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The laughter died. Not because it wasn’t funny. Because the sentence underneath it wasn’t, and we both heard it, and the room held both things at once — the absurdity of the yawn and the weight of what it was measuring.

“Then we wait,” I said.

“I don’t want to wait.” She looked at me. The laughter was still there, living at the edges, but her eyes had gone steady.

“Just until you can ask me without yawning.”

She smiled. Not the professional one. Not the tired one. The one that lived underneath both, the one I’d seen in the field with the water and the hose, the one that came from the place she didn’t visit often.

She stood. Pushed her chair in. Picked up her water glass and carried it to the sink, because she was Priya and she cleared dishes even when the world was rearranging itself around her.

She set the glass down. Turned off the tap. Dried her hands on the towel.

Then she walked back to me.

I was still in my chair. She stopped beside it, close enough that I could see the faint line where her collar met her neck, close enough that the lamp caught the brown of her eyes and turned it the same amber as last night on the porch.

She bent and kissed me.

Not brief. Not the corner-of-the-mouth press from the first night, not the mid-sentence interruption from the third. She kissed me with her hand on the back of my neck and her mouth open against mine and the taste of chili and water and the warmth of a woman who had decided something and was doing it.

I kissed her back. My hand found her hip through the flannel — the borrowed flannel, the one that was too big and smelled like my laundry soap and looked better on her than anything she’d brought from Denver. I held her there. She leaned into it, her weight shifting toward my chair, her fingers tightening on my neck.

She pulled back.

Her hand stayed on my neck. Her eyes found mine. She was close enough that I could see the freckles the sun had put across her nose this week, the ones her foundation didn’t cover because she’d stopped wearing it.

“Goodnight, Daddy.”

Two words.

She said them quietly. Not a whisper. Not a performance. The same register she used for observations about water volume and permit fees — clear, deliberate, a woman saying a thing she’d chosen to say.

Then she checked my face.

I don’t know what she found there. I know what it felt like — the two words going through me like a current that found every wire I had, every circuit I’d been careful with, every night I’d spent on the porch breathing through the wanting. They didn’t land in one place. They went everywhere. My hands, my jaw, my chest, the backs of my knees. The sound of her voice saying that word, that name, aimed at me, chosen — it undid something I hadn’t known was fastened.

I couldn’t hide it.

I didn’t try.

Her eyes searched my face. Whatever she found there — and I could feel it, the openness, the thing I had no control over — made her expression change. The smile softened. Her hand on my neck shifted, her thumb moving once along the line of my jaw.

“There it is,” she said. Softly. Almost to herself.

Then she straightened. Stepped back. Her hand left my neck, and the place where her thumb had been cooled in the bunkhouse air.

She walked to the back room. The door closed. The latch clicked.

I sat at the table with the chili pot and the water glasses and the lamp humming and my hand still open where her hip had been.

Goodnight, Daddy.

I sat there for a long time.

Then I washed the dishes, because my hands needed something to do that wasn’t following her through that door, and because the agreement said she got to sleep and I got to be the man who made sure she did.

I turned off the lamp.