"Look closer," he says.
I look closer at a sound fence post.
"Still fine," I say.
He looks at the post. Looks at me. Looks at the post again. "Might need monitoring," he says.
"I'll keep an eye on it," I say seriously.
He nods. Mission accomplished. We head back to the barn without mentioning the fence post being fine. Silas doesn't say anything about anything, and it somehow becomes the most comfortable dishonest conversation I've ever had.
June stays for lunch, which she announced at eleven with the casual tone of someone who definitely planned this from the moment she arrived. She and I eat at the tailgate while Remy is conspicuously busy doing things near the creek that I am conspicuously not looking at.
"What's Remy doing down there?" I ask.
"Ranch stuff," June says immediately.
"What kind of ranch stuff."
"The kind that needs doing." She hands me a piece of cornbread she brought from the bakery. "Try this. New recipe."
I try the cornbread.
It's the same recipe it's always been.
"Great," I say. "Really different." She beams.
I love her completely.
Maisie checks on me twice during the afternoon with the focused concern of someone making sure an extremely important plan is still on schedule. She drifts past, looks at me, decides I'm where I'm supposed to be, drifts away again.
The second time she stops beside me at the round pen fence and watches me work Copper for a few minutes with the settled patience of someone with time to spare.
"You still want to see the bird at six?" she says. Casual. Practiced.
"I'll be there," I say.
She nods. Something in her expression shifts. The practiced casual drops for just a second and underneath it is something real. Something that looks like the eight year old version of the giddiness I've been carrying all week. The good kind.
She puts it away quickly and goes back to casual.
"It's a really good bird," she says.
"I'm sure it is," I say.
She walks away toward the barn and I turn back to Copper and think that this child has known the ending of this story longer than anyone.
She just let the rest of us catch up.
The afternoon crawls by slower than a Texas traffic jam behind a tractor.
I say this as someone who has managed flash floods, cattle escapes, irrigation disasters, colic emergencies at midnight, and four months of desperately trying not to fall for a man I had already fallen for anyway. I know long afternoons.
This one seems longer.
The ranch keeps moving around me the way it always does, tasks completing themselves, the crew doing what they do, the Texas afternoon heat doing its committed work on the temperature. I do my part. Check on the horses, review the arena construction progress, talk to Dale about the access road final grading happening next week.
Normal ranch afternoon, completely abnormal internal experience.
