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"Pearl's something," she said, finally, because somebody had to.

"Pearl's the county paper. Marge is the archive." He glanced over. "She came out of the kitchen for you. You know that's not nothing, right? Last person Marge came out for was Lara, and Lara's marrying a Royston in a month."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's a fact."

"I'm painting Friday," she said, with dignity.

"Pearl says you're at the fish fry."

"Pearl can say what she wants."

Neither of them believed her.

He turned in at her gate and let the truck idle while she gathered the bags, and did not put his hand anywhere at all, which she noticed with a body that had opinions about it, and she got down and stood in her yard with hardware in both arms.

"Thanks for the ride. And the... " She gestured with an elbow at the general direction of town, the diner, the county, the whole morning. "Whatever that was."

"That was Soluno deciding it's keeping you," he said, out the window, backing out. "Fight it if you want. Nobody's ever won."

She carried the pie in first, ahead of the paint, and set it on the counter where the light was good, and stood there a minute in the quiet kitchen with her hand pressed flat to the small of her own back, right over the spot, like checking whether a burn was real.

It was still warm. That was ridiculous. She left her hand there anyway.

Behind her on the counter sat a peach pie from two women who had been friends with her grandfather, in a town that had already counted her, and the whole drive home, she realized, she had not once thought about the realtor in Midland.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mason found the wreck on Friday morning, forty feet of downed wire silvered with frost, and he didn't need to walk it to know what had happened. She'd gone out after he left and tried the repair on her own, wanting to surprise him with it, and the old wire had gotten away from her, and there in the middle of the ruin sat one heartbreaking little splice, wrapped exactly like the diagram in her notebook and holding nothing to nothing.

He had it fixed before her kitchen light came on, and when she came across the yard with two coffees, he was leaning on the fender like a man who'd just pulled in.

"You're early."

"You're up."

"I'm always up. Ranchers rise early, I read it in a book." She handed him his coffee. "The one I'm writing. You're in it. You don't come off well."

"Lies," Mason said, pleased. "Fence stretcher today. Time you learned tension."

They worked down the south line, the morning warming out of frost into that dry gold November light, and partway down she stopped at the road stretch. At the clean splice sitting where her ruin had been. Mason got very interested in the spool.

"This is where I..." She looked at it a long moment. He felt the look swing over to him and stay there. "Huh," she said, finally, and it had about nine syllables of things in it she wasn't saying, and she came on down the line, and neither of them said one word more about it, and the silence had a shape, and the shape was thank you.

The stretcher was her grandfather's, an old lever tool with forty years of other men's hands worn into the handle, and Mason should have stood beside her to teach it. Beside her was how you taught it if you had sense. He came around behind her instead, reached around her, and laid his hands over hers on the handle, and knew inside one second that he'd made the kind of mistake a man doesn't recover from by lunch.

Her hands were cold under his. Fine-boned, steadier than they'd been a week ago, and cold, and the cold of them went up through his palms and straight down the middle of him, and every drop of blood he owned changed address.

"Crank it slow," he said, and his voice came out a register lower than he'd sent it. "You're not fighting it. You're persuading it."

"Persuading it." She cranked it slow. The wire came up out of the grass and drew, and she leaned back into the pull, which set her back against his chest, which put her hair directly under his jaw, paint and cold air and something floral underneath it, and Mason forgot the next part of the lesson, and then forgot there was a lesson at all.

"Then what?" she asked.

"Hm."

"The wire's tight." Her voice had gone quiet. She hadn't moved. He hadn't either. "Then what?"