"You been at it since when?"
"Since sunup."
"Bex."
"Don't Bex me. Banshee's on the gate till dark and he ain't allowed to leave. Somebody's gotta keep this ranch's feet under it. I'm the closest thing they got to a farrier who'll deal with finicky horses in forty-five miles."
She tips her head back against the chair and closes her eyes.
I look at her. The grease on her forearm. The sweat at her temples. The bandana she's tied around her wrist that I think is supposed to be a sweat rag. The smell coming off her of horse, a hot day, and a working woman who hasn't stopped since the sun came up.
I haven't taken off my own house slippers since this morning. "Bex."
She doesn't open her eyes. "Yeah?"
"Are you okay? With everything that's happenin'?"
She is quiet for a long moment with her face up to the porch ceiling. "I'm okay enough."
A small thing moves at the corner of her mouth. "I been doin' this longer than you, Cross. I been Banshee's woman through three Vegas trips and a Copperhead summer. I been watchin' our men brace this ranch for ugly weather since I was a kid, I suppose. The Shotgun Saints MC have always been part of my life, one way or another. They're royalty around these parts."
She opens her eyes and turns her head to look at me. Her eyes are dark and tired and very clear. "How you holdin' up, Cross? Give me the real answer, not some polite bullshit."
The pencil is still in my right hand. I press the lead of it slowly into the page of my notebook until the point breaks under the pressure.
"I keep thinkin' I should be more scared than I am. Or I should be more okay than I am. I don't know which one is the wrong feelin'."
Bex doesn't look at me right away. Her eyes are on the gate, on her husband's truck parked there in the heat. "Neither. Both. That's the deal."
I look down at the broken pencil in my hand. "Is it always like this?"
She nods once, slow. "When the firm or somebody's grandmother's cousin decides to come at us, yeah. It's like this. You get used to it, though. You don't get used to the not knowin' when it ends part."
Her glass is empty. She doesn't pick it up to fill it. Her thumb runs along the lip of it where it sits between her boots. "How long since the last time?"
"A while now." Her thumb stops moving on the glass. "And it was bad."
She looks at the front gate from where we sit. Banshee's truck is the only thing she can see from here. Her face shifts for a split second. "It can be really bad, sometimes, Cross. You should know that, but you should also know that the club will do anything to protect its women and children."
I let the silence sit.
Her eyes don't leave the gate. "Cross. Can I say one more thing."
"Yeah."
"That man's been waitin' on you since before you knew his name."
The pencil moves a quarter inch in my hand.
"Two months I been watchin' him watch the porch of your cabin. Banshee saw it before I did. Came home one night about six weeks ago and said Rogue went over the cliff and didn't even know it yet."
She keeps staring at Banshee's truck. "Rogue's been waitin' on a woman for a decade. He'd put himself in the ground for your boy by the end of next week. You don't get to keep parts ofyourself protected from a man like that. Either give it all to him or give him nothin'. He'll handle whatever you give him, but he can't handle half."
Bex turns her head and looks at me. "You hearin' me, Cross?"
"Loud and clear."
"Good."