I look at him.
He raises his coffee cup. "For what it's worth. He looks at you the same way."
"What way?"
"The way you're looking at him right now." He nods toward the equipment shed. "Like you've found something you didn't know you were missing, and you're not entirely sure what to do with it yet."
I look at the equipment shed.
Beckett comes back out with a tool he needed, turns, looks across the yard, finds me at the barn door the way he always finds me, like his eyes just know where to go.
He raises a hand.
I raise mine back.
Something in his expression shifts the way it always shifts when we do this small ordinary thing across a distance, steady, grounded, completely his own.
Remy makes a sound beside me.
"Don't," I say.
"I'm emotional," he says. "I contain many layers."
"You contain approximately one and a half layers on a good day."
"Today is a good day," he says.
I look back at Beckett crossing the yard toward us and think that today is in fact a very good day.
Then my phone buzzes.
Then Silas's radio crackles.
Then Remy's phone buzzes.
All three within about ten seconds of each other which on a ranch means one specific thing.
Something is wrong.
I look at my phone screen.
The weather service alert is large, red, and using words like severe and flash flood warning and the creek name that runs along the south boundary of Silver Mesa Ranch.
I look up at the sky.
It has gone that color.
The specific green gray that Texas saves for its worst moods.
"Remy," I say.
"Already moving," he says.
The storm announces itself properly at noon.
Not the gentle version, not the warning shots we got in week four that trapped me and Beckett in my truck and started something neither of us was ready to name. This is the full commitmentversion. The kind of Texas storm that doesn't negotiate or apologize or give you more time than it decides you deserve.
The sky goes from green gray to almost black in forty minutes.
