"Remy."
"I'm just saying. Objectively speaking."
"I will put you on fence repair for a month."
He holds up the burrito in surrender. "Finished. Said nothing. Moving on."
He pushes off the door frame and grabs a feed bucket. We work down the stall line together and I'm almost convinced he's actually letting it go when he says, casual as anything, "Beckettwas looking for you this morning. Said he had something to talk to you about."
I keep my eyes on the feed bucket. "About what?"
"Didn't say." Remy finishes his burrito and tosses the wrapper in the bin. "Seemed like it was something he wanted to say to you directly."
I don't answer that.
Beckett finds me twenty minutes later at the water trough near the north pasture. He's got his new work gloves on and his boots are already dusty which means he's been up and moving for a while.
He stops a few feet away and looks like a man organizing his words carefully.
"I want you to move into cabin two," he says.
I straighten up slowly. "Excuse me?"
"You're the ranch manager. You've been living in the bunkhouse." He says it plainly, no fanfare. "That's not right. Cabin two is empty and it's yours if you want it."
I look at him for a long moment. "I've lived in the bunkhouse for four years."
"I know." He holds my gaze steady. "Doesn't mean you should keep living there."
The morning is quiet around us. I don't know what I expected him to say but it wasn't that.
"I don't need your charity," I say.
"It's not charity. It's a job title." He pulls his gloves on tighter. "Ranch managers get cabins. That's just how it should be."
He walks back toward the barn before I can answer.
I stand at the water trough and look at cabin two sitting quietly in the morning light and feel something shift in my chest that I am completely unprepared for and absolutely not ready to examine.
I haven't even given Beckett an answer about the cabin.
He hasn't asked for one, which is either an order, or strategic. I haven't decided which yet. What he has done is show up to every task this morning already knowing what needs doing, which is new and slightly disorienting after two weeks of explaining everything twice.
He's at the fence line near the east pasture when I find him. He's replacing two rotted posts that have been on the maintenance list for a week. He's got the post hole digger positioned correctly,which I know because I watched him get it wrong three times last week and apparently he went home and figured out why.
He doesn't look up when I approach. Just keeps working with the steady focused energy of a man who has stopped trying to prove something and started trying to actually learn it.
It's a meaningful difference.
"Posts need to go eighteen inches minimum," I say, out of habit.
"Twenty in this section," he says. "Soil's softer near the drainage line. I checked."
I look at the post. Look at him. "You checked."
"Silas mentioned it last week. I wrote it down."
I don't say anything to that because what I want to say is something along the lines of good.
