Page 45 of Omega’s Fold

“Finally. I was about to drive up there myself.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t answered me since Wednesday.”

“I know.”

“So. Tell me. How is it going?”

There is a silence in which she waits for me to tell her. My mother is good at silences. She raised me on them.

“It’s going fine,” I say. “I should be home next week. I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Julian.”

“Mom.”

“And how is Wyatt?”

“He’s in the barn.”

A beat. “Doing what?”

“Sleeping. He slept in the barn last night.”

“Julian.”

“I have to go. I love you. I’ll call you Saturday.”

“Saturday is the end of the order.”

“Yes.”

“Call me Saturday.”

“I will.”

I end the call and put the phone face down.

I sit on the step and I do the thing I haven’t let myself do since Donna walked off this porch.

I didn’t poison the aquifer. A hydrologist in Denver did, if you want to call it poisoning, which I don’t, because dewatering is the removal of water from a zone where it’s in the way of a foundation, and the water returns. That’s what the drawdown model says. I’ve read the drawdown model. I’ve sat in rooms where drawdown was discussed in detail by people whose job it is to discuss drawdown, and not one of them suggested that a rancher in the valley should lose his grandfather’s land because the water table sits six feet lower for forty years.

They offered buyouts. I know they offered buyouts because I designed to the acquisition schedule, and Wyatt’s parcel was on it.

Somebody from Linden sat at that kitchen table, probably with his mother before she got sick, and offered a number, and somebody in this family said no. That somebody is now watching his south well go dry because of the no, and he is a grown man, and a grown man who sees his livelihood going has options, and one of those options is to talk about it. To say, out loud, to the alpha the Bureau has sent him, *I am losing my ranch, and I am frightened, and I don’t know what to do.*

He didn’t say that. He has never said that. He took me to bed instead and let me assume the rest, and then he saw a picture on my laptop and got in his truck, and now I am being treated by this household like the villain of the piece because I did not volunteer something he could have solved in five minutes with a search engine, if he had ever once, in a week, asked me what I actually do for a living.

It does not feel as good as I want it to. It feels, mostly, correct, and a little shaky underneath in the one place I am not going to look at, which is the part where I knew, the second I saw the pumps on the ridge on Day Three, that this was my project and that the man whose house I was sleeping in was going to lose because of it. I knew. I didn’t tell him. I told myself I would tell him later, when he was easier to tell, and he was never easier to tell, and that is on me.

The kitchen door opens behind me.

“Matthew’s school bag,” Donna says to the back of my head.

“On the hook by the back door.”

She goes and gets it, not looking at me once.