"He asked me yesterday," Silas says after a moment, "about the bunkhouse. What would make it better. What Remy and I actually need out there."
I look at him. "What'd you tell him?"
"The truth." A pause. "He wrote it down."
I think about Beckett's notebook. The five year plan I don't know the full contents of but have seen him working on in the early mornings on the porch. The home questions Silas mentioned before. The secondary irrigation diagram from Earl on the passenger seat of his truck.
A man making plans doesn't make them for a place he plans on leaving.
I know this.
I've known it since this morning on the porch.
Knowing it and feeling it in your bones are two different things though.
Right now, standing at the east pasture fence in the afternoon sun, with Silas quietly drinking his coffee beside me, I feel it in my bones.
Beckett Wilder is building something here.
He's building it around me.
That thought moves through me, slow, warm, certain.
And I let it stay this time instead of filing it somewhere safer.
I let it stay.
The evening comes in soft and gold, the way Texas evenings do when they're not trying to kill you.
I finish the last of the afternoon checks and head back toward the cabin with the particular end of day feeling that has become one of my favorite things about life at Silver Mesa. Not tired exactly. More like pleasantly used up. The kind of physical satisfaction that comes from a full day of real work that meant something.
Beckett is on the porch when I pass the ranch house.
He's got his notebook open but he's not writing in it. Just sitting with it in his lap looking out at the ranch in the fading light with the expression he gets when the day has settled into something good and he's taking a moment to notice it.
He looks up when he hears my boots on the gravel.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
He tilts his head toward the empty chair beside him. The chair that has quietly become my chair without either of us making a formal announcement about it.
I should keep walking. I have things to do in the cabin. Paperwork, supply orders, the ongoing project of organizing my new space that I've been doing in small increments sinceI moved in. I have a full list of responsible reasons to keep walking.
I sit down.
He hands me a coffee from the thermos on the rail beside him, already poured, already the right temperature.
He has apparently memorized exactly how long it takes me to finish the afternoon rounds and planned accordingly.
I take it without comment.
We sit in the comfortable quiet that has become its own language between us. The ranch settles around us.
The barn goes dark at the edges, the horses moving slowly in the far pasture, the hill line holding the last of the light before letting it go.
"Good day," he says. Not a question. More like something he's decided.
