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It's not lying, the voice said. It's timing.

My father would have said that too. Word for word.

I finished the pens. Forked the night hay, checked the chart, added my capitals under the last entry, and walked back down through the dark with Biscuit falling in at my knee from wherever she'd been running her own rounds, and the yard came up around me quiet and cold, stars all the way down to the black shoulders of the range.

Her window was gold.

She'd woken from the nap and crossed home sometime in the evening — the lamp was lit in her cabin, and through the gap in the curtains I could see her silhouette at the little table, head bent, one hand moving. Coloring. The good tin open at her elbow, I'd have bet the ranch on it, if the ranch had been mine to bet. She'd sat down at her own table on her own day off and gone back to it by lamplight, pressing hard, tongue between her teeth, safe and warm and fed, everything I'd built the day to make her — and the sight of it landed in my chest with all its weight at once, the whole gold rectangle of it, a lit window with a small woman in it on ground I couldn't promise her.

I stopped on the footbridge and stood there a long time.

The creek ran loud under the planks, snowmelt-cold, talking its spring talk in the dark, and I stood on my post at the near rail with my breath standing out white, wanting what I saw through that window the way drowning men want air — the lamp, the bent head, the moving hand, all the years of it, every October — and underneath my boots the bridge held steady and the ground held steady and none of it was promised, not one plank, not one acre, not to me and not to her. I stood there wanting it and not trusting the floor under any of it, and the water went on underneath, saying June, June, June, and after a while I put my hands in my pockets and felt the folded newspaper there, her laugh under my fingers in the dark.

Biscuit sat down on the planks beside me and leaned her gray shoulder into my leg, and the two of us kept the watch a while longer, and the lamp burned gold across the water, and I didn't cross, and I didn't go home.

Chapter 12

Josie

The bruise had gone yellow-green by Friday, and I stood in front of the little mirror in my cabin that morning with my shirt hiked up and made the official ruling: healed enough. Healed enough for what was the question I'd been circling for three days, and I knew the answer, and the answer made my heart do something athletic every time I let myself look at it straight.

The week had gone by in the ranch's new hard rhythm — Boone gone before my breakfast, thermoses on the porch rail, notes in block capitals that had progressed from EAT to EAT ALL OF IT to, on Wednesday, GOOD GIRL, which I had peeled off the rail and folded into my coat pocket and carried around all day like contraband. My ribs had reported for duty a little more each day. And underneath all of it, quiet and patient and getting less quiet by the hour, was the afternoon we'd never had. The one we'd rationed for ten days and lost to a text message, folded and set aside like the quilt on the porch rail, neither of us reaching for it.

I had decided to reach for it.

I rehearsed all day, which is embarrassing to enter into the record but I'm keeping this record honest. I rehearsed on the bottle calf while I fed her — "So the thing is, I've been thinking," I told her, and she butted the bottle and had no notes. I rehearsed on the mare in the wash stall, three different versions, one of which involved the phrase whenever it's convenient, and the mare flicked an ear at that one and I agreed with her and threw it out. Whenever it's convenient was Bozeman talk. It was the language of a woman apologizing for having a body, and I had signed a paper retiring that woman, and the paper had held every single time I'd tested it, so. Plain. I would say it plain. Boone Calloway had never once made me pay for a plain sentence, and he'd given me maybe two hundred of his own, and the least I could do was hand him one back.

By evening, I'd let myself into his cabin — allowed, encouraged, my key on his ring of spares with a loop of blue twine on it so I could find it by feel — and built the fire up and then had nothing to do but wait and vibrate.

Butterbean and Clover watched me from the mantel, spaced at their negotiated distance, the rabbit's one good ear tipped at an angle I chose to read as supportive. Biscuit lay by the door with her chin on her paws, tracking my laps around the kitchen table with just her eyes, too professional to comment. Biscuit's portrait hung on the wall by the window, square, at the height of Boone's eyes, and I looked at it and thought: I did that. I made a thing and he nailed it to his wall. My drawing lived in this house. My rabbit lived in this house. Some significant percentage of my heart had moved in without filing paperwork, and tonight I was going to stand in the middle of this kitchen and ask for the rest of it.

My heart was going like a trapped bird already and he wasn't even across the creek yet.

I heard him before I saw him — the scuff of his boots on his own porch step, which still undid me a little every time, a man six-foot-five announcing himself to his own house because somewhere inside it was a woman who'd once been afraid of doors — and then he came in on a wall of cold air, smelling of night and iodine and the barn, and hung up his coat, and saw me standing in the middle of his kitchen not doing anything, which was itself a tell, because I always had my hands in something.

"Josie," he said. A greeting and a question in one syllable, which was his way.

And I didn't stall. That's the part I'm proudest of, in the record. I had a whole runway of small talk available — the ribs report, the bottle calf's weight, the state of the fire — and I used none of it. I stood there with my hands at my sides and my chin up that half inch and my heart absolutely deafening, and I said it plain.

"I want you to touch me. Tonight." My voice held, mostly. "All of it. The afternoon we lost — I want it back, and I want it now, and I've been rehearsing this sentence on livestock all day so please don't make me say it twice."

The cabin went very quiet. The fire ticked. Biscuit's one good ear came up.

Boone took his hat off. And he set it down on the table — slowly, so slowly, with the deliberation of a man setting down something that might go off — and the whole time his eyes never left my face, and I watched something move through them that he made no attempt to hide from me, which was its own kind of answer. Heat, banked ten days, longer. Since a barn aisle in March, maybe, if I was being honest, and tonight was for being honest.

"You're sure," he said. Not a challenge. A gate check, the way he checked everything twice.

"Yes."

"The ribs."

"They're fine."

He looked at me. That was all. One long level look with the whole contract in it, the honesty clause standing in the room between us, wearing my own handwriting, and I felt my ears go warm and I amended it, because the paper ran both directions and I had learned — expensively, over his knee, in this very room — what happened to the letter of the law when I strangled its spirit.

"Tender on the left," I said. "Yellow-green. Deep breath is clear. And I'll say red if I need to. I promise I'll say it. I know how now."

"Mm," he said, which was Boone for correct answer, and something in the low register underneath it, something that went down my spine like warm water.