I smiled behind my mask. He'd used my own words back at me, easy as anything, and something about that made me feel slightly less like I was vibrating at an unhinged frequency. "The boots," I said. "And you sat down like you were deciding whether the chair deserved you."
This time the laugh was real—quiet, surprised, the kind that sounds like it doesn't happen that often. "Fair enough."
We sat with that for a moment. The sunflower print stared at us. Someone in another part of the clinic dropped something metal and we both looked toward the sound and then back at nothing.
"You here alone?" he asked. Then, quickly, like he'd heard how that sounded: "I mean—no partner, or?—"
"No," I said. "Very much no partner. This was—" I looked down at the spreadsheet. "This was my plan B. Solo plan B, you could say." I paused. "Pun intended, I guess."
He was quiet for a beat. "Brave."
"Broke is more accurate." I folded the spreadsheet again. "What about you? Is your—" I gestured vaguely. "Are you here with someone, or?—"
"No." He said it flatly, no elaboration, and then seemed to reconsider. "It's a long story."
"I've got—" I checked the time on my phone. "Forty minutes until my consultation. And I've run out of things to do with this spreadsheet."
He looked at me then—fully, for the first time, turning his head so those brown eyes were actually on me instead of adjacent to me—and even half-masked and in a waiting room with a sunflower print and terrible AC I felt it like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
Three and a half years,I reminded myself.It has been three and a half years. This is just what happens.
"It's a really long story," he said.
"I'm a good listener," I said. "Professional hazard. I used to coordinate events for a living. You learn to let people talk."
The corner of his eyes creased. "Used to?"
"COVID took that too." I shrugged. "Hence the spreadsheet."
He nodded slowly, the way people do when they're deciding something. Then he settled back in his chair, those big hands loose on his knees, and said: "You know anything about inheritance law?"
“Not even a little bit,” I said. “Lay it on me.”
It took him about ten minutes to explain—without drama, without editorializing, just the facts laid out in order like fence posts. His grandfather's deed had some weird stipulations. There was a birth order clause. His uncle Arlo, the oldest, hadbeen in prison for the better part of twenty years and had apparently chosen this particular moment in history, a global pandemic, to emerge and hire a lawyer. There was a twelve-month window.
If this man—this gorgeous, mountain of a man—was able to have a baby in twelve month? The land was his. If not…
"Production of a natural heir," I repeated.
"That's what it says."
"Your grandfather actually used the wordproduction."
"1958."
"I—yeah, okay." I pressed my lips together behind my mask. "And if you don't?—"
"The land goes to auction. Pending a county review that could take another six to twelve months, during which my uncle's claim sits alongside mine and the whole thing becomes—" He paused. "There are developers. They've been waiting for exactly this kind of opening."
"How much land?"
"Twenty-four hundred acres."
I did the math on that involuntarily, the way I did with everything. Twenty-four hundred acres of Hill Country, an hour north of San Antonio, with developers circling. I thought about the numbers I'd been staring at for forty minutes and felt the specific vertigo of two different scales of problem existing in the same room.
"And you've been running it," I said. "The ranch."
"Twelve years."
