The ranch house fills with it.
I don't look at Laney while I play.
I don't need to.
I can hear the quality of her silence from across the room. The held stillness of someone receiving something they weren't expecting, and don't have words for yet.
I play for about four minutes.
Then I stop.
The last note sits in the room for a moment before it goes.
I turn on the bench.
Laney is sitting on the couch with her hat in her lap and her hands very still and her eyes doing something she's not managing at all.
"Beckett," she says. Her voice is not entirely steady.
"Yeah."
"You told me you were good."
"I told you I was actually good," I correct.
"You were not adequately specific about what actually good meant."
I look at her across the living room. At the expression on her face. At the woman who has been slowly, deliberately, courageously letting her walls down one at a time since the morning she showed up at the round pen and told me not yet.
"There's something I want to ask you," I say.
She goes very still.
"Not tonight," I say. "Not yet. But soon." I hold her gaze across the room. "I want you to know it's coming so it doesn't catch you off guard."
She looks at me for a long moment.
Her expression moves through several rooms and lands somewhere I recognize. The same place it lands every time something real has been put in front of her, and she's decided to let it stay.
"Okay," she says softly.
"Okay?"
"Okay." She looks at the piano. Looks at me. "Play something else."
I turn back to the piano.
My hands find the keys.
Outside Silver Mesa settles into the evening, and inside the ranch house something that has been quietly building since a moving truck got stuck in the mud on a Tuesday afternoon moves one more step toward where it was always going.
Like it finally stopped pretending to be temporary.
Maisie appears in the doorway in her turquoise boots with Rowdy beside her. She stops when she hears the music.
Her mouth opens.
She looks at Laney.
