My father was telling Neto about a piece he was working on—something about the limestone composition of the creek bed, apparently—and Neto was listening with the long-suffering patience of a man who had heard thirty years of these ideas and learned to nod at the right moments. Sawyer had stolen the last of the chips and was being called out for it by my mother. Wyatt ate steadily and said nothing and Haven talked enough for both of them without seeming to notice or mind.
And Millie sat next to me in her blue dress with her hair falling down and ate her sandwich and laughed at something my father said and reached for her sweet tea without hesitating, like she'd been coming to this table for years.
I watched her and thought about what Wyatt had said on the walk up.
You have a history of making something your whole life and then wondering why you don't have anything else.
Yeah, I thought.
Maybe.
But right now, sitting at this table, I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted that wasn't already in this room.
TEN
Millie
Gage had said back by noon and he'd meant it.
He came through the screen door at twelve on the dot—I'd checked, because I was the kind of person who noticed things like that—dusty from the field and squinting slightly from the glare outside, and the first thing he did after he sat down was find me across the table like he was taking stock of something he'd been thinking about all morning.
I'd felt it in my sternum.
After lunch, after Adam had told Neto three more things about limestone and Peggy had sent Sawyer home with the leftover chips because she knew he'd just come back for them anyway, after Haven had said a very bright goodbye to the table generally and a noticeably less bright goodbye to the back of Wyatt's head—after all of that, Gage caught my eye and tilted his chin toward the door.
Come on.
I came on.
Outside the air had thickened into that deep afternoon heat, the kind that pressed down on your shoulders and smelled like cedar and dry grass and something mineral underneath it all. Gage had traded his work gloves for his hat and he settled iton his head as we came off the porch, and I watched him do it and thought about how completely at home he was in his own skin out here. Like the land and the man were the same thing expressed two different ways.
"Tour?" I said.
"Tour," he confirmed.
We started with the cattle—or rather, we started with the fence line he'd been working on all morning, which happened to be near where the herd had settled in the east pasture. A hundred and eighty head of Longhorns in the afternoon heat, barely moving, their horns catching the sun.
"They're enormous," I said.
"They're manageable," he said. "That's why we run them out here. Low maintenance. Good in the heat."
"They're still enormous."
His mouth curved. "Yeah. They are."
He showed me the creek next—Holt Creek itself, running low this time of year, cutting through limestone like it had been doing it since before anyone had a name for it. The water was clear where it ran and still in the pools between the rocks, and the shade along the banks was the first real relief from the heat I'd felt all afternoon. I crouched down at the edge and put my fingers in and it was cold enough to make me catch my breath.
"Fed by springs," Gage said, from behind me. "Even in August when the surface water dries up, the springs keep it running."
"Adam was right," I said. "You can feel how old it is."
I looked up and found him watching me with that steady unhurried attention he turned on things he cared about.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." He held out a hand to help me back up. "Come on. I want to show you the stable."
The stable was Sawyer's work originally—he'd rebuilt it from the ground up before he left for film work, and Forrest had been quietly restoring the details since he came home. It was cool inside, the way old stone buildings stayed cool even in June, and it smelled like horses and cedar shavings and leather. Two quarter horses turned their heads when we came in, regarding us without alarm.
