cotton dress and work shoes.
Wren.
He let himself think the name once with no child in the room to hear it.
At Sudie's fence, she had looked thinner than the version he had kept and stronger than the girl who had left.
There had been a quickness in her eyes he recognized and a guarded set to her mouth he did not.
He had wanted, shamefully and instantly, to know who had taught her to stand that way.
He had also wanted to step between her and every stare Dusthallow would aim in her direction.
That was the trouble. His body remembered before his judgment got a vote. It remembered Wren barefoot on creek rock, Wren drawing flower shapes on feed receipts while he pretended not to watch her hand, and the night before she left, when he had stood too close and still not close enough.
Then came the weeks after. The unanswered letter. The way every truck on the road made him look up. The slow humiliation of understanding that she could choose a world without him in it and keep choosing it.
Harlow had come later with kindness that asked for nothing false. Colt had loved her honestly. Harlow had not been second place. She had been his wife, Beau's mother, a woman whose absence lived in the house as surely as her quilt lived on the bed.
And Wren's leaving had taught him the first rule of loss. Harlow's death had carved it deeper. Love did not make staying happen. Need did not make staying happen.
His phone lay on the desk beside the bill basket. Colt picked it up before he decided to. The screen lit his palm. No message. No missed call. No reason to open a blank text except the pull that had started the moment Beau said Wren's name.
He typed W before he could stop himself. Her contact still existed because he had never been able to delete it, though the number might belong to a stranger by now.
He set the phone down, then picked it up again. Outside, the heifer lowed once from the close lot, a rough sound that brought him back to the hour and the work waiting in it. Good. Work had saved him before. Work did not ask why his hand shook.
He deleted the single letter. The message box went blank.
Colt deleted the almost-text to Wren, set the phone facedown, and reminded himself he had survived her leaving once.