“You were absolutely going to touch them.”
“I have self-control.”
“You have tremendous self-control about most things. Baked goods are not most things.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. The corner of his mouth did the thing—the small, stubborn warmth that was becoming familiar in a way that made my chest do something complicated—and he turned and went back to his maps without another word.
I smiled at the mixing bowl. Wide and unguarded, the kind of smile I saved for moments when nobody was looking, because Sterling couldn’t see it from the other room and the dough didn’t care whether I was grinning at it, and sometimes happiness was its own justification.
Ten minutes later Mitch appeared in the doorway exactly the way Sterling had—arms crossed, one shoulder against the frame, his hat pushed back on his head like he’d been working hard and had just remembered he had a brother who might be worth checking on.
“Well?” he said.
“Sterling said yeah,” I said.
Mitch’s whole face did something enormous. His eyebrows went up. His mouth opened. His eyes got wide, and then he caught himself, tried to rearrange his features into something approximating casual interest, and failed so completely it was almost artistic.
“That’s it? Yeah?”
“For Sterling, yeah is basically a sonnet.”
Mitch laughed. The real one—full and unguarded, the kind that came from somewhere behind his sternum and filled thekitchen without trying, bouncing off the ceiling beams and the cast-iron pans and the open shelving where the mismatched mugs lived.
From the other room there was a pause. A specific, deliberate gap in the sound of paper shuffling, the kind of silence that meant someone had stopped what they were doing to listen.
I knew that pause. Sterling was listening. He was always listening.
Mitch caught it too. His eyes flicked toward the main room, then back to me, and the grin he gave me was the wide, unrepentant one that said he knew exactly what he was doing and had no plans to stop.
I turned back to the mixing bowl. The dough was ready—soft and elastic and smelling like yeast and cinnamon and the particular promise of something that would be worth the wait.
I shaped it into a rough rectangle on the floured counter, my hands moving through the familiar motions without needing my brain’s full participation, because my brain was currently occupied with other things.
Sterling’s boots were still by the door. His jacket was still on the hook. He had come to stand in the kitchen doorway not for coffee but for something he didn’t have words for yet, and he had given me yeah, which from Sterling Callahan was practically a declaration set to music.
The wanting had gotten more specific overnight. Rooted in detail now: the corner of his mouth when it did that thing. The low, rough yeah. The way his hand had found mine on the blanket and held on. The weight of him sleeping beside me, his breathing slow and even in a way it almost never was when he was awake.
I held all of it. Patient and certain. Both hands open, the way I held everything that mattered—not gripping, not demanding, just steady. The dough under my palms. The warmth in mychest. The sound of paper shuffling resuming in the other room, which meant Sterling had decided that whatever he’d heard was worth hearing and not worth responding to, which was its own kind of progress.
The oven ticked. The wood stove hummed. Somewhere outside, Mitch had gone back to whatever involved a hammer and intermittent swearing, and the rhythm of it carried across the yard and found the kitchen window and settled into the silence of a building that had decided, for today at least, that three people was exactly the right number.
I smiled at the dough. Rolled it into a tight spiral. Cut it into rounds and arranged them in the pan, each one touching its neighbors, because that was how they rose best—together, in contact, the way most things did.
Chapter Seven
~ Sterling ~
I’d already downed three cups of coffee by the time I wandered through the bunkhouse kitchen again, topographic maps tucked under one arm, jaw set tight enough to crack walnuts. My eyes kept slipping back to the east ridge through the window—confirmation, not that I needed it, that my unease wasn’t going anywhere.
Tuesday. That’s when it started. Miller’s late feed delivery, nothing unusual on its own. But the dark truck idling at the county road junction, windows tinted, engine running for seventeen minutes according to the timestamp on the perimeter camera.
And the north fence—intact Tuesday, checked personally, the steel posts driven to the exact depth I’d specified. By Thursday, a thirty-foot stretch of it was gone. Cut. Clean. Professional.
That kind of work didn’t happen by accident.
I set the maps on the long table and turned to the coffeepot for a fourth cup. Black. No cream, no sugar, the way I’d taken it since basic, because cream and sugar were luxuries and luxuries slowed you down.
At the cast-iron range, Caleb stood with flour on his forearm and the particular focus of a man who treated baking like it was engineering. Something golden and buttery sat on the cooling rack beside him, steam still rising in thin, determined curls.
