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Sunday nights, we eat at the ranch house.

Not every Sunday. Not because anybody requires it. Garrett asked once, carefully, and told me no was an answer, and I said I’d think about it, and then I went because I wanted to. Tessa cooks. She is not a good cook. Garrett does the actual cooking while she supervises with a glass of wine and a clipboard, and Cole and I sit at the kitchen table with Ledger, their brindled cattle dog, lying across both our feet like he’s personally responsible for keeping us there.

Last Sunday, Cole told Garrett that a gray cow in the east pasture had opened the lower water-lot gate again. Garrett put his head in his hands. Tessa laughed so hard she had to put her wine down.

“The Accountant,” she explained to me, wiping her eyes. “She’s undefeated.”

I don’t know the story. I asked. They told me. It took twenty minutes, and nobody at that table checked a single exit the whole time.

The Sunday before that, it was Cole’s turn. He told them about a pony named Biscuit who broke him when he was twelve, and Garrett said, with a straight face, that it explained a lot.

Some nights I wake at two in the morning and listen to him breathe, slow and even, and count it like a patient. The rhythm never changes. I fall back asleep before I reach sixty.

* * *

At four-thirty, my last client pulls out, and Cole’s truck comes in through the public gate.

He parks nose-out. He gets out slowly, because his right arm still doesn’t like going above his shoulder for long, and the scar on his thigh aches when it’s about to rain.

“You’re early,” I say.

“I filed an exception report at three fifty-eight.”

“What did you do?”

“Opened a locked equipment route for a county fire inspection when the assigned key failed. Witnessed entry. Photographed the seal. Replacement lock logged.” He puts his work keys in a locking pouch on his belt before he crosses onto my property, the way he does every single day.

“Romance has made you reckless,” I say.

“I came through the public door.”

He kisses me, warm and slow, with his left hand at my waist. His right can reach my shoulder now but not much higher. I know that because we share a house, not because I’m his doctor.

“How was the clinic?” he asks, still holding me.

“14C tried to eat my pencil.”

“Did you let her?”

“A little.”

He smiles. The whole one, the one that changes his face.

My computer chimes on the counter behind me. A routine transport packet for one of tomorrow’s vaccination calls. I check the route sheet against the movement paperwork out of habit.

Trailer number TX-8041 appears on two different loads. One southbound through Webb County. One westbound out of the Panhandle. Different carriers. Different cattle. The times overlap.

Cole reads my face over my shoulder. He doesn’t come around the counter. He doesn’t reach for the screen.

“Problem?” he asks.

“A duplicate trailer number on two routes.” I save the packet exactly as it came in and send both pages to the trucking compliance office. “It might be a typo.”

“Do you need me to report anything?”

“No. If that changes, somebody with the authority to ask will ask.”

He nods and lets it go. He actually lets it go. I can see him do it.

I close the laptop. I pick up my keys, and he picks up his, and we walk out to our separate trucks in the late afternoon light.

At the gate, I stop and look back at him.

“I love you,” I say. I say it most days now. It hasn’t gotten old. I don’t expect it to.

“I love you,” he says, like it’s the easiest true thing he knows. “Go home. I’ll be right behind you.”

Right behind me. Not in front of me. Not in the way.

I drive home with the windows down and the key to our front door on the ring beside my clinic key, and I don’t look in the mirror once to make sure he’s coming.

I know he is.

The End

* * *