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I was on the phone. A supplier in Ennis had returned my call. Their rate was lower than Dale’s but their truck was smaller, which meant more runs, which meant more diesel, which meant the math was different and I needed to run it before I could commit.

Cash drank his water. I talked. He leaned on the rail and waited.

When I hung up, I reached for my clipboard. My hand passed the water bottle.

Cash moved it six inches closer to my hand.

I stopped. Looked at him.

He looked back. Green eyes, steady, the grin absent. Not angry. Not disappointed. Something else — something patient and immovable that I recognized from the night he’d said you’re not done yet in the hayfield.

I picked up the water. Opened it. Drank.

He nodded once and walked away.

I stood at the rail with the water in one hand and the phone in the other and the sandwich still on the post, and I drank half the bottle and set it down and picked up the clipboard and did not eat the sandwich.

***

At nine that night, the phone sat on the table. Not the shelf. The table, faceup, screen lit, the email to Dale’s dispatcher half-drafted.

Cash sat across from me with a book. He’d been reading for twenty minutes. The same page. I didn’t know if he’d turned it.

Nine o’clock came. I watched the clock on the phone’s screen change from 8:59 to 9:00.

The phone stayed on the table.

Cash turned a page.

9:15.

9:30.

Cash closed his book. Set it on the table. Stood.

He washed his water glass. Dried it. Put it on the shelf.

He walked past my chair on the way to the main room. His hand touched the back of my neck — brief, light, his thumb against the top knob of my spine. Then gone.

“Goodnight, Priya.”

“Goodnight.”

He went to the main room. His mattress creaked.

I kept working.

The phone stayed lit. The room stayed lit. The shelf stayed empty, and the agreement stayed in my bag in the back room, and the rules on it stayed written, and I stayed here, breaking them, one by one, in order, with the full knowledge of what I was doing and the complete inability to stop.

At midnight I was still at the table. At 12:40, I went to bed. The phone came with me. I set it on the crate beside the water glass, faceup, screen lit, notifications on.

I lay in the dark and listened to the creek and the breathing and the nothing, and I didn’t sleep, and in the morning I would do it again.

***

The wind had moved two panels overnight.

I saw it from the gate at six-fifteen — the northwest section of the arena fence sitting three inches off the string line, both panels canted inward where the overnight gust had caught them broadside. The T-posts held, but the panel-to-post clips had loosened, and the gap between the shifted panels and the next section was wide enough to fail a safety inspection.