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The shelf was by the door. I crossed to it without turning on the lamp. My hand found the phone before my eyes did — the familiar rectangle, the weight of it, the slight warmth it held from the day’s use.

I picked it up.

The screen lit. The brightness hit my face and I turned it down with my thumb, the automatic gesture of someone who had done this a thousand times in a thousand dark rooms, and the light became a soft glow that showed me the shelf, the edge of the door, my own bare feet on the floorboards.

The email was there. I opened it.

The hydrologist had written in the plain language I’d paid for. No hedging. No academic qualification. Two paragraphs and a table.

Current flow: 0.34 cubic feet per second at the measurement point below the footbridge. Projected August flow at current trajectory: 0.12 to 0.18 cfs. Required volume for dust suppression on a 180-by-90-foot arena surface at August ambient temperatures: 0.4 cfs sustained, or equivalent hauled supply.

The numbers sat on the screen. Clean. Final.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The phone’s glow lit my hands. I should have put it down then. Left the problem until tomorrow. Got a good night’s sleep so I was ready to solve it with a full energy bar in the morning.

But I couldn’t let it go. How could I?

I opened the calculator and ran some numbers.

They came back the way numbers came back when you already knew the answer — not with surprise but with the dull confirmation of a thing you’d been pretending might not be true. The haulage cost per event day, at the county’s commercial water rate plus fuel plus labor, was four hundred and thirty dollars. Two runs. Eight hundred and sixty. Plus the tank repair. Plus the coupling. Plus the driver, if it wasn’t Cash, which meant it would be Cash, which meant it was his time, which meant it was his labor, which meant it came out of the operating budget I’d built around a creek that was supposed to supply what we needed for free.

I opened my email. Started drafting to the county water office. Requested current commercial rates and availability for August booking. Copied Wyatt. Opened a second tab and searched for alternative suppliers in Ennis. Opened a third and pulled the budget spreadsheet.

The phone stayed lit.

I worked for an hour. Then two. The room stayed dark except for the screen, and the screen lit my face and my hands and the papers I’d pulled from my bag — the budget sheet, the haulage calculations, the hydrologist’s table copied onto a page in my own handwriting, the numbers small and precise and adding up to the same thing every time I checked them.

Through the wall, Cash’s breathing changed once — the shift from deep sleep to lighter sleep, the small catch and resettle. I stopped typing. Held the phone against my sternum, the light against my shirt, and waited.

He didn’t wake.

I exhaled. Lifted the phone. Continued.

The draft to the county office was three paragraphs long. I rewrote the second paragraph twice, adjusting the tone from urgent to professional, from professional to neutral, from neutral to the register of a woman who needed something from a government office and knew that sounding desperate cost you leverage.

I sent it at 1:14 a.m.

Then I kept going. Alternative suppliers. A feed-store contact in Ennis who might know someone with a water truck. The math on whether we could reduce the arena surface area and lower the required volume. The math on whether a partial creek supply plus one haul run could bridge the gap. The math, the math, the math, each calculation a brick in the wall I was building between myself and the thing I was supposed to be doing, which was sleeping, which was trusting the agreement, which was being the woman who put the phone on the shelf at nine and left it there until morning.

I wasn’t that woman.

I knew it. The knowing sat alongside the doing, present and useless, the way a passenger sat alongside a driver who was taking the wrong road. I could see the wrong turn. I was taking it anyway.

At 2:03 a.m., I set the phone facedown on the bed beside me. Not the shelf. The bed. Close enough to reach again.

I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to the creek and the breathing and the nothing, and the numbers stayed behind my eyes, running and re-running, and the budget hole stayed where I’d found it, and the solution stayed where solutions lived when you hadn’t found them yet — just out of reach, in the dark, in the place where you were supposed to stop looking and trust that morning would be soon enough.

Morning was not soon enough.

Morning was six hours away, and six hours was a third of a day, and a third of a day was enough time for a supplier to book another client, for a rate to change, for a creek to drop another inch.

I picked the phone back up at 2:11.

The screen lit. The numbers glowed. The room stayed dark.

I worked until the light at the window turned from black to gray, and then I put the phone on the shelf where it was supposed to be, and I lay down and closed my eyes and pretended I’d been sleeping, and through the wall I heard Cash’s alarm go off at five-forty, and the creak of his mattress, and his boots on the floor, and the bunkhouse door opening and closing with the care of a man who thought the woman in the back room was still asleep.

I hadn’t slept.