A year and a half earlier.
The whiskey in my glass has been the same temperature as my hand for twenty minutes. I haven't touched it. The ice melted a while ago and now it's just amber water catching the yellow light of Brannigan's bar, and I'm holding it like it's the last solid thing in the room.
Colton, my childhood friend, is leaning against the bar across from me, arms crossed, dish towel over his shoulder, doing the thing where he doesn't interrupt because he knows if he does I'll stop talking and I won't start again.
The jukebox behind us is playing something with too much guitar. Two guys near the pool table are arguing about a carburetor. Normal Tuesday at Brannigan's. Except I'm shaking.
"Twenty minutes." I stare at the glass. "He screamed for twenty minutes because I bought the wrong size can. Not the wrong brand. The wrong size. And I just stood there, Colt. I stood in the kitchen holding a grocery bag and I didn't move until he was done. Like a dog waiting for the thunder to stop."
My voice cracks on the last word and I press my lips together so hard they go white. Colton's jaw shifts. I can see the tendon jump under his ear.
"I went to two interviews this week." I push through it because if I stop now the crack becomes a hole. "Nothing. Both of them looked at my résumé like I'd handed them a napkin.
And I can't — I've been wearing the same three shirts for two months because he has the bank card and last time I asked for clothes he said—" I swallow. "'You don't go anywhere. Who are you dressing up for?'"
Colton's knuckles go white against his forearms. I keep going before whatever's building in him gets out.
"I'm leaving him."
His arms uncross. Both palms land flat on the bar top. "About time, Jess."
"I have a plan." The word sounds almost real when I say it out loud. "Find a job. Save enough for a deposit on a room somewhere. Get out before he can turn it into a conversation I'll lose."
"You can lose a conversation with a guy whose best argument is throwing a beer can?"
"You know what I mean." And he does. Troy doesn't argue — he erodes. He takes every exit and bricks it shut with reasons that sound almost reasonable until you realize you've been standing in the same room for three years wondering where the door went.
Colton opens his mouth and I cut him off because I need to get this next part out before my chest closes around it.
"I need you to take Miss Claw."
His mouth shuts. Something moves across his face — not surprise. Something softer and worse.
"Until I'm settled," I say, and my voice is doing the thing it does when I'm pretending I'm not falling apart, going light and practical like I'm discussing logistics. "She hides under the bed every time he raises his voice, which is…"
"Every night."
"Most nights." I trace the rim of the glass with my finger. The condensation is cold and my fingertip leaves a line through the fog on the surface.
"She flinches at doors now. The same way I…" I stop. Swallow. "I can't watch her do that anymore."
Colton doesn't say a word. He turns, disappears through the door behind the bar, and I hear his boots on the upstairs floorboards — heavy, deliberate, the walk of a man holding his mouth shut by sheer force of will.
A soft meow. The click of a carrier latch. He comes back down with Miss Claw pressed against the wire door, her green eyes blinking at the bar light like she's been personally offended by the interruption.
My throat does something terrible when I see her. That little gray face. I press my thumbnail into the pad of my finger under the bar where he can't see.
"Couch is open too." He sets the carrier on the bar top, gentle. "You know that."
I shake my head. "I need to do this in order or I won't do it at all."
He stares at me — that look, the one where I can physically see seven sentences stacking up behind his teeth. His jaw works once. Twice. Then he picks up the carrier and points at me with his free hand.
"I'm not going to stop asking."
"I know." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. He holds my eyes for a beat too long, then turns and pushes through the back door. The night air comes in cold for a second before the door swings shut. Gone. And the bar gets larger around me, like the walls just took a step back.
I stare at the empty stool where he leaned. The dish towel is still on the bar where he left it. I reach for my glass — finally — and that's when the stool one over scrapes against the floor.
Cowboy hat. Calloused hands wrapped around a beer bottle like they've held harder things. A jaw that's been in more sun than rooms, tanned and a little weathered, with lines around the eyes that come from squinting at distance, not screens. He settles onto the stool the way a man settles into a saddle — like he could stay there all night without shifting once.
He glances at my full glass. Then up at me. His eyes are brown. Warm, the way creek water is warm in late afternoon when the sun's been sitting on it.
"That bad or that good?"
I almost don't answer. My mouth is already forming the polite smile I use on strangers — the one that says I'm fine, please don't — but something in his voice stops it before it sets. There's no angle. No geometry. Just a man at a bar noticing that the woman next to him looks like her night already happened to her.
"That bad."
He nods. Slow. Like that's a perfectly reasonable thing to tell a stranger at nine o'clock on a Tuesday. "Can I buy you one you'll actually drink?"
Something behind my sternum unclenches. Just a fraction. Just enough.
His name is Wade. He's in town for a livestock auction, drives down twice a year from a ranch I've never heard of in a place called Elkhorn Ridge. He orders me a bourbon without asking what I want, and somehow it's the right call. The glass is warm when it arrives and the first sip burns in a way that feels like it's cleaning something.
He asks what I do. I tell him I used to work with horses. His eyebrows lift — not dramatic, just interested, the way a person lifts their head when they hear something in their own language.
"Why'd you stop?"
And I don't know why — maybe it's the bourbon, maybe it's because he's a stranger and strangers are safe because they don't stay — but I tell him.
"Mom took a fall during a qualifying round. Fence at thirty miles an hour. Horse spooked and she went over the top rail." My voice goes thin and I look down at the bar top.
"Her spine just — decided it was done. Permanent." I swallow. "They sold the horses one by one while she was still in the hospital. Bellbird went last. I wasn't there for it."
He doesn't fill the silence. Doesn't offer I'm sorry or that must have been hard. He just leaves it there, open, like a door he's holding without looking at his watch.
Two hours dissolve. I know this because the jukebox has cycled through its whole rotation and the same bad guitar song is playing again and my bourbon glass is empty — when did I finish it? — and my cheeks ache in a way I don't recognize until I realize it's because I've been smiling. Actually smiling. The muscles are confused by the assignment.
He laughs at something I say — quiet, mostly breath, a sound that lives in his chest rather than his mouth — and the realization lands on me mid-sentence like a hand on my shoulder.
I've been talking more tonight than I have in months. Not because he asks the right questions. Because every time he goes quiet, his silence has room in it, and I keep wanting to put something true inside the space he's left open.
I can't remember the last time anyone made room for that.