He goes to find Silas.
I keep working on the fence latch and don't watch him walk away which requires more effort than it should.
Remy finds me at eight with coffee and the expression of a man who has walked into a weather system he didn't forecast. He looks at me. Looks in the direction Beckett went. Looks back at me with the careful energy of someone deciding whether to ask.
He asks. Because he's Remy.
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Something happened."
"Remy."
"You're using your professional voice." He says it like a diagnosis. "You haven't used that voice with Beckett since like week two. Something happened."
I take the coffee. "Ranch business. Nothing to do with you."
He looks at me for a long moment. The grin is entirely absent, which on Remy's face is its own kind of alarm system. "He know something's wrong?"
"He noticed," I say. "He always notices."
"You gonna talk to him about it?"
I look at the fence latch. "When I'm ready."
Remy nods slowly. Accepts this with unusual grace. Starts to walk away.
"Remy," I say.
He stops.
"Don't tell him anything."
He turns back with the expression of a man caught between two loyalties and not enjoying it. "I won't say anything," he says. "But Laney," he pauses, "don't wait too long to be ready. That man is trying to figure out what he did wrong and he didn't do anything wrong."
He walks away before I can answer.
I stand at the north pasture fence in the early morning and feel the truth of that land somewhere it doesn't help me right now.
He didn't do anything wrong.
I know that.
I just can't seem to feel it yet.
By Wednesday the tension has a texture to it.
Something you can feel in the spaces between things. The morning porch coffee that I've stopped showing up for. The barn rounds we used to do together that I've quietly shifted back to doing alone.
The tailgate lunches where I sit at the opposite end from where I usually sit and nobody says anything about it but everybody notices.
Beckett notices most of all.
I feel him noticing. That's the particular cruelty of having spent three months learning someone well enough that you can read them from across a pasture. I know when he's watching me. I know when he's deciding whether to close the distance. I know when he's chosen not to because he can read me well enough to know I'm not ready.
We are two people who know each other very well, being very careful around each other, and it is exhausting.
