I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I looked out the window, traced the line of the snowdrift as it climbed the edge of the porch. “I got a degree. That’s about it.”
He shrugged, as if to say that was more than most people ever managed.
He went quiet again, then said, “You always this good at reading people?”
This was the part I hated. The “you” that meant “omega,” the “reading” that meant “please entertain me with your trauma.” But there was nothing in his voice but genuine curiosity, a mechanic asking about a weird noise in your engine.
I decided to answer him for real.
“I learned early,” I said. “In my house, you had to figure out if a question was a test or a warning. If it was safe to tell the truth, or safer to lie.”
Hooper made a small noise, not quite a laugh. “I get that.”
“It’s not a skill anyone wants,” I said. “But you can’t unlearn it. Even when it stops being about survival.”
He nodded, as if this confirmed a theory he’d been holding in reserve. He refilled his mug, gestured with the pot in case I wanted more.
I declined.
“Rawley says you’ve got a mind like a filing cabinet,” he said. “You remember every number you’ve ever seen.”
“Not every number,” I said, but it was close enough to true.
He took a breath, and I could tell he was about to shift gears.
“Ranch accounts are a mess,” he said, flat as a weather report. “Nobody here cares about spreadsheets. Not Rawley, not Burke, and definitely not me. I tried to get Carter to fix it but he’s better with animals than with decimals.” He looked at me, level. “That’s not a job offer. Just a fact.”
I nodded. “I get it.”
“Rawley says if we don’t get the books in order by spring, we lose half our credit lines. Which would be bad, if you like eating or getting paid.”
I almost laughed. “You want me to audit the ranch?”
He shrugged. “If you want to. Or you can just keep making lists for yourself. Up to you.”
I stared at the pattern of coffee rings on the table, the way they overlapped and blurred, each one a ghost of a previous conversation.
I said, “I’d want to see the books first.”
He nodded, as if this was the only possible answer. “Fine,” he said, and pushed up from the table. “I’ll get them.”
He left the kitchen with his mug in hand, boots making the old boards complain. I listened to his progress down the hall, the pause at the closet door, the sound of a shelf being dragged open.
The house was quiet again, but it wasn’t empty. It was the kind of silence that held a place for you.
I sat at the table and waited for him to come back.
The kitchen table was never meant for actual work. It bowed in the center, every coffee ring and knife scar from the last fifty years preserved in the laminate like a timeline. But when Hooper returned from the closet with an armload of ledgers and two bulging grocery sacks full of receipts, he dumped everything in the middle of the table and immediately started sorting them into piles.
“This one’s the main ranch,” he said, patting the thickest ledger, its cover held together by three layers of duct tape. “These are equipment. And this—” he handed over a spiral-bound notebook with a steak sauce label stuck to the cover, “—is Rawley’s personal log. If you can make sense of his handwriting, you win a prize.”
I took the notebook, turned a few pages. Rawley wrote in a blocky, military print, but every other word was a jargon hybrid: “feed audit,” “calf weights,” “generator test—failed (again).”
There were doodles in the margins—horses, mostly, and a surprisingly good sketch of the main house viewed from the north pasture.
The next hour dissolved into the kind of calm I hadn’t known I could crave. Emilio snored gently in the next room, the baby monitor green and unblinking on the counter, picking up nothing but the faint static of a house settling into itself. The only other sounds were the soft shuffle of papers, the tick of the woodstove cycling on, and the clink of Hooper’s spoon as he stirred sugar into his second coffee.
I started with the bank statements. They were filed by month, but not by year, which meant half my time was spent sorting the past from the present, stacking them into chronological order.
