"You don't have to answer," she says. "I'm just asking because I think it would be good." She opens her book. "For everyone. Including Rowdy."
I look at the table.
At my hands on the table.
At the cabin walls around me that have become mine in the months since Beckett handed me the key without making it a big thing.
I think about the thing he said at the piano. There's something I want to ask you. Not tonight. Not yet. But soon.
I think about soon.
"Maisie," I say.
She looks up from her book.
"I think it would be good too," I say quietly. "For everyone."
She holds my gaze for a moment.
Then she smiles. Wide, undefended, the full Maisie smile that is her father's smile on a smaller face.
She goes back to her book like the matter is settled.
Maybe it is.
Chapter twenty-one
Building Something Real
Beckett
The access road contractor shows up Thursday morning at seven sharp.
His name is Dale. He's fifty-something, weathered. Drives a truck that has seen more ranch roads than most people see in a lifetime.
He drives the access road to the south pasture with the unhurried assessment of a man who has fixed worse and knows it. He crouches down at the problem section near the creek crossing, examines the drainage situation, then stands back up and looks at me.
"Three days," he says. "Maybe four if the ground doesn't cooperate."
"What does the ground need to cooperate?" I ask.
"Two dry days and a decent base layer." He looks at the sky. "Weather's holding. Should be fine."
He gives me a number.
I give him a start date of Monday.
He nods, shakes my hand, and heads back toward town with the efficient energy of a man who has a full week and doesn't waste the front end of it.
I turn around.
Laney is standing at the barn door with her coffee and her expression of someone who has just watched something finally get solved after needing attention for three years.
"Monday," I say.
"I heard." She looks at the access road. "Dale's good. He did the Blackthorn property two years ago."
"Weston's road?"
