“You snore.”
“I do not snore.”
“You snore like Doris turning over on a cold morning. It’s how I knew, actually. No reasonable woman would put up with it otherwise. Must be love.”
The corner of his mouth went up, slow, the smile he rationed like it came out of his own pocket. “That so?”
“Get up.” I was already hunting for my jeans, already feeling something come loose in my chest that I didn’t have a name for and didn’t need one. “I’m off today, and I’m taking you out to the ranch. I want to show you where I’m actually from.”
“You sure?”
I looked at him — rumpled and sleep-warm andhere, and for the first time in my whole life nothing I was holding back from a single living person. “Caleb. There’s nothing left to be sure about. Now move. Daisy doesn’t like to be kept waiting, and neither do I.”
Caleb foldedhimself into Doris’s passenger seat with his knees around his ears and one arm out the window, and he watched the country open up like he meant to remember every mile of it. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. I’d spent enough months reading the set of his shoulders to know the difference between his quiet that was hiding something and his quiet that was just full, and this was the second kind. Doris made it without complaint, which I chose to take as approval.
We came up the long drive a little before noon — the main house at the top, Liam and Stephy’s truck nosed in by the porch; a hundred yards down, low and square and stubborn, my cabin. I drove us straight past it, around to the barn, because the thing I wanted to give him first was the land.
“This is yours,” Caleb said. Not a question.
“Half mine. Liam’s got the other half.” I hauled the barn door back. He didn’t ask the next question, the money one, and I loved him a little extra for it. Daisy had her head over the stall door before I was three steps in, ears pricked, deeply suspicious that I’d brought a stranger onto the premises without her written consent. “That’s Daisy. She’s eight, she’s dappled, and she has the personality of a woman who has never once been wrong about anything.”
“Sounds familiar,” Caleb said.
“Careful.”
He got up on Stephy’s tall bay better than he wanted me to know — a flash of muscle memory under the rust — and then sat there caught exactly betweenI have this handledandplease confirm I have this handled,and it was, hands down, the best thing I’d seen in two weeks.
“You look good up there,” I said, swinging up onto Daisy. “Like a postcard. A nervous postcard.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Poet can smell it. She’s just too polite to mention it.”
We rode out east, into the part of the property I loved most — grass nearly to the horses’ chests, cottonwoods throwing shade in coins across the ground. Caleb found his seat inside a quarter mile, the wariness sloughing off him, and somewhere in there he quit checking his hands and started looking at the country instead.
“It’s quiet out here,” he said.
“That’s the idea. When everything in town got too loud, this is where I came. The dirt and the horse and nobody deciding anything for me.” I let the old grievance pass, light, because it didn’t have teeth anymore. “Best ground in the world for remembering who you are.”
He was quiet a moment. After a while he nodded at the fence running the rise to our left. “Liam and I mended a stretch of that.”
“I know. He told me. Said you didn’t speak for two hours and it was the best conversation he’d had in years.”
“Sounds about right.”
At some point, a hand left his reins and crossed the gap between the horses to find mine, and we went on like that a while — badly, one-handed, the horses ignoring us with the deep patience of animals who’d carried fools before.
The creek came up gold and shining through the trees ahead.
The creek wasn’t much — ten feet of clear water running over pale stones, a cutbank on the far side where the cottonwood roots hung out into the air — but it had been my favorite ten feet of the world since the day we signed the papers, and I wanted him to have it too. We left the horses to crop grass and sat down on the warm flat rock that had been set there, as far as Iwas concerned, specifically for this. Caleb stretched his legs out, leaned back on his hands, and tipped his face up to the light, and for a while we just let the water do the only thing it knew how to do.
“Liam and I bought this with the last of what our parents left us,” I said. The water made it easy. “Everyone thought we’d lost our minds. The sensible thing was stocks. A city. Something practical.” A beat. “We bought dirt instead.”
He didn’t say anything. He knew I wasn’t finished.
“Every parcel that comes up around here, we buy if we can. Not because we’re afraid of losing it anymore.” I looked out at the pale stones under the water — stones that would belong to my kids one day, if I was lucky. “Because one day we want to hand it down.”
I picked at a fleck of lichen on the rock. “You want to know the worst part of the two weeks? The coffee.” I watched the water instead of him. “Every morning. Flat white. Extra hot. The caramel. I’d pour it straight down the sink.” My throat pulled tight. “And every morning I’d think: he’s still there.”
