Prologue #2
She's good with horses. Better than she knows. Better than I tell her, because telling Dakota she's good at something just makes her push harder, and she's already pushing hard enough to break.
Ten minutes later she comes up the porch steps.
Dusty. Arena dirt on her jeans, her boots, the brim of her hat.
Sandy hair pulled back in a braid that's come half undone.
She's got my jaw and my eyes and the stubborn set of my mouth, and right now that mouth is pulling to one side the way it does when she's reading a situation.
She looks at me, looks at the empty chair and looks at the Maker's Mark bottle I set on the rail an hour ago and haven't opened.
"You look like hell, Pops."
"Thank you."
She drops into the chair next to me—Jolene's chair, except it's not Jolene's chair anymore, it's just a chair—and pulls off her hat.
She runs a hand through the loose pieces of hair at her temples.
She smells like arena dust, horse sweat, and the leather conditioner she uses on her tack, and it's the most honest smell in the world.
"How'd you do?" I ask.
"Second. By a tenth." She says it like it burns. Because it does. Dakota doesn't do second.
"You'll get it next time."
"Damn right I will." She eyes the bourbon. "Are we drinking or are we staring at it?"
I hand her the bottle.
She cracks the seal—she knows I haven't touched it yet, knows what an unopened bottle on the porch rail means—and pours two glasses without asking for ice.
Hands me one. Takes a sip of hers and leans back, and for a minute we just sit there, father and daughter, watching the sky do what it does in central Texas at the end of a long day.
Gold bleeding into orange bleeding into something deeper that doesn't have a name.
"You going to tell me, or am I going to have to guess?" she says.
I take a drink. The bourbon is warm and sharp and it settles in my chest like a small fire.
"I talked to your mother today."
Dakota doesn't react. Just waits. She's always been the one who waits—Shiver runs hot, Grace analyzes, but Dakota sits still and lets the information come to her. Got that from me, too.
"Told her she needs to stop coming around. The clubhouse, dinners, events. All of it. It's done."
A beat. Dakota looks at her glass. Swirls the bourbon once, watching the light catch the amber.
"It's high time you had that conversation, Pops. Pretty damn sure Grace told her the same thing."
I look at her. Twenty-seven years old. My blood, my face, my stubbornness. The girl who used to ride on my shoulders in this exact yard and pull my hat off my head and put it on hers, giggling because it fell past her ears.
"You're not upset?"
"I'm upset it took you this long." She takes another sip.
Stares out at the land. "Ma kept following you around like a lost dog, Pops.
It's sad. Watching her show up to club dinners and sit in that chair like she was still your ol’ lady when everyone in the room knew she wasn't—it was painful. For everyone. For her."
The truth of that sits between us like something physical.
"She deserves someone who actually wants her," Dakota says.
Quieter now. "Someone who looks at her and sees her.
Not someone who keeps her around out of habit or guilt or because it's easier than having this conversation.
" She glances at me. "She deserves to be loved for love, Pops. Not for loneliness."
I don't say anything. Because my twenty-seven-year-old daughter just said the thing I've been failing to articulate for thirteen years, and she said it better than I ever could.
"When did you get so smart?" I ask.
"One of us had to be."
I almost smile.
She reaches over and clinks her glass against mine. Not a toast. An acknowledgment. The sound of crystal in the warm air, small and clear.
We sit there.
The sky goes dark by degrees.
The ranch settles into its nighttime sounds—crickets, a horse nickering in the barn, the distant hum of the generator behind the clubhouse. Stars coming out one by one like someone's turning on lights in a house so big you can't see the walls.
I think about thirty years.
About the woman who just drove away crying in a white Escalade and the life we built that was never quite a life.
About the children we made who turned out better than either of us deserved.
About all the things I should have said a decade ago and didn't, because it was easier to let the silence do the work.
I think about the empty chair beside me and how it doesn't feel empty with Dakota in it.
And I think—just barely, just at the edge of something I can't name yet—that I've been clearing ground.
For what, I don't know.
But the ground is clear.
And the sky is wide.
And somewhere out there, past the fence lines and the county roads and the years I'll never get back, something is coming that I'm not ready for.
I finish the bourbon and set the glass on the rail next to my phone.
Dakota finishes hers. Stands. Drops a kiss on the top of my head the way she's done since she was tall enough to reach.
"Night, Pops."
"Night, baby girl."
She walks into the house, the screen door closing behind her. The sound of her boots on the hardwood goes up the stairs, then is gone.
I sit in my father's chair on my father's porch on the land that's been Lyle dirt since before Texas was Texas.
The chair next to me is empty and for the first time in thirty years, it's supposed to be.