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She didn’t ask what happened in Denver. She didn’t say she understood, or that I could tell her when I was ready, or any of the sentences people said when they wanted a door opened at a pace that suited them.

She set two fingers on the table beside my hand. Not touching. Close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off them.

“All right,” she said.

Cash walked back into the room.

Josie picked up the vet kit and went out, and the door shut, and the bunkhouse was quiet.

Cash was looking at me with an expression I didn’t have the capacity to read, and the report sat on the table between us with a dark line through the middle of it.

Chapter 13

Cash

Thursday came in clear and dry, the sky pulled tight from horizon to horizon, the kind of Montana morning that made a man forget there was such a thing as weather. I had the truck idling in the yard by seven-fifteen. Priya came out of the bunkhouse with her clipboard, her phone, and a manila folder I hadn’t seen before. The folder was tabbed. Of course it was tabbed.

She climbed into the passenger side and set the folder on her lap and buckled the seatbelt with her left hand. Her right wrist was still wrapped — the beige elastic showing at the cuff of the flannel, my flannel, the one she’d stopped pretending was borrowed — but the swelling had gone down. She flexed her fingers once against the folder’s edge, testing, and I heard the small sound she made when the joint cooperated. A breath through her nose. Satisfaction measured in fractions.

I pulled out of the yard and onto the ranch road. The gravel popped under the tires. The creek ran along the left side of the drive, thin and bright in the early sun, the sound of it barely reaching the cab over the engine.

“Eight o’clock?” she asked.

“Eight o’clock.”

“I have the insurance certificate, the revised site plan, the water haulage agreement with Dale’s cousin, the panel specifications with the incident report attached, and the fire mitigation plan.”

“All of that’s in the folder.”

“All of that’s in the folder. Tabbed.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

She opened the folder and checked the tabs. I watched her do it from the corner of my eye while I navigated the cattle guard at the end of the drive. She touched each tab with her index finger — left hand, the right resting on her thigh — and I could see the check happening in her head, each document confirmed present and in order, the producer running her inventory with the same precision she brought to everything.

The highway south was empty. The Madison River ran beside it on the east side, the water catching the light in flat silver planes where the current slowed over the shallows. The cottonwoods along the bank were fully leafed now, the green heavy and dark, and the shadows they threw across the road moved over the hood in patterns that reminded me of lying under a tree as a kid, watching the leaves shift.

She closed the folder. Set it on the dash. Leaned back in the seat.

“You nervous?” I asked.

“I don’t get nervous. I get prepared.”

“That’s a nervous person’s answer.”

“That’s a competent person’s answer. Nervous people bring extra copies.” She paused. “I brought extra copies.”

I laughed. She didn’t, but her mouth moved, and the motion was the private version of the smile she’d started giving me this week — the one that came out when the producing stopped and the woman underneath was allowed to surface for air.

We passed the turnoff to Ennis and kept south on the highway, and the valley narrowed as the hills closed in on both sides, the road climbing in a gradual rise through the old mining country. The buildings of Virginia City appeared at the top of the rise — false-fronts and boardwalks, the old courthouse set back from the street, the kind of town that looked like it had been built for a photograph and accidentally became real.

The county offices were on the second floor. I parked the truck under a cottonwood that was already dropping cotton on the windshield. Priya took the folder and the clipboard and her phone and the extra copies, and I held the door and followed her up the wooden stairs.

Dena Fry’s office smelled of instant coffee and filing dust. The cardigan was there, draped over the chair back. The desk held three neat stacks of paper and a photograph turned away from visitors, and Dena sat behind it with her county lanyard and her reading glasses and the expression of a woman who had been saying “I’m sorry” all summer and meant it every time without yielding.

“Mrs. Nair,” she said. “Mr. Calloway.”

“Mrs. Fry.” Priya set the folder on the desk. “I have the revised application packet with the updated insurance certificate, the water haulage agreement, the fire mitigation plan, and the incident report from this morning’s panel injury, which I’ve documented with photographs and veterinary confirmation that the animal was treated and is sound.”