The damage, as they said, was arguably done.
I watched her laugh at something my mother said.
This was a terrible idea…and she’d already mostly sold me on it.
After lunch we moved to the back pasture to check the water lines and she worked the way she always did—efficient, no wasted movement, knew what needed doing before I said it. She'd been like that since she was fifteen. It was one of the first things I'd noticed about her, back when noticing things about her was still uncomplicated.
That had stopped being uncomplicated a while ago.
I already hated myself. That was the other thing. I'd spent two days feeling like the worst man alive for what had happened behind the Spur, and the self-hatred was familiar enough at this point that it almost felt like company. I was used to carrying things I wasn't proud of. One more wasn't going to break me.
And if I said no—if I kept saying no—she was just going to keep showing up and looking at me like she knew exactly what I was thinking, which she apparently did, and I was going to spend the entire calving season in a slow kind of torture that helped nobody.
Haven crouched down to check a valve fitting and I looked away.
This was a terrible idea and I was going to do it anyway.
The day rolled on…the sun began to set. It was 4:30 by the time I’d made my decision, and I still didn’t know if it was the right one.
But she’d asked. Begged me for an answer.
So as we stood washing our hands at the utility sink at the end of the day…I leaned in close enough that she could hear me, close enough that I could smell her—a trace of perfume, the day’s sweat, hay and sweetness.
“Stay after,” I murmured.
She stilled.
Just for a second. Then she reached past me for the paper towels like I hadn't said anything.
"My place," I said, quieter. "When you're done."
She looked up at me. Hazel eyes, steady.
"Okay," she said.
I finished the evening checks on autopilot.
Fed the horses. Topped off the water. Noted the two cows closest to term and made sure they were settled. I'd done it ten thousand times and my hands knew what to do without my brain being involved, which was good because my brain was somewhere else entirely.
I was doing this.
I was actually doing this.
The logical part of me—the part that had spent two days constructing very reasonable arguments about age and employment and basic human decency—had apparently clocked out sometime around 4:30 and left the building. What remained had been thinking about Haven Sinclair for longer than I was going to admit to anyone, including myself.
I latched the barn door and walked to my house.
Inside I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and looked at the place the way she was going to see it in about ten minutes. Small. Clean. Sparse. One chair at the table. A shelf of veterinary manuals and three books I'd read twice:The Red Badge of Courage,All Quiet on the Western Front, andThe Martian. Nothing on the walls except a calendar from the feed store and a framed photo of Ethan that had been there so long I'd stopped seeing it.
I'd been twenty-three in that photo. Both of us had.
Ethan Nassar…he’d been one of the best men I’d ever met. Enlisted together when we were twenty-one, and we’d done the whole damn thing together—boot camp, deployment, the works.Neither of us had anything to lose. Or at least, it felt that way until you were dead.
I looked away.
Haven didn’t knock; I heard her footsteps out on the gravel, then the door cracking open. Maybe I should’ve changed, but this wasn’t a date. What we were doing here, tonight, was an arrangement.
Dirty, secret…all about to unfold.
