“You’re wrong,” Sterling said, his voice flat.
“I’m experienced,” Mitch said.
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“In this context they are.”
I set my coffee down. “You’re both wrong.”
They turned to look at me, Mitch’s eyebrows up, Sterling’s expression doing that thing where it didn’t change but something behind his eyes recalculated.
“The correct answer is in the extension guide,” I said pleasantly. “The one that’s been on the shelf for six months. If either of you would like to read it.”
Mitch waved a hand. “I don’t need a guide. I’ve driven approximately nine thousand fence posts in my life.”
“I’ve read it,” Sterling said.
“Then you know you’re wrong,” I said.
“That’s not what the guide says.”
I did not roll my eyes, but it was close. “I’m happy to get the guide.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Mitch was grinning so wide his face was practically a structural problem. He leaned back in his chair, coffee mug cradled between both hands, and looked at Sterling with the expression of a man who had front-row tickets to a show he’d been waiting months to see.
Sterling looked at him. “Stop.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
“I’m always enjoying myself.”
“That’s the problem,” Sterling said.
And the corner of his mouth did the thing—the small, stubborn warmth I’d been cataloguing since the first week, the almost-smile that lived in the crease beside his left eye.
I turned back to the range before my face gave me away entirely, because my face had never been good at secrets and Sterling missed nothing, and the last thing I needed was for him to decide that being watched was a reason to remember all the walls he’d spent last night taking down.
After breakfast Mitch headed out to the barn with the purpose of a man who had decided that physical labor was the appropriate outlet for whatever energy was currently bouncing around his system. I heard the door slam, then the stomp of his boots on gravel, fading toward the south end of the property where the irrigation line had been giving us trouble.
Sterling stayed. He spread his topographic maps across the long plank table with the precision of a man who needed to feel like he was working even when he was sitting still.
Each map went down flat, corners weighted with coffee mugs and the pepper grinder, and his hands moved over the paper with the same focus he brought to everything—methodical, unhurried, treating the eastern ridge approach like it contained information that couldn’t afford to be missed.
I washed the dishes. Dried them. Put them away in the cabinet where they lived, because things having a place mattered to me in a way that felt less like organization and more like the stubbornness of someone who had spent too many years living out of a duffel bag.
Then I pulled my seed catalog off the shelf and sat down across from Sterling. Not beside him. Across. Where he could see me coming, where my presence was something he could register on his own terms rather than having it arrive in his peripheral vision without warning.
I’d learned that much about Sterling Callahan in four months—he needed sight lines. He needed to see things coming. It wasn’t about control. It was about the particular way his nervous system had been wired by a career that rewarded vigilance and punished surprises.
He glanced up. His eyes moved from the catalog to my face, held for a beat, then dropped back to the map.
“You don’t have to stay in here,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and opened the catalog.
