Silas takes a phone call near the equipment shed that he walks away from the barn to take, which Silas never does, Silas takes calls wherever he happens to be standing.
June's truck pulls in at ten.
June doesn't come to Silver Mesa on Saturdays unless invited or unless there is a gathering. Something is happening.
She finds me at the round pen and hugs me slightly longer than a Saturday morning hello requires and then talks about nothing with the focused energy of someone who needs me to keep looking at her and not at whatever Remy is doing behind the barn.
I look behind the barn and Remy is looking at the sky.
There is absolutely nothing interesting in the sky.
I look at June.
June looks at me with bright eyes and the expression of someone holding something in that has been building since approximately the moment she arrived.
"You look nice today," she says.
I'm in my work clothes.
I have been in my work clothes since five-thirty.
I look at the ranch around me. At Remy and his string of lights. At Silas's deliberate quiet. At Maisie's notepad. At June's bright eyes.
I look at the ranch house where Beckett has been in his office since breakfast with the door almost closed.
Something warm moves through my chest. So large and so certain that I have to breathe through it carefully.
Oh.
I know what's happening.
I know exactly what's happening. And it must be happening at 6:00 today.
I go back to work and say nothing and feel the day stretch out in front of me with a completely different quality than it had an hour ago.
Saturday suddenly feels about three days long.
In the best possible way.
I decide not to let on that I know.
This is the gift I can give him. The genuine surprise of a woman who didn't see it coming, or at least the performance of one, which given that the actual surprise happened three weeks agowhen I read three lines in a notebook and stood very still in the office with a supply invoice in my hand.
He deserves the moment.
So I go about my Saturday with the focused normalcy of someone who is absolutely not counting down to six o'clock and absolutely not thinking about an oak tree at the creek bend catching the evening light.
It is the most acting I have ever done in my life, which is saying something considering I survived two years of county fair fundraising meetings without openly losing my mind.
Silas finds me at nine with a fence issue on the north boundary that needs looking at. I know immediately this is manufactured because I just drove that fence line Tuesday and it was sound.
Silas knows I drove it Tuesday because he was there. But I go because going is easier than explaining that I know and because watching Silas manufacture a ranch problem with a straight face is genuinely impressive.
We get on the 4 wheelers and drive the north fence line together while Silas studies fence posts with the concentration of a man trying very hard to sell me a completely imaginary problem.
He points out a post that is, objectively, completely fine.
"Looks fine to me," I say.
