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Quick. Involuntary. The glance of a woman checking whether she was being watched doing something she couldn’t justify. Her eyes found mine, and I saw the flush start at her throat — a faint warmth that crept up the side of her neck and reached her jaw in the time it took me to set down my coffee.

Two seconds. Maybe less. The pen hovered. The blank page waited. Her eyes held mine with the expression of a person who had been caught doing something they couldn’t explain and was deciding whether to explain it or abandon it.

Then she looked down.

The pen touched the paper.

She drew a line. Another. A curve that connected them. Her hand moved with the same precision she brought to everything — the handwriting, the calculations, the careful margins of her budget sheets — but the subject was different. This wasn’t a number or a label or a site note. This was something round. Something with ears.

She drew a cow.

I stood at the counter with my coffee and watched a woman who had spent weeks building a rodeo from the ground up draw a cow on the back of a haulage sheet with the pen she wouldn’t let me touch, and the cow was terrible.

It was magnificent in its terribleness. The head was too large. The legs were four different lengths. The ears stuck out at angles that suggested the animal had been startled by something behind it, and the tail curved upward in a shape no tail had ever occupied in nature. She’d given it an expression — a dot for an eye, a line for a mouth — that landed somewhere between existential dread and mild surprise, and the combination of the two on a cow with disproportionate legs was the funniest thing I’d seen in a month.

She kept going. The pen moved. A second cow appeared beside the first, smaller, standing on a hill that was really more of a bump, with a flower in its mouth. The flower had five petals and a stem that bent at a right angle. She added a sun in the corner — a circle with lines radiating from it, the kind of sun a child drew, the kind of sun that had no business on the back of a discharge calculation and didn’t care.

She wasn’t embarrassed anymore.

The flush had faded. The glance hadn’t returned. She was drawing with the same focus she brought to the budget, her head tilted slightly, her hair falling forward, the pen moving in strokes that were deliberate and unhurried and entirely without purpose, and the absence of purpose was the point.

She gets to play.

I’d written that on the agreement. My handwriting, slanting uphill, the word “play” wandering toward the margin. I’d written it because Boone had said something about permission, and because I’d watched her laugh in the field with the hose and wanted her to have that without needing a broken coupling to justify it.

I hadn’t known what it would look like.

It looked like a cow with four different-length legs and a flower in its mouth on the back of a haulage sheet, drawn with a pen that cost more than the paper, by a woman who had forgotten I was in the room.

I sat down across from her. I didn’t comment. I picked up my book and opened it to the page I’d been pretending to read for three days and didn’t read it, because reading required looking at the page and the page was not where the interesting thing was happening.

The interesting thing was happening on the back of a discharge calculation, in dark ink, with a sun in the corner that had no business being there and every right to be.

She moved to the floor without announcing it.

One minute she was at the table, pen moving, the cow with the flower gaining a companion — a chicken this time, with legs like sticks and a comb that looked like a small fire on its head. The next minute she’d picked up the haulage sheet and the pen and crossed the room and settled on the floor beside my chair, her back against my legs, the paper balanced on her drawn-up knees.

She didn’t ask if it was all right. She didn’t explain. Her shoulder pressed against my calf. The warmth of it came through my jeans, and I adjusted my book to cover the fact that I’d stopped being able to read.

“This is Brenda,” she said.

Her voice was different.

I’d heard her professional register — fast, precise, lightly ironic. I’d heard her tired voice, the one that came out after midnight, thinner and more honest. I’d heard her cry. I’d heard her say “goodnight, Daddy” in a voice so quiet it rewired something in my chest.

This was none of those.

This was loud. Not volume — presence. The words came out rounder, looser, tumbling over each other with an energy that had nothing behind it and nothing ahead of it and no destination. She spoke with her whole mouth, and the sound filled the bunkhouse the way the creek used to fill the valley — without trying, without effort, just by being there.

“Brenda is a cow who works in accounting,” she said, tapping the terrible cow with the pen. “She’s very good at her job but she keeps eating the receipts. This is a problem because her clients are also cows, and cows don’t generate many receipts to begin with.”

I looked down at the paper. Brenda the accounting cow had gained a desk, drawn in rough lines, with a stack of papers on it. The papers were smaller rectangles. She’d drawn tiny numbers on one of them.

“The chicken is her assistant,” Priya continued. “His name is Gerald. He’s been fired three times but he keeps coming back because Brenda can’t reach the top shelf and Gerald can fly. Sort of. Gerald’s flying is—” She paused, studied the chicken’s stick legs, and amended: “Gerald’s flying is aspirational.”

Her voice was the voice of a person who had left every professional register in the other room and was speaking from somewhere she didn’t usually go.

Somewhere small. Somewhere unguarded.