Beckett feels it too.
I can tell because I know his faces. The focused one, the thoughtful one, the expression he gets when something has exceeded his expectations and he's deciding how much to show. The one he's wearing this afternoon is new.
Settled in a way that goes deeper than contentment. Like a man who has been tested and found out something about himself that he needed to know.
He finds me at the round pen at four, just checking in the way he does at the end of working days now, the quiet gravitational pull that keeps drawing us back toward each other when the day is winding down.
He leans on the fence rail.
I lean beside him.
We look at the ranch in the afternoon light. The tarp on the barn roof. The mud still visible on the access road. The lower field dark at the edges but draining. All the evidence of what happened sitting alongside all the evidence of what held.
"How're you doing?" he asks.
"Good," I say. "Really good actually."
He looks at me sideways. "Yeah?"
"The field's draining faster than I thought. Fence line is solid. The barn roof is cosmetic, not structural." I pause. "We came out of it well."
"We did," he says.
The “we” lands the way it always lands between us now. Not marked or noted, just present. The most natural word in the sentence.
He reaches over without looking at me and wipes some dirt from my face, the way he does, slow and steady. His hand stays at my jaw for a moment.
"I meant how are you doing," he says quietly. "Not the ranch."
I look at him.
At this man who has learned the difference between asking about the ranch and asking about me and knows which one he's asking.
"Really good," I say. Quieter. Meaning it completely.
He holds my gaze for a moment.
Nods once.
Turns back to the ranch. "I think this ranch seems to get the worst of the storm, that's the news in town."
We stand at the fence rail in the afternoon sun, and the we of it sits between us warm, steady, completely without effort.
That's the best part.
The complete lack of effort carries into Wednesday, when Silver Ridge comes to Silver Mesa.
Not formally or organized. Just the way Silver Ridge does things, quietly, without anyone calling a meeting or sending an announcement.
Harvey Miller shows up at eight in the morning with lumber in the bed of his truck and two volunteers from the hardwarestore who apparently had nothing more pressing to do than help repair a ranch roof on a Wednesday.
Earl Bishop sends feed.
Not a bill. Just feed. Pulled up in his delivery truck with his usual economy of expression, unloaded it at the barn, handed me the invoice, which had the word complimentary written across it in Earl's blunt handwriting, and drove away before I could say anything about it.
Jolene sends food.
A whole situation worth of food, the kind that means nobody in Silver Ridge plans on letting you fend for yourself after a storm.
