Page 59 of Thunder

And then Dakota—Dakota, who hasn't looked at me with anything but stone in months— lets out a broken little breath and says, "God. You sound just like him. The good parts of him."

She scrubs a hand under her eyes. "You're right. That's exactly what we're doing. And I've spent months hating him for it and hating—" She stops. Looks at me.

Something in her face finally, finally cracks all the way open. "Hating you. For having her face. For being the proof of what he did. And you didn't do a single thing except get born to the wrong people, and I took it out on you because you were safer to hate than he was."

"Dakota."

"No, let me—" She holds up a hand, and her eyes are streaming now, silent and furious at herself.

"I owe you this, and I've owed it for months. I'm sorry, Presley. What we did to you, freezing you out, treating you like you killed our mother—you lost as much as we did that day. You found out your whole life was a lie same as us. And you lost your sisters on top of it, and that part's on me and Grace, and it wasn't fair, and I'm sorry."

Grace's hand finds mine under the table.

And across a diner booth loaded with waffles going cold, my sister Dakota looks at me and stops being a stranger.

"I don't know how to fix it fast," she says, wiping her face. "I'm still—I'm a mess, I'm angry all the time, I'm not gonna be normal overnight. But I don't want you frozen out anymore. I want my sister back. If you'll still have us after how we've been."

"Are you kidding?" My own face is wet now. "Dakota, I've been dying out here. Yes. God, yes."

Braxton picks that exact moment to let out a squawk, breaking us all open into wet laughter, and Shiver's voice comes off the phone roughly, "Y'all are cryin' in a diner without me. This is exactly why I hate bein' the one on the phone."

Grace hands me the baby without asking.

She just passes him across the table into my arms, warm and furious and impossibly small.

It's the first time she's let me hold him outside a hospital room, and I know exactly what she's saying by doing it.

Waylon picks up his little plastic fork and chows down on more food, all while we’re emotional.

I hold my nephew against my chest and he settles, the way babies do when there's nowhere left to fall.

Dakota watches me do it with something soft and broken open on her face.

For one suspended minute the three of us are just sisters at a table with a baby and a toddler, and the dead woman, the grave, and the men on the run are all a hundred miles away.

I want to freeze it here.

This exact minute.

Before we do what turns us into our father.

But minutes don't freeze, and Braxton starts rooting at my shirt, looking for something I can't give him.

Grace takes him back to nurse while Waylon stays with us, and the warmth drains out of the booth by degrees as we all remember why we came.

We pull ourselves together over cold hash browns, and then it's time, and we all know it's time.

Dakota picks up her phone, takes Shiver off speaker, and stands.

"I'm gonna go do it now," she says. "Before I lose my nerve. Y'all—just—be here when I get back."

She walks out to the diner lot, and through the window we watch her.

She stands by her truck in the morning sun with the phone to her ear, and we can't hear a word, but we can see all of it.

The way she squares her shoulders, the way she starts talking with her free hand moving, the way she nods at whatever he's saying, wipes her eyes once, laughs at something, a real-sounding laugh she's pulling up from nowhere to sell it.

My sister is out there in a gravel lot lying through her teeth to save our father, my mother, and four men who buried a body, and doing it so well it breaks my heart.