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She hadn’t even smiled.

She’d given me nothing back.

Not hostility. I’d know hostility. She was just elsewhere.

Working. Measuring. Finding things I’d missed. The clipboard moved and her boots moved and her pen moved and I stood in my own field, in my own arena, and realized I was the least useful object in it.

She looked tired. I kept coming back to it. The way her shoulders sat, not slumped but held, the way a person held something when they’d been holding it so long they’d forgotten it was heavy. The shadows under her eyes that the makeup covered and the morning light undid.

She’d driven hundreds of miles to get here and she’d started working before she’d said hello.

I watched her pace the east fence, and I wanted her to laugh, and I didn’t know why that had become the only thing in the field that mattered.

***

“I need three things from you,” she said. “Site plan, water source, and your liability certificate.”

“Let’s start with the site plan,” I said, because starting with the certificate would have required a level of courage I was saving for later.

I reached into my back pocket and produced the sketch I’d made on graph paper. It was the size of a napkin, because it had been drawn on a napkin, which I’d then taped to graph paper because I’d run out of graph paper and hadn’t been to town. The tape was pulling away at the corners. The ink had smudged where my thumb had been carrying it for a week.

She took it.

She looked at it for four seconds.

“This will need redoing,” she said. She handed the sketch back. “We’ll work on it together.”

I folded it and put it in my pocket. The tape gave up entirely and one corner came free. I pressed it flat with my thumb.

“The water source is the creek,” I said, confident I could at least satisfy her on this. I walked her to the east fence, where Carrow Creek ran through the cottonwoods. The water was clear and low, moving over stones that were usually covered. “We’ve got creek access here, and a stock tank system that runs from the spring-fed—”

She looked at the creek. Then at the bank. Then at the water level against the rocks, where a dark line marked where it usually sat.

“It’s down,” she said.

“Four inches since last week. Runoff’s tailing off. By August it’ll be lower.”

“Can it supply the volume you need for stock, vendors, and dust control?”

“For stock, yes. For vendors, I’ll haul. Dust control—” I stopped. I hadn’t planned for dust control. I hadn’t known dust control was a thing that required planning. I’d assumed dust was a feature of Montana in August, not a variable to be managed.

She wrote something on the clipboard.

“The certificate,” she said.

Not a question. A prompt. The third item on her list, delivered with the same even tone as the first two, as if she expected it to be there and was already making room for whatever version of it I produced.

I looked at the creek. The cottonwoods. The light on the water. I looked at everything that wasn’t her face, because looking at her face while I said this would have cost me something I wasn’t ready to spend.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

No joke. No grin. No deflection about the decorative department or the artistic process or Wyatt’s bedside manner. Just the words, flat and plain, set on the ground between us like a bucket with no bottom.

She wrote it down.

Her pen moved across the clipboard in small, precise strokes. She didn’t look up. She didn’t pause. She didn’t ask why, or how, or what’s your plan. She wrote “no certificate” or something like it, in the same column as the gate and the seep and the ambulance access, and the pen kept moving, and she was already onto the next line before the silence had finished arriving.

It was worse than being scolded.