"It's pretty crooked," she says seriously.
"Two minutes."
She accepts this, shifts her weight, looks at Weston with the direct assessment of an eight year old who hasn't learned to pretend yet. "Are you a friend of my dad's?"
"Just a neighbor," Weston says pleasantly.
"Oh." She considers him for a moment. "Our house looks really good now. Laney helped me fix it up." She says it with the casual ownership of someone stating a simple fact. "She knows where everything should go."
Something crosses Weston's face that he smooths over quickly.
Something flashes across Beckett's face that he doesn't bother smoothing over at all.
Maisie, satisfied with her contribution to the conversation, turns and runs back toward the house with Rowdy thundering behind her.
Weston straightens up, adjusts his hat, looks between me and Beckett with a smile that has recalculated itself slightly. "Nice kid," he says.
"Yeah," Beckett says quietly, looking at me. "She is."
Weston makes his goodbyes shortly after.
I watch his truck roll down the drive and think that Maisie just said more in thirty seconds than I've managed to say to myself in three weeks.
She knows where everything should go.
Lord help me.
I find Beckett at the north pasture fence line after lunch.
He's been out here a while by the look of it. He's replaced two posts, reset a third, and got the wire tension on the east section tighter than it's been in months.
His shirt is damp from the heat, his hat is pushed back, his new gloves are finally starting to look like work gloves instead of store gloves. He doesn't look up when I approach, just keeps working with the steady focused energy that has become the version of him I know best.
The version of him I trust most.
That thought arrives uninvited and I let it pass without examining it.
"You didn't have to take the whole fence line," I say.
"I was already out here." He sets the post driver down, rolls his shoulder once. "Figured I'd finish it."
"Remy was supposed to do that section this afternoon."
"Remy spent his afternoon teaching Maisie how to rope a fence post." He glances at me sideways. "She's got a better arm than I do, which I'm choosing to be proud of rather than embarrassed by."
I look down the fence line at the work he's done. It's good. Solid, correctly tensioned, properly set. Three weeks ago he didn't know which end of a post driver to hold. Now he's working a fence line alone and doing it right.
I don't say any of that out loud.
"About this morning," he says.
I look at a fence post. "What about it."
"Weston Blackthorn." He says the name like he's setting something on a table carefully. "He comes around a lot?"
"Occasionally."
"He's interested in you."
