I was staring at a jacket flap and spinning the solitaire on its chain around my neck the day Alice went into premature labor. If I'd had it in my teeth worrying it in my mouth as I often did when I was thinking, I'd probably have choked on it.

Alice had nearly choked when I'd come back from Thanksgiving with it dangling between my breasts. "What the fuck? You got engaged?"

"No." I said. "I run him out and he left this on my stove."

She had cocked a sculpted eyebrow at me, expensive pen pushed into her pointy chin. "Country people are fucking weird. Did you vote for Trump? Because that's one thing I can't–" She'd stopped. "Nevermind. You are a fool. You're going to get to my age and wonder what the hell you were thinking."

I kept feeling his cock inside me, staking his claim and destroying me all at the same time. I could feel the bruises on me, like little whispers of the ghosts of who we were, and the babies that had curled up inside my body the way he did and died, the way maybe our love would. I could still smell him in my place. My couch reeked of the smell of our not-love making. Love hating. Grief porn. God a Mighty, I could sit in my living room and close my eyes and the scent of the fields and his old man deodorant and the feel of his jeans rough in my hands almost overpowered my sanity.

"I…" I didn't want her pity. I didn't want to connect, but somehow seeing her judgment, seeing her hand in the small of her back and how it exaggerated the plum swell of her hanging belly, it mattered. I wanted her to know where I was coming from worse than I wanted to keep the truth in silence. "I had a miscarriage. I lost his child."

Her eyes widened but before she spoke, I had gritted my teeth hard, listening to the whir of the printer in the next room starting up. I had spoken over it, definitive. "Twice. I lost two babies."

She had stood there a few minutes, neither of us speaking. She'd said "I'm sorry," and then as I only nodded, nothing. She wasn't a hugger. She was metal in a way, cold and opaque, and I'd never seen her buckle so long as I'd been there. She didn't then either. She'd simply turned to go, long waves of auburn mane falling over her shoulders. She spoke to a painting on the wall about six feet beyond on her way out. "You lost your children, Bella. He lost all three of you."

It was nearly a week on when Alice asked for me, and the fear in her voice made me come at a run. I'd seen her angry, pissy, joyous, and confident but fear was new. She had called for me on the phone and then through her door and across the office in a voice that made it clear something was wrong. It reminded me of the bleat of a calf separated from its mama, all thready wail and rolling eyes.

"Close the door," she'd said, and I did, smelling it already and knowing somehow what would be there behind her modern white desk. "Come here." Her chair and her likely expensive maternity dress were soaked. It was too soon, some two months too soon.

"You have to call Jasper. I can't…" Her hand clutched at my wrist, and her eyes were rolling, even as she doubled in the throes of a pain that felt like an echo to me from a lifetime ago. Her tears were more shocking than the red-tinged water still soaking the chair and the carpet.

"Look at me," I'd said, pulling the phone out of my back pocket. Her head had come up, a turtle testing the air outside a shell it had pulled inside. I'd used the hand she was still gripping to squeeze one thin black sleeve of her dress. "Don't you dare panic. You're the head bitch in charge. You better damned well act like it right now. You hear me?"

The breath she pulled in snaked through trembling lips but she used it to fill her lungs, inflate her chest, and maybe ground us both.

"Okay," she'd said. "Okay. You're right."

"Of course, I am," I'd said, fiddling with my phone, mashing 9-1-1. I hit send.

My mother hates funeral homes. She rarely attends even the funerals of close friends or family members. She jokes that she looks terrible in black, that it washes her naturally olive skin out to a dingy grayish-green. In reality, my grandpa's funeral was a preaching affair that wrung her out to dry and spoiled any image she'd built for herself of a Dallas socialite able to grieve in a stylish hat and non-waterproof mascara. She refuses, whenever possible, to step foot in a mortuary hall.

I'd had rather the same general mind about hospitals for some time, and yet, there I was, in it up to the knee caps as Guv would've said, if'n he could've talked around the tube stuck down his throat anyway. Mercy, I hoped I wouldn't end up at the funeral parlor before the visit was over.

The text from Edward had come two weeks later when I was still minding the office by myself. I'd called Alice immediately, a sure sign of how much of a mess I suddenly was. If her phone rang while she was in NICU visiting, she'd have politely excused herself to the hallway and then they'd have heard her cussing me back in Oklahoma.

"Book a flight," she said. "Or have Carmen book one for you. Of course, you have to go."

"But you won't even be back part-time for weeks yet," I said, biting my lip. "You're busy with your new little booger."

She snorted. "I am busy with an industrial grade breast pump and a team of annoyingly competent NICU nurses. Other than that, I mostly worry when I'm not with Preston and Jasper. I can work from here. It will give me something else to think about."

"You shouldn't worry. Preston's strong as an ox. He just needs some time to grow and you know, ditch the yeller cast to his skin."

"From the sound of it, Guv may not have that kind of time, Bella."

The breath went out of my lungs in a whoosh. "God, you can be such a bitch."

Her tone, comforting rather than icy, was an even bigger punch to my gut. "You know I'm right. Besides, the publishing industry basically shuts down at Christmas. Book the flight."

Seeing Guv in the glow of blinking green lights in this darkened room felt like a dream, one of those movies where everybody knows what's coming except the person at the bedside, and bless it, it made me sick.

Edward was napping in an uncomfortable looking sad beige chair pulled close to the opposite side of Guv's hospital bed. He woke up when I walked over and brushed his face with my fingertips. His big hand closed over mine and didn't let go. "Thank God, you're here." He pulled my hand down to his lips and brushed his mouth over the back of it, the sweet heat of his lips registering in parts of my own body it really should've have at that moment. "I think he's been waiting for you."

My hands went to my pockets. "Where's Essie May?"

He sighed and there was something in his words I hadn't ever heard before. Resignation.

"Em and Rose took her home. She's dead on her feet. She's got to rest or she'll be in here, too."

I looked around for another chair to sit down and noticing me doing so, he got up and motioned for me to take his. He squatted beside me, one hand on the foot of the bed and the other on my knee after I sat. His jeans, too tight across his muscular thighs as always, were still stained with motor oil. He was probably helping Emmett tune up the tractors for the winter when he got the call two days ago.

"Is it really that bad?" I asked, speaking as as though we were already in the funeral home. "What did the tests say?"

"Not another heart attack." He looked at the floor and his eyes were dull black pools in the semi darkness. "A stroke. A bad one."

"Bless it." I think I might have actually choked trying to hold back my sobs. This was not supposed to ever happen. Guv was a dagged gum institution. The whole damned state would mourn. They would lower the flags. Was it gonna come to that?

I looked at Edward, at the pain and the terrifying understanding in the set of his sharply defined jaw. It was going to, and he knew it. His voice sounded like sandpaper against glass as his fingers gripped my knee.

"She signed a DNR before she went home."

"Oh, Edward. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

He reached for me, and my arms went around him. He laid his head across my lap, and I reached down to take off his hat and drop it on the little rotating table beside us. I ran my fingers through his gold red hair, which was growing into a mullet and looked like a spill of silk across my leggings, as he cried.

Three hours later, we stood side by side and hand in hand as the doctor and a team of nurses quietly turned off the glowing machines in the aftermath of a series of follow up strokes, each one an aftershock that knocked out what was left of Guv's good, long life. I had perched myself on the side of his bed and held Guv's hand before they started, his papery skin feeling as though it might disintegrate in mine. I had stroked his white brows with the pads of my fingers and wept, and I'd told him it was okay for him to go, that Edward would take care of Essie May. At one point, Edward had unfolded his ridiculously long legs from the plastic chair and taken himself off to the bathroom. I don't think he actually needed to pee. I think he was in there crying again.

"Guv," I had whispered, leaning close and smelling the antiseptic smell of the hospital on him where once there was only musk and hounds and cow shit. "What is it? What are you waiting for? Do you want us to get Essie May back?"

He had never reopened his eyes in the time I'd been there.

"Do you want me to fetch Edward?"

His cold fingers had tightened on mine, just for a moment. The pressure, so light as to be barely perceptible, had been there nonetheless. I started to get up and there it was again. I sank back down, waiting.

As the minutes ticked by in the darkness, it came to me at last. He didn't want me to get Edward. He knew Edward and Em and Rose would take care of his beloved Essie May. He wanted to hear the last thing, the thing that wasn't for sure, from my lips.

My voice was thick. "You're gonna make me say it, ain't you? You old coot." I swallowed hard and then touched my lips to his cheek so he could feel me form the words as well as hear me whisper them in the darkness.

"I don't know how, Guv," I confessed. "I break everything. I mess everything up. But I'll figure it out, I promise. I'll take care of Edward for you. Always."

His eyelids, pale and dotted with aging skin tags fluttered. The pressure on my fingers came back for only an instant, and then, nothing. Only slow, slow, slower breaths.

The pin strokes started half an hour later. After each one, the doctor would listen with his stethoscope. The nurses would take his vitals. We were all just waiting, listening to those rattling, spaced out breaths.

Finally, even the doctor's voice shook as he read the hands of the clock above the bed. "Time of death, four twenty-seven a.m."

I hadn't been able to make myself wear boots to Guv's funeral, not with the tv cameras following our every move, and besides it was disrespectful for a lady to appear in mourning in boots. Instead, I was literally shaking in black heels while holding Essie May up on one side. Edward shouldered most of her weight on the other, standing on a green turf carpet edged with snow at Memorial Park Cemetery as the well-wishers sang one more hymn. There was a 21-gun salute coming next and she'd refused to sit during that part, too.

Guv had served two back-to-back four-year terms as governor in the 1980s, then sat out for a term, come back and defeated his Republican opponent to serve two more four-year terms throughout most of the mid '90s to early '00s. In 2010, term limits had been approved limiting a governor to only eight years in office in a lifetime. I still thought it was mostly the republicans who were pissed about how the people kept putting Guv back in office. He had retired and quietly gone back to his farm and cattle full time after that. It had never been about the power for him. Like his military service in Vietnam, when he'd gone in as an officer after reactivating when he'd already served in Korea, it had been only about doing what was right and helping where he could do the most good.

His nephew was so much like him. As the volleys rang out, I studied Edward's profile over the top of Essie May's black scarf-wrapped head. For all his grief the night we'd lost Guv, he had been solid as a rock since. Most people who really knew Guv, me included, had trouble with this moment especially. It was December 24. There was a deep snow on and Christmas wreaths adorned many of the graves at Memorial Park. He stood as a contrast to all the bright ornaments and weeping, dark-clad mourners. He looked as carved of stone as the marble tombs off in the distance to his left.

He wore a trim black suit, black Lucchese boots polished to a high shine, and a black Stetson. There was no trace of any emotion on his face, good or bad. I got the feeling his face might crack if he moved his lips. The only time he spoke with anything beyond polite courtesy was to Essie May or to me. He'd told me the night before that if I went anywhere near a vehicle without him for the next week, he would chain me to my bed. I didn't think he was kidding. We might not have figured anything out, but he was taking no chances on me heading to an airport.

After the soldiers delivered Essie May the tightly wrapped flag, the preacher stepped forward, intoning the final homily.

"Dear Heavenly Father, we commend the soul of your good and faithful servant, Carlisle Cullen, four-time governor of the great state of Oklahoma, husband to Essie May, father to Robert, who precedes him in death, and adoptive father to his nephew, Edward, to your care and keeping, oh, Lord. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me..."

Behind Essie May's back, the fingers of his right hand found my left elbow, smoothing up over the back of my arm. He was with me. I was with him. We would, somehow, find our way.

We skipped the mercy meal and drove up 66 in the Yukon Guv had always preferred rather than the Escalade that Em had brought, dodging the interstate route entirely to put Essie May straight to bed. Her doctor had come to the big house with a sedative, something that had shocked me. Apparently, former first ladies could still get house calls–and sedatives–unlike the of rest of us who had to sign our lives away for a bottle of NyQuil.

I went to look for Edward once she was sleeping soundly. I found him in the upstairs library, Guv's private space, his hat on his knee, sitting by the roaring fireplace and sipping a glass of what I expected was Guv's special bottle of Pappy Van Winkle.

He reached out to me with one hand, and I saw it right away, the slight tremor. Crossing the room, I took the glass from his hand, depositing it on a side table, and picking up his hat, seated myself on his knee instead. His arms enfolded my waist. Breathing in the woodsy smoke of the fire, mixed with the bergamot and musk of the cologne he'd likely worn to disguise the smell of the bourbon he'd drunk before we left for Tulsa, I hung the hat over the back corner of his chair. I wrapped my arms all the way around his big shoulders and sighed as he breathed slowly into my cleavage.

When he drew back, his eyes were wet again. The deep green of winter wheat, they seemed to call my name in a way his voice never did. If there were invisible threads that connect us to those we love in this world, ours were sewn not at our hearts or ring fingers but at the corners of our eyes.

Cupping his chin, I leaned down to touch my lips to his. Slowly this time and so carefully, I tried to put it all out there with my kiss. I tried to show him not the anger of our last coupling but the promise I had made to Guv, and in a strange way, to myself. My lips were feather-light on his, but I insisted, biting softly at his thicker bottom lip until he opened his mouth and met me. I swiped at his tongue and then sucked it into the warmth of my own mouth, up and down, as I longed to do with more than his tongue. I sucked and swallowed, his groans and tears and his pain, wishing I could draw all the hurt out of him and inside me instead. It ain't always possible to share every pain, but you could displace it for a bit, replace it with something else, if just for a few minutes.

His hands dug into my waist and he pulled me off his knee and spun me around suddenly, yanking my ass against his lap and pulling my hair back from my ear to lave at my neck. Squirming and pushing my bottom against him, I finally found my voice.

"Edward," I said, voice just above a whisper. "Let's go to your room."