He's not gonna ask about her again. He doesn't have to.
I nod back, and Phantom slams the gavel down.
I walk out of the clubhouse out onto a Texan-sun filled day.
The yard is bright. The day is heating up the way it always does out here, fast and dry, the air smelling like cedar and dust.
Behind Hadley's cabin, the laundry line is hung with three of Nash's t-shirts, a pair of her jeans, and a pillowcase that's already drying in the sun.
Hadley’s standing at the line in a different shirt than the one she was wearing at breakfast.
Her hair is up now. She's bending to the basket at her feet and shaking out a sheet.
Nash is in the dirt yard between her cabin and mine, throwing the football to Diesel by himself because someone must've turned the dog out an hour ago.
I stand at the edge of the gravel and watch them.
I think about the half-second touch on my knuckle, about the look across the kitchen.
How her left ring finger, bare, half-hidden in the laundry basket because she has her sleeves rolled down against the sun.
Hartley somewhere in Llano County right now with a printout of my face with a partner I haven't identified yet, and a clock that started ticking the second the sedan returned the rental car last night.
I've loved this woman for two months. I’m pretty damn sure I've loved that boy for almost as long.
I've spent a decade staying invisible, and the men I ran from are about to make me visible whether I want it or not.
There's a choice coming in the next few weeks.
The choice is staying on this ranch with these two people or disappearing to keep them safe, and I haven't decided yet which one I can live with.
Diesel catches the football out of the air and Nash whoops.
Hadley looks up from the laundry line and laughs—softer than she laughed at Thunder last night, just a quiet startled laugh because her boy is happy.
She catches sight of me at the edge of the gravel and doesn't look away.
I look at her across the yard.
The white hat is shadowing my eyes.
She can't read my face, but I'm reading hers, and hers is telling me she might be ready for this.
I tip my hat at her.
She nods.
A small thing. A nothing thing. The kind of exchange a hired hand and a cook would share across a yard before noon.
I walk back to my cabin.
I close the door behind me.
I sit down at the monitors.
I'm gonna have to tell her. I just don't know when.
CHAPTER FOUR
