Tonight Whiskey River Bar & Grill is loud, warm, packed to the edges with Silver Ridge turning out to celebrate a successful charity rodeo. The whole place carries that particular communal energy of a town that knows how to end a good week properly.
The band is in full swing, the bar is doing serious business, every table is full, the dance floor claimed by a rotating cast of cowboys, kids, people who can dance, people who absolutely cannot dance but have decided tonight is not the night to let that stop them.
Maisie is with June's family tonight, an arrangement June offered and Maisie accepted with suspicious speed, which means Maisie is aware something is happening between me and her father and has decided to be strategically elsewhere.
She is eight years old.
She is terrifying.
Our table is the big round one near the back that Wyatt reserves for us on busy nights because Wyatt has been doing that for three years and has never once asked whether we needed it. He just does it. That's Silver Ridge. That's Wyatt Boone.
Remy is already there with a fresh drink and his second favorite hat, which Silas found in the dark pasture this morning and returned without comment. He's telling Silas something about the rodeo that has Silas's mouth doing that small private smile.
They look up when Beckett and I arrive together and neither of them says a single word about the together part, which represents genuine personal growth from Remy specifically.
We settle in. Drinks arrive. The band moves into something with a fiddle that fills the room from the floor up.
Beckett leans across to me. "I talked to Remy this afternoon," he says, close enough that I can hear him over the music. "About the bunkhouse. Told him we're doing the upgrades in the fall. New bathroom fixtures, proper insulation, a covered porch."
I look at him. "He knows it's coming from you?"
"He tried to argue about it." Beckett's mouth curves. "I told him it was non-negotiable. He accepted it in about four seconds."
"Remy loves a covered porch."
"Everyone loves a covered porch."
He's not wrong.
I catch Earl Bishop at the bar on my way back from getting a second round and mention that the secondary irrigation line Earl sketched out on that receipt is going in next month. Earl looks at me, looks past me at Beckett at the table, looks back at me.
"He's doing it right," Earl says simply.
"He is," I agree.
Earl nods, turns back to his drink. Conversation finished. Earl doesn't require more words than that.
I carry the drinks back to the table and slide in beside Beckett and look around at the table. Remy, Silas, Wyatt who has appeared from behind the bar for a few minutes, June who came in after dropping Maisie with her family. The whole Silver Ridge crew, warm, loud, completely at ease.
Beckett is talking to Wyatt about something, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, relaxed in a way that's completely different from the controlled, careful man who climbed out of a car in pressed khakis a few weeks ago.
Silas leans close to me. "Weston's been quiet since the rodeo," he says quietly.
"I noticed."
"Means he's thinking."
"Weston thinking is never entirely good news."
Silas nods, sits back, picks up his drink. "Worth watching."
I file that away and look back at the table, at the band, at the warm crowded room, at Beckett laughing at something Wyatt said with his whole face, all the way up to his eyes.
Worth watching indeed.
Just not Weston.
The band shifts into something slower around nine o'clock.
