24. Lo
— ? —
Lo
The bed is empty when I wake up.
For one terrible moment, I’m back in the old house. Back in the year of absence, waking up alone, reaching across cold sheets for a husband who was never there. The panic rises in my chest, familiar, bitter, the particular fear of someone who’s learned not to trust.
Then I smell bacon.
I lie there for a second, letting my heart rate slow, letting the present reassert itself over the past. The cabin, the storm, last night. Jesse’s hand on my belly at dawn, feeling our daughter kick against his palm.
He didn’t leave. He’s just cooking.
I pull on a robe and pad out to the kitchen.
He’s standing at the stove, shirtless in jeans, the morning light catching the planes of his back. His hair is still sleep-mussed, sticking up in ways that should be ridiculous and are instead impossibly attractive. The ring glints on his left hand as he flips something in the pan.
Two plates on the counter. Two mugs of coffee, decaf for me, I know without asking.
“You’re awake,” he says without turning around.
“You’re cooking.”
“I’m multitasking. Cooking and being devastatingly handsome.”
“Modest too.”
“Modesty’s overrated.” He turns, spatula in hand, and grins at me. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Good. Because I made enough food for approximately seven people, and I need help eating it.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. There’s bacon, eggs, toast, some kind of potato thing I don’t recognize, and what looks like an attempt at biscuits that didn’t quite work out.
“What happened to those?” I ask, pointing at the misshapen lumps.
“They’re rustic.”
“They’re lumpy.”
“Rustic and lumpy are the same thing, depending on marketing.”
“You sound like Sloane.”
The name lands heavier than I meant it to. Jesse’s smile flickers, then steadies.
“Low blow,” he says. “But fair.”
We eat at the small table by the window, the morning light warm on our faces. The bacon is perfect, crispy, exactly how I like it. The eggs are passable. The “rustic” biscuits are terrible, but I eat them anyway because he made them.
“The county rodeo’s later this fall,” Jesse says.
“I know.”
“I’m entered in the tie-down roping.”
“I know that too. Cal told me last week.”
“You going to come watch?”
“Depends. Are you going to embarrass yourself?”
“Probably. But I’ll look good doing it.”
I roll my eyes. But I’m smiling.
***
The weeks pass.
July becomes October. My belly grows. The baby moves from occasional kicks to constant acrobatics.
At thirty-two weeks, she discovered my ribs.
At thirty-four weeks, she discovered my bladder.
At thirty-six weeks, she seems to have discovered everything at once, shifting and rolling and making her presence known at all hours.
The weeks between have their own rhythm now.
Jesse comes to every doctor’s appointment, sits in the waiting room reading his tabbed parenting book, holds my hand during ultrasounds, asks questions the obstetrician answers with visible patience.
I choose my own work hours, my own projects, my own balance between the hay business and rest. Pruitt coordinates the investigation from Nashville, sharing updates with Peter, who handles the local side, extra road patrols at random intervals, enough to be unpredictable.
No continuous guard, no promises that couldn’t be kept.
But every update comes to me too. No more decisions made without my knowledge.
Four weeks until due date. November feels both impossibly far and terrifyingly close.
The rodeo grounds are packed.
It’s the county fair’s big event, people from three towns over, families with kids, the particular chaos of a community coming together to watch grown men chase animals for prizes. I find a seat in the stands with Bree and Rosie and Molly, my belly making the climb harder than it used to be.
Thirty-six weeks. The October air has that particular crispness that means November’s coming fast, and so is she.
Hattie.
We chose the name last week, sitting on the cabin porch, going through options.
Jesse wanted something with meaning. I wanted something that didn’t sound like a character from a soap opera.
We compromised on Hattie, his grandmother’s name, a woman I never met but who, by all accounts, was exactly the kind of stubborn, opinionated person I aspire to be.
“Hattie Cooper,” Jesse had said, testing it out. “Hattie Rose Cooper, if you want to give her a middle name.”
“Hattie Rose.” I’d rolled the syllables around. “I don’t hate it.”
“High praise.”
“I don’t hate anything that doesn’t deserve hating. It’s a reasonable standard.”
So Hattie it is. Hattie Rose Cooper, due in four weeks, currently using my bladder as a trampoline.
“There he is,” Rosie announces, pointing at the arena. “Jesse! JESSE!”
“He can’t hear you, sweetie,” Bree says.
“JESSE!”
He definitely can’t hear her, but he looks up at the stands anyway, scanning the crowd until he finds us. Finds me. He tips his hat, a ridiculous, theatrical gesture, and I shake my head at him, and he grins like he’s gotten away with something.
Cal appears at the end of our row, climbing the bleachers with the particular care of a man whose knees have seen too many bad landings.
“Ladies,” he says. “Mind if I join you?”
“Pull up a seat,” Bree says. “We’re about to watch Lo’s husband make a fool of himself.”
“He’s not going to make a fool of himself. He’s been practicing for weeks.” Cal settles in beside me. “Tucker says he’s the best he’s seen in years.”
“Tucker’s easily impressed.”
“Tucker’s a state champion three times over. He doesn’t impress easy.”
The announcer’s voice crackles over the speakers, calling the first roper to the chute.
We watch a series of runs, some good, some not, the particular rhythm of competition that I’ve known my whole life.
My grandmother used to bring me to rodeos when I was small, before she got too sick to travel.
I’d sit in her lap and watch the cowboys, and she’d tell me which ones were showing off and which ones were actually good.
Jesse’s showing off.
But he’s also actually good.
When his turn comes, I watch him settle into the saddle like he was born there. The buckskin mare beneath him is alert, focused, ears pricked toward the chute. They’ve been working together for months now, long enough to build the kind of partnership that shows in the way they move.
The calf breaks. Jesse breaks with it. The loop sails out, clean and true, and then he’s off the horse, running down the rope, hands flying through the motions of flanking and tying. The time flashes on the board: 7.2 seconds.
The arena roars.
“Told you,” Cal says. “Tucker wasn’t blowing smoke.”
I don’t respond. I’m watching Jesse walk out of the arena, watching the way he moves, the confidence and the ease of it. This is who he was before the music. This is who he still is, underneath all the complications.
“He turned down a tour, you know,” Cal says.
I look at him. “What?”
“Forty-date stadium tour. Label offered it the week he showed up in Marigold.” Cal’s watching the arena, not meeting my eyes. “He said no. Didn’t even think about it.”
“He never told me that.”
“He wouldn’t. Not his style.” Cal shrugs. “Just thought you should know. The man had a choice between his career and being here, and he picked being here without hesitation.”
I sit with that for a moment. Forty dates. Stadiums. The kind of tour that makes careers, that cements legacies, that Jesse would have killed for two years ago.
He walked away from it.
And he never used it as leverage. Never mentioned it when we were fighting, never brought it up to prove how much he’d sacrificed. He just… didn’t go.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because you should know who you’re married to.” Cal finally looks at me. “The man made mistakes. Big ones. But he’s not making them anymore.”
The roping finals end with Jesse taking first place.
He accepts the buckle with a grin and a wave, the crowd cheering, and then he does something unexpected. He walks to the announcer’s booth and says something I can’t hear. The announcer nods, hands him the microphone.
“Folks,” Jesse says, his voice echoing across the grounds, “I need to borrow a guitar. Anyone got one?”
Someone does. Of course someone does. A battered acoustic appears from somewhere in the crowd, passed hand to hand until it reaches him. He straps it on like it’s second nature, which it is.
“Nine years ago,” he says, “I sat on a tailgate behind the stock pens at Ridley and sang the worst song ever written to a woman who was trying to sell hay. She told me honey wasn’t a color. I told her it was now.”
Murmurs in the crowd. People shifting, phones coming out.
“I made a lot of mistakes since then. Hurt her in ways I’m still trying to make up for. But the one thing that never changed was the song. So I’m going to sing it now, in front of everyone, the way I should have been singing it all along.”
He starts to play.
The melody is different than I remember, more polished, more professional, the rough edges smoothed by years of practice. But the bones are the same. The same chords he fumbled through on that tailgate, the same words he made up on the spot.
“I sat down where I shouldn’t, on a stranger’s tailgate throne. She could’ve told me off or told me gone, but she left me alone.”
He’s not looking at the crowd. He’s looking at me.
He sings the honey line straight up into the stands, the one I corrected on a tailgate before it even had a melody, and he holds my eyes through every word that follows it, all the way down to she’s my home, she’s my everything.
My throat is tight. Beside me, Rosie is bouncing in her seat. Bree’s got her hand over her mouth. Molly is openly crying.
The familiar chorus rises, and I feel it in my chest the way I always do, not the words themselves anymore, but what they cost him to keep meaning.
He plays through the verses, abbreviated now, just enough to carry us to what matters, and this time there’s no Sloane on a hay bale beside him. This time there’s no ambiguity about who the song is for.
The last chord rings out over the arena.
The crowd is silent for a moment. Then the applause starts, not polite applause, real applause, the kind that comes from people who’ve witnessed something genuine.
Jesse hands the guitar back to whoever it belongs to. He thanks the announcer. And then he’s climbing the stands, buckle in hand, making his way toward me through the crowd.
“For Hattie,” he says when he reaches me, holding out the buckle. “Her mama’s already got one of me.”
I take it. The metal is warm from his hand, still dusty from the arena.
“HATTIE!” Rosie shrieks. “Is that the baby’s name? Hattie? HATTIE!”
“That’s the name,” Jesse confirms.
“I love it! Hattie and Rosie! We can be best friends! Mama, Hattie and I are going to be BEST FRIENDS!”
“That’s great, sweetie,” Bree says, but she’s looking at me, and her eyes are wet.
I’m crying. I didn’t notice when it started, but there are tears running down my face, and I can’t seem to stop them.
“Lo?” Jesse’s voice is worried. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Ignore me.” I duck my head.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m pregnant. Pregnant women cry. It’s hormones.”
“Is it just hormones?”
“No.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “It’s also you, being ridiculous in public.”
“Good ridiculous or bad ridiculous?”
“The good kind.” I hold up the buckle. “Hattie’s going to be very confused by this gift.”
“She’ll grow into it.”
“She’ll use it as a teething toy.”
“That’s fine. We’ll keep the actual teething toys handy.” He sits down next to me, close enough that our shoulders touch. “Did you like the song?”
“The bridge still doesn’t work.”
“The bridge works fine.”
“The bridge is lazy.”
“The bridge is familiar. That’s not the same as lazy.”
I lean into him. Just a little. Just enough to feel the warmth of his body, the solid presence of him beside me.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For the song. For the buckle. For-” I gesture vaguely at everything. “For doing it right this time.”
“I should have done it right the first time.”
“Yes. You should have.” I look at him. “But you’re doing it right now. That counts for something.”
“Does it?”
“It’s starting to.”
He smiles. It’s a real smile, the kind that reaches his eyes, and I feel something loosen in my chest that’s been tight for a very long time.
“I love you,” he says. Quietly. Not demanding anything back.
I don’t say it. I’m still not there. But I lean into him a little more, and I let myself feel what I feel, and that’s closer than I’ve been in months.
The crowd is starting to disperse. Rosie is chattering about Hattie and best-friendship.
I’m watching her, smiling, when I notice the woman.
She’s standing at the edge of the bleachers, maybe fifty feet away. Average height, dark hair, sunglasses despite the fading light. Watching me.
Our eyes meet. She doesn’t look away.
I think about the description Pruitt gave Peter last month. The suspect they’ve been tracking. Brandi Kell. Dark hair, average build, tends to blend in.
By the time I blink, she’s gone.