She comes into the office and sits in the chair across the desk, which she has never done before. The desk has always been mine, and she has always interacted with it from the doorway with the unconscious body language of someone who understands where the lines are. The office carried the same boundary with it.
Sitting in the chair is new.
I notice it and say nothing about it.
"The access road to the south pasture," she says. "Silas told you about that."
"Three years," I say. "Why didn't you put it in a maintenance report?"
She looks at the desk. "Previous owner had a budget ceiling for non-operational improvements. The road didn't meet the threshold."
"What was the threshold?"
She tells me.
It's a number that I spend approximately one second looking at before I write a figure in the notebook that is considerably larger and turn it to face her across the desk.
She looks at it.
Looks at me.
"That's the annual improvement budget going forward," I say. "Operational and non-operational. Laney's discretion on allocation."
She is very still for a moment before she says, "That's a significant number."
"It's a significant ranch."
"Beckett."
"This is your operation," I say. "You know what it needs better than any maintenance report can communicate. I'm giving you the resources to address it without having to build a case for every decision."
She looks at the number again. I can see her processing it, running through the list of things she's been managing around for four years.
All the things that were unobtainable. The access road, the wash station, the arena, a dozen smaller things that accumulateinto the quiet frustration for someone who cares deeply about something and has been working with less than it deserves.
"The arena project," she says quietly.
"Contractor's coming next week for a site assessment."
She looks up. "You scheduled that already."
"Yesterday afternoon."
She is quiet for a long moment. The office settles around us, the ranch sounds coming through the window, the particular mid-morning energy of the ranch doing what it always does.
"You've been planning this since before the Weston situation," she says. Not a question.
"Since week three," I say. "Maybe week two."
Something shifts in her expression. The careful professional layer that has been sitting over everything since Monday peeling back slightly at the edges.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asks.
I look at her across the desk. "I wanted to show you instead."
She holds my gaze for a moment.
Then she looks at the notebook. The figure. The contractor note I've written in the margin. The access road added in fresh ink from this morning.
