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I’d been in Denver six days when I finally looked at the three binders on the table and admitted that I had been walking around them the whole time.

They were good binders. I’d built them in the last forty-eight hours on the ranch, standing at the bunkhouse table at two in the morning, hole-punching with my left hand while the right one held the pages flat. Transition of materials, Section 9. The tabs said VENDOR LIST — FINAL, RUN OF SHOW — AUGUST 15, and CONTINGENCIES 1–14. The labels were in my left-hand writing, slanted, careful, the letters smaller than they’d been in June. The binders were the last thing I’d produced as the producer of record, and they were the whole of what Carrow Creek needed to run the rodeo without me, and I had brought them to Denver instead of emailing them, and I had not opened one of them since.

Outside, Denver did what Denver did. Traffic on the boulevard, a leaf blower somewhere below, a siren that rose and faded and was replaced by another siren. No creek. I’d caught myself twice on the first night turning my head toward a sound that wasn’t there — the water over the flat stone, the chord it made when it ran full. The sublet had a white-noise machine in the nightstand drawer, still in its plastic. I’d left it there.

At nine, I sat down at the table.

Nine o’clock meant something different now. For the last few weeks, nine o’clock had been the border of the day — the hour the phone went on the shelf, the hour the agreement took over from the clipboard, the hour a man’s voice said “Goodnight, little one” and meant every word of the permission in it. Now nine o’clock was when work started, because work always started at nine, because I had started work at nine in every city and every office and every job site for eleven years, and the habit was structural. It was load-bearing. I sat down at nine because sitting down at nine was what I did.

I set the laptop on the table. I set the phone beside it, face up, because there was no shelf and no rule and no one to put the rule in the room. I uncapped the pen. I opened the laptop and looked at the binders.

The binders looked back. Blue, gray, black. The tabs in my own handwriting. The spines uncracked.

I checked my email. There was a coupon from an airline I’d flown once. There was a newsletter from a staging-equipment supplier in Colorado Springs. There was nothing from Madison County, because there was no reason for there to be anything from Madison County — the amendment had gone through, the permit had been reissued, Carrow Creek Ranch was the organizer and the producer and the insured party, and the woman who’d built the whole structure had been the last piece removed from it, cleanly, by her own hand.

I closed the laptop. I went and washed the sublet’s two mugs, which were already clean.

At eleven, I sat down again.

I was going to write the handover memo. That was the task. One page — where the vendor deposits cleared, which invoices were pending, the combination to the arena equipment lockbox, the name of the woman with the goat-milk soap in case she called with a question on the fourteenth. The memo was an hour of work. Forty minutes, left-handed. I uncapped the pen and pulled a sheet of the sublet’s hotel stationery toward me and put the nib to the paper at the spot where “To: went.”

The machinery didn’t start.

I’d spent two years assuming the machinery was me — that if you sat me at a table with a pen and a deadline, the producing would happen the same way breathing happened, automatically, at the bottom of everything, below the level where effort lived. Sit down, open the binder, and the lists arrive. It had never once failed to arrive. I’d produced a funeral luncheon for a client’s mother-in-law with food poisoning the week after Riverline. I’d produced a museum gala in June from a hotel in Ennis with one bar of signal. The machinery had run through all of it — the review, the debt, the four-a.m. scenarios, the whole two years of it — the way a millwheel keeps turning through a drought, lower and lower, grinding on nothing, but turning.

The pen sat on the page. Nothing came down the sluice.

I capped the pen. I uncapped it. I wrote my own name at the top of the page, which is a thing they teach you in grade school when the assignment won’t start — put anything on the paper — and looked at it. Priya Nair. It sat there in the left-hand slant like a signature on a document nobody had drafted.

The phone buzzed at 11:42.

Cash. The third message since I’d driven down the ranch road, and I knew the shape of his messages by now without opening them — the dot of the preview, the first four words. The first had come the night I left: Tuck says the bull was — and I’d swiped it away before the rest loaded. The second had come two days ago: Amendment cleared. Permit’s on the fridge. A photograph had been attached. I hadn’t opened the photograph. I knew what the fridge looked like.

This one said: You don’t have to answer this.

I looked at it for a while. The preview sat on the lock screen under the date and the weather — Denver, 84 degrees, air quality moderate.

I typed Hi. I deleted it. I typed The amendment news is good, thank Wyatt for — and deleted it, because it was a report, and a report was an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. You don’t have to answer this. He’d known. He’d known before he sent it that I was sitting somewhere with the message open and the reply box empty, and he’d taken the pressure off the only way he could, from hundreds of miles away, with six words and a period.

I locked the phone. Set it face down on the table. Picked it up forty seconds later and checked it anyway, the old reflex, the four-a.m. reflex, the reflex that had outlived its job now that there was nothing left to monitor. No new message. There wouldn’t be.

After lunch — the lunch being half a bagel I’d eaten standing at the counter — I sat down a third time.

I put my hand flat on the blue binder. I could feel the rings through the cover. I knew the weight of the thing.

I opened it.

The list was there. The tabs were there. The margin notes were there — shade angles for stalls twenty-six through thirty-one, the soap woman’s phone number, the note in the margin that said TUCK: SLING OFF 8/12, NO LIVESTOCK CONTACT, and my own handwriting saying it to me from nine days ago, when I’d still been the kind of woman who knew things and wrote them down so other people could know them too.

I read the first page. I understood every word. That was the ugly part — nothing was wrong with the machinery’s ability to read. It read fine. It filed fine. It could tell you the shade angle at two o’clock. What it couldn’t do, this week, in this white room, was produce — and a producer who couldn’t produce was a title with nobody inside it, and I sat with the binder open in front of me and the title empty and the afternoon going by outside the window, leaf blower, siren, no creek, and I didn’t cry, and I didn’t close the binder, and I didn’t answer the message, and at some point the light moved off the table and the room went the color of a day that had been used up without being used at all.

The binder stayed open all night. Page one. Nothing on the page changed.

***

The phone rang at ten the next morning, and the screen said HALLORAN, A., and I looked at it for three full rings before I answered.

“Priya.” His voice came in ahead of everything else, my name first, the way it always did when he wanted my attention and had thought about how to get it. “I won’t keep you. I know mornings are your production hours.”