“I help with the feeding twice a week. Jasper showed me the schedule.”
Sterling nodded. Once. Sharp. The kind of nod that meant he’d filed the information and was moving on. Then he asked, “The garden beds behind the bunkhouse. What are you planting?”
The question landed in the space between us like something I hadn’t been expecting to catch. I set my fork down.
“Spring onions first,” I said. “Then carrots. Maybe potatoes if the soil warms enough. Why?”
“Just asking.”
Just asking. From Sterling Callahan, who rationed words like they cost him something, who spoke in sentences that averaged four words and rarely exceeded six. Just asking about my garden beds, like it was a normal thing to wonder about, like he’d been paying attention to the patch of turned earth behind the bunkhouse that I’d been working on when I thought no one was looking.
Mitch was watching us both with the expression of a man who had front-row tickets to something he’d been waiting for.He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His face said enough for both of us.
I stood up and carried my empty plate to the sink. Turned on the water. Started washing, my back to the table, and let myself smile at the soap suds because there was no one to see it and because my chest was doing that thing again, the warm, heavy rearrangement that happened whenever Sterling did something human, and I needed a minute with a dish sponge to get my face under control.
Behind me, the table was quiet. Boots shifted on the floorboards. A chair creaked. Coffee poured into a mug—Sterling’s, probably, his third—and then silence again, but not the kind that meant empty. The kind that meant occupied. The kind that meant someone was sitting at a table they didn’t have to sit at, drinking coffee they didn’t have to drink, staying in a room they could have left five minutes ago.
Sterling was still there. Not leaving. Not finding a reason to be somewhere else. Just staying, with his bad leg and his hat and his jaw that could cut glass, drinking coffee in a bunkhouse that smelled like bacon and wood smoke and the complicated warmth of three people who were, against considerable odds, learning how to share a morning.
I smiled at the pan. Listened to the sound of him behind me—the soft scrape of a fork against a plate, the low rumble of his voice answering something Mitch had said, the unhurried rhythm of a man who had decided, for reasons he wasn’t sharing, that he wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere else.
It was enough. For now, it was more than enough. It was the sound of a door staying open, and the man on the other side of it choosing, for once, not to walk away.
Chapter Four
~ Sterling ~
The back porch was cold. The kind of cold that seeped through denim and settled into the joints, the kind that made a man with a bad leg very aware of exactly which leg was bad. I sat with my right leg stretched out on the bench, boot heel on the decking, and watched the last heat rise from a mug of black coffee that had stopped being hot approximately twenty minutes ago.
Forty-five minutes on the porch. I was counting. I counted most things. It was a habit with operational value that had long since stopped being about operations.
The near pasture stretched out in front of me, winter-brown and scored with the dark lines of fence posts Mitch had been driving since first light.
He was forty yards out, working the steel bar with both hands, each swing landing with the full weight of a man who had done this ten thousand times and found no reason to rush the ten-thousand-and-first.
His sandy hair was pushed back under his hat. His jaw was set in a line that said nothing about the temperature and everything about the fact that Mitch Pruitt, when he worked, forgot that anyone might be watching.
I was watching. That was the problem.
Each impact sent a low, resonant thud across the pasture. Thud. Pause. Adjust. Thud. The rhythm was unhurried and entirely his own. Mitch didn’t hurry. He wasn’t putting on a show. He just worked, with the focus of someone who understood that the job was the point and the point didn’t need embellishment.
Forty yards left, at the kitchen garden fence, Caleb was crouched on his heels. He had one hand on the top rail and theother gesturing at a fat, indifferent bird perched on the post. Actually talking to it. His mouth was moving. His head was tilted to one side. He gestured once, an open-palmed sweep that looked, from this distance, exactly like a man making a point to something that had not asked for his opinion.
The bird did not move. Caleb kept talking.
I drank the cold coffee. I did not taste it.
The sound of Caleb’s laugh carried across the pasture, bright and sudden, and I catalogued it without deciding to. Mid-range pitch. Warm. The kind that suggested whatever he’d just said to the bird had amused him more than it had amused the bird, and he was fine with that distribution of labor.
I had not looked at the tree line once. I was aware of this. I was aware of a lot of things I shouldn’t have been aware of, including the exact angle of Mitch’s shoulders when they dropped, and the way Caleb tucked his chin when he was concentrating on something that didn’t matter to anyone but him.
Both of these facts constituted a problem. I did not have a clean operational category for watching two men work a pasture and wanting, with a specificity that alarmed me, for them to keep doing it.
I finished the coffee. Set the mug on the bench beside me.
I did not go inside.
The gravel on the apron crunched under boots that did not belong to Mitch or Caleb. A long stride, unhurried, but covering ground, and I knew who it was before I turned my head because there was only one person on this ranch who walked like he was late for something he had no intention of hurrying toward.
