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A real laugh. Loud, warm, unedited.

I looked at her and then away before the looking became too much for a public morning.

She lowered her hand.

The smile stayed.

Out in the yard, the valley kept arriving. Another truck turned between the bare posts and started up the drive, bringing whatever it had decided we needed.

Priya watched it come.

She didn’t stand up.

***

The first bull hit the arena like he had a personal objection to August, steel gate cracking wide, black hide twisting through a wall of dust while four hundred people came to their feet at once.

The rider made three seconds.

Maybe four.

He came off over the left shoulder, hit the clay, rolled, and the bullfighters pulled the animal clean toward the catch pen while Ty stood at my elbow and watched the gate.

“Latch dragged,” he said.

“I saw it.”

“Fix it before the next one.”

That was Ty’s version of congratulations.

I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled at Tuck before remembering Tuck was twenty yards away from the chute, exactly where I’d ordered him to stay.

Earl laughed from beside the latch. I took the wrench Earl held out and dropped to one knee beside the gate. The steel was hot through my jeans. Dust hung low over the arena, fine as flour, carrying the smells of cattle, trampled hay, horse sweat, sunscreen, diesel, and meat smoking over Boone’s barbecue pit.

Behind me, the announcer filled the dead air. He was a high-school coach with a borrowed microphone and a belief that volume could cover an incomplete understanding of rodeo. But he knew every family in the valley, and when he called the rider’s name, half the north bleachers yelled like the kid had stayed on the full eight instead of getting planted before the buzzer.

The rider got up. Lifted both arms. The crowd gave him another cheer.

“That boy’s going to feel that tomorrow,” Earl said.

“He’s feeling it today.”

“Tomorrow’s when he understands it.”

I tightened the lower hinge bolt. The latch had dropped half an inch after the first release, probably from the gate taking more weight than it had during the test. I’d seen it. Ty had seen it. Priya would’ve seen it from two hundred yards away while talking to a county clerk and calculating bathroom capacity in her head.

I looked toward the rail.

I found her in six seconds.

She stood near the flatbed stage with Josie, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. My gray-green flannel was tied around her waist over a white shirt that had survived Montana better than the linen one from June. Her hair moved against her jaw in the wind. She wasn’t wearing a radio. No clipboard. Her phone was nowhere I could see.

She caught me looking.

Held up a paper plate with both hands.

Eating.