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I looked at it. Added:

Thank you for the mug.

Sent.

I drove.

The smile came back somewhere on the highway, and I let it stay for one mile, and then I chewed the inside of my cheek and told it to go.

It didn’t go.

I drove faster.

Chapter 5

Cash

I’d had the coffee ready since seven-thirty.

The mug sat on the bunkhouse counter, clean, ready to be filled. Her mug. The one she’d left on the stock tank like a flag planted in someone else’s country and then forgotten.

The bunkhouse smelled different today. I’d lit the stove at six to clear the damp that lived in the walls, and the dry heat had pulled the mouse-dust smell out of the air and replaced it with something warmer. Coffee and warm pine and the mineral tang of the iron heating up.

I’d also done the site plan.

Not on a napkin. On proper graph paper, the kind Wyatt kept in the office for fence diagrams and pasture rotations. I’d borrowed four sheets, taped them edge to edge on the bunkhouse table, and drawn the arena to scale. One square equals ten feet. I’d used a ruler. I’d used the ruler twice because the first attempt had a wobble in the north line that would have driven me crazy if I’d let it stand, and I suspected it would have driven Priya Nair crazy faster.

The arena ran north-south now. Chutes at the north end, away from the morning sun. Stock pens connected to the existing sale-barn alleys. The seep was marked — crosshatched in red pencil where the groundwater sat, with a note in my handwriting that said DRAINAGE NEEDED. The south gate was labeled REHANG: OUTSWING. The north end had a turnaround drawn in, a wide half-circle I’d sketched from memory of how the fire road at the Ennis fairgrounds curved.

It wasn’t pretty.

It was accurate.

I’d stayed up until midnight with a pencil and a tape measure and Tuck’s numbers, which I’d verified myself at dawn because trusting Tuck’s spatial reasoning was an act of faith I wasn’t prepared to commit to the permanent record.

One hundred and fifty by two hundred. The tape had stopped lying.

The gravel spoke at seven fifty-three.

I poured coffee into the mug and walked out onto the bunkhouse porch. Morning air sat cool in the yard, the creek running somewhere below the house, cattle quiet in the lower pens. The mountains held early light along their ridgelines.

Her sedan came up the drive slower this time. She’d learned the gravel, or at least learned to respect it. The car rolled to a stop near the bunkhouse, and the engine cut.

She got out.

Different clothes. She’d tried. A flannel shirt — thrift store purchase, by the look of it, too wide in the shoulders and rolled once at the cuffs. Jeans that fit. The same boots, the brown leather ones that had cost real money and met real mud. They’d been cleaned. She’d scrubbed them, but the creek stain had set into the grain, and they were gray at the toe in a way that wasn’t coming back.

She reached into the car for her clipboard. Bag over one shoulder. Hair pushed behind her left ear before she’d closed the door.

I walked down the porch steps and held out the mug.

No grin. No speech. No “Morning, Denver” or comment about the weather or the view or the mountains doing their thing behind us. Just the mug, held at the height where her hand would find it.

She looked at it.

At the mug. At me. Back at the mug.

She took it.