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Not the insurance. Not the stock deposits. Not the inspection fee or the re-application fee or the hydrologist or the grading contractor. She’d gone through the budget — the budget I’d built, the budget she hadn’t seen yet but had clearly reconstructed from the numbers available — and the first thing she’d subtracted was the place she slept.

“Does the ranch have anywhere I can stay?” she asked. “A room. A couch. I don’t need much. I need a surface and a door that closes and somewhere to charge my phone.”

I didn’t say anything about the six hundred and eighty dollars. I didn’t say anything about the fact that she’d cut her own bed before she’d cut anything else. I didn’t say that I’d watched her forget her coffee and lose her sunglasses and check her phone like it carried news of a disaster only she could prevent, and that the pattern was so consistent it had stopped being a pattern and become a person.

“The bunkhouse has a back room,” I said.

“I’m not kicking you out of your own place.”

“You’re not. I sleep in the main room. The back room’s been empty since I moved in.”

“What’s in it?”

“Right now? Dust and a mattress I wouldn’t give a dog.”

“Then I’ll take it.”

“I’ll fix it up first.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll fix it up first,” I said again.

She looked at me. Her mouth opened, the beginning of a protest forming, the automatic refusal of help that I was starting to recognize as her default setting. Then she closed it.

“Thank you,” she said.

Same two words from this morning. Same flat delivery. Same way of moving past the gratitude before it could settle.

She picked up her clipboard and went to the truck to get her bag.

I went to work.

***

The back room had been a storage closet when the bunkhouse housed hands. Six feet by ten, one window facing east, a plank floor, and a mattress folded against the wall that had been there long enough to develop opinions.

I dragged the mattress outside and leaned it against the bunkhouse wall. It would go to the dump, or the burn pile, or wherever mattresses went to die in Madison County.

I swept. The floor hadn’t been swept in months, maybe years, and the dust came up in sheets that caught the light from the window and hung there. I swept it out the door and swept it off the porch and swept the corners until the broom found nothing left.

The barn had what I needed. An old bed frame — iron, welded, heavy enough that carrying it one-handed made my shoulder sing — that had been stored under a tarp since Dad stopped keeping year-round help. I hauled it to the bunkhouse, set it in the back room, and tested the joints. Solid. The Calloway talent for keeping things that might be useful someday had finally paid off.

The main house had a spare mattress in the room nobody used — the one that had been Boone’s before he moved into the cabin, then a guest room that never had guests, then a room that held things nobody could throw away. I carried it across the yard with my right arm doing the work and my left arm pretending to help, and I got it onto the frame without dropping it or tearing anything important.

A lamp from the bunkhouse’s own junk. I wiped the shade clean, found a bulb that worked, and set it on the crate I’d been using as a nightstand in the main room. It looked better in here than it had out there.

The stove. I’d lit it this morning for the damp, but I built a proper fire now — small, controlled, the kind that would warm the room without smoking it out. The iron ticked as it heated.

A shelf cleared. A hook screwed into the wall for a coat. A glass of water on the crate beside the lamp. A towel from the main house, clean, folded, set on the bed.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it.

The room was small. The bed took up most of it. The window let in east light that would wake her early, which was fine because she woke early anyway. The lamp cast warm light on the plank floor. The stove ticked.

It wasn’t much.

It was more than I’d done for myself since I moved out here in May.