"Maisie."
"I'm just saying."
Remy hands her a sandwich without being asked and she accepts it like this is perfectly normal, which I suppose by now it is.
She's been following the ranch hands around since day one and they've adopted her with zero resistance and zero discussion, the way people absorb stray animals and children without ever making a formal decision about it.
It occurs to me that she fits here better than I do.
Which, considering she's achieved full ranch acceptance in under forty-eight hours while I'm still losing arguments with mud, feels a little unfair.
That thought sits somewhere uncomfortable for a moment before I let it go.
The conversation at the tailgate drifts the way ranch conversation seems to drift, which is sideways and unhurried and occasionally landing somewhere unexpected. Remy tells a story about a previous irrigation disaster that makes my situation look minor by comparison.
Silas adds two sentences that somehow make the story significantly funnier. Maisie asks questions that derail everything in the best possible way.
Laney sits at the far end of the tailgate, one boot propped up, eating her sandwich and listening more than she talks. She laughs at something Remy says and the sound of it is easy and unguarded in a way that is different from how she sounds around me.
I notice that more than I should.
I also notice that she's included me in the tailgate without making a point of it. No announcement. No formal gesture of acceptance. Just a handed sandwich and a few inches of sharedtruck space that somehow carries more weight than either of those things should.
Remy catches me looking at her and grins at me with the subtlety of a freight train.
I immediately regret every facial expression I've made in the last twenty minutes.
I look back at my sandwich.
"So Money Bags," Remy says cheerfully. "What'd you think of your first real ranch morning?"
The nickname lands around the group like a small stone in still water. Maisie giggles. Silas looks at the horizon.
Laney is very focused on her potato salad.
"Enlightening," I say.
Remy points at me with his fork. "That's a ten dollar word for a two dollar morning."
Even Laney smiles at that one.
Maisie makes the dinner happen.
That is the only accurate way to describe it. Nobody planned it. Nobody suggested it.
Maisie simply announced at three in the afternoon, with the confident authority of someone who has never once considered that a plan might not work, that everyone was eating dinner together at the cabins tonight.
Remy agreed immediately.
Silas said nothing, which I've learned means yes.
Laney opened her mouth, looked at Maisie's expression, and closed it again.
I stayed out of it entirely because I've been on this ranch long enough to understand when a decision's already been made.
By six o'clock Remy has started the outdoor grill behind the cabins and is treating it with the focused intensity he apparently reserves for two things in life. Horses and fire.
Silas has appeared with a folding table from somewhere and set it up without fanfare in the flat space between the cabins where the grass is worn down from what looks like regular use.
