Page 75 of What Remains

Liz reached for Layla’s hand and drew the girl closer, giving Josie a look that asked no questions. Sisters understood the moments you couldn’t explain.

“I’ve got her.”

Josie nodded once, grateful and helpless in the same breath. “Just… give me a minute.”

Neither Liz nor Seth tried to stop her. No one offered comfort. They simply let her go, and the mercy of that nearly broke her again.

Josie turned before anyone could see the tears threatening to spill and walked across the frozen yard toward the barn.

Each step heavier than the last. The crunch of gravel and packed snow sounded too loud in her ears, swallowed only by the wind whispering through the leafless cottonwoods. Her breath came in uneven clouds that the wind took before she could watch them go.

She’d known this was coming. The polite, sterile phrases she’d practiced on the drive—‘He was a good man,’ ‘We miss him every day’—dissolved into useless ash in her mind. Polishing words couldn’t protect her from the sharp, unbearable reality of saying his name.

Saying his name out loud.

Admitting he was gone.

And then—worst of all—hearing the pity in another person’s voice, as if his life had been reduced to a tragic, distant story instead of the center of his world.

The barn grew larger as she approached, looming against the gray afternoon. Faded red paint peeled back in strips, exposing weathered gray boards beneath. One shutter hung crooked, swaying gently in the breeze in the same stubborn rhythm it always had. Her father had promised he’d fix it. “I’ll get to it this summer,” he’d said, like time still belonged to them.

There hadn’t been another summer.

Josie reached the wide sliding door and wrapped her trembling fingers around the cold iron handle. The metal squealed in protest as she pulled, and the sound traveled through the empty building—sharp, familiar, and far too loud for the silence around her. It echoed as if the barn itself remembered every moment she’d ever been afraid to cry.

For one impossible second, her heart surged on a thought so strong it almost convinced her.

Her father’s voice.

“Jo, shut that door! You’re letting all the heat out!”

The memory, warm and real, hit her like a hand on her shoulder, then dropped away into nothing.

Only silence answered.

Josie stepped inside.

The scent came first: hay and leather, dust ground into old wood, horse and work and weathered time. It wrapped around her like a forgotten quilt, a scent so familiar it pulled memories up by the roots from the places she’d tried to bury them.

She shut her eyes.

She was twelve again—barefoot and fearless—running the aisle with Liz while their father pretended not to watch them. Outside, she could almost hear her mother’s laughter drifting in as laundry snapped on the line. She remembered brushing Daisy before the county fair, remembered Mark pretending he knew how to saddle a horse while her dad looked on with that amused, patient expression meant only for family.

She remembered Mark’s attempt going wrong—saddle on backward, his cocky grin turning into helpless laughter as he tried to save face.

Mark had taken it all anyway, shoulders rising with that crooked grin, the kind that made you forgive him before he even apologized.

Josie’s breath hitched, and the memory shattered into the present—into the fact that there would be no more awkward jokes, no more Sundays that stretched into evenings, no more Christmas arguments about football while her mother rolled her eyes from the kitchen. No more kisses before bed. No more whispered “I love you” delivered like a promise.

She moved deeper into the barn, gloved fingers trailing along the worn wood of the stalls. Every board held a path of memory: the groove where generations of boots had passed, the nail heads dulled by years of tightening and fixing, the places where her own small hands had reached for comfort without knowing it.

She stopped at Daisy’s old stall.

Empty now, the mare long since moved—everything rearranged by survival, nothing rearranged enough to erase what was missing. Josie rested both hands against the rough wooden wall and leaned her forehead there as if she could press her way back into time.

“I miss you,” she whispered.

The words hung in the air, unsure who they belonged to—Mark, her parents, the little girl who believed grief could be managed by staying busy.