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The sound she made scattered blackbirds off the far bank.

She came out of that creek like something launched, three splashing strides and straight into me — I was already standing, I'd been standing since she waded in, a man doesn't sit while somebody he's responsible for negotiates with snowmelt — and she hit my chest shrieking with laughter and burrowed in, and I closed my arms around the whole shivering operation of her and felt her giggle straight through my breastbone.

"It's f-fine," she chattered, into my shirt. "Thursday was a different creek."

"Mm."

"Warm me up. That's a rule now. I'm writing it down when my hands work."

I sat us back down on the quilt and took her feet in my hands — both of them fit in my two palms with room left over, white with cold, and I chafed them the way you'd rub down a chilled calf, slow and firm, and she leaned back on her arms and watched me do it with an expression I was learning: half bliss, half disbelief, like she kept expecting the bill to arrive and it kept not arriving. Then she got her revenge by planting both ice-cold feet flat against my calf under my jeans cuff, and cackled, and I bore it, and I'd have borne worse for that cackle.

It was during the foot negotiations that Biscuit made her move.

Ten years old, gray in the muzzle, arthritis in her hips on the wet mornings — and she crossed eight feet of grass in total silence, extracted a ham triangle from the open basket with the delicacy of a surgeon, and returned to her spot, and was lying with her chin on her paws by the time either of us looked over. The sandwich was already gone. Her eyes said it had never existed. Her eyes said she'd been framed.

"Biscuit!" Josie said, scandalized.

Biscuit thumped her tail once, unrepentant, a dog who had buried better men than us.

"That was theft. That was — Boone, your dog committed a crime."

"Dad's dog," I said, before I thought about it, and then, because it was truer: "Your dog." And Josie went quiet and soft all at once, the way she did when something landed deeper than its size, and looked at the old heeler a long moment, and let the crime stand.

Then she came and settled into the vee of my legs, her back against my chest, and we sat like that while the creek talked and the sun leaned on us, and my thumb found the curve of her hip and traced circles there, idle, no destination in it — and her breathing went long, and mine went long, and for a while there was nothing in the valley but water and the two of us and a thief digesting in the grass.

She tipped her head back against my shoulder. I bent to her — telegraphed it, always, even now — and kissed her, and it started lazy. Warm and unhurried, tasting of coffee and apples, the tenth day of a thing we'd been rationing on purpose, and I meant to keep it lazy.

She turned in my arms.

Twisted around to face me, knees coming to either side of my thigh, her hands sliding up my chest to fist in my collar, and the kiss stopped being lazy. My hands moved — under her jacket, spanning her waist, and they spanned it entire, my thumbs nearly meeting over her spine, and she made a small sound into my mouth at the size of the grip and pressed into it instead of away, and ten days of banked heat came up through me like fire finding a draft.

"Today," she whispered, against my mouth, ragged. "Still today?"

"Still today." My voice had gone down into the gravel. We'd agreed it three days ago, both of us at my kitchen table with the paper between us, everything spoken plain the way we'd sworn to speak it: this afternoon, my cabin, finally. The waiting had been mine — my insistence, slow, everything signed and nothing rushed, no first time on a night shift's adrenaline or a golden accident, but chosen, in daylight, decided — and she'd argued the timeline exactly once and then spent three days looking at me across the barn like I was Christmas morning being withheld.

"Because I've been patient," she said, kissing the words into the corner of my jaw, "I've been so patient, I want it noted in the file—"

"It's noted." My hands tightened on her waist and lifted her a half inch, just to feel the weight of her come into my grip, and her breath went to pieces, and my blood was singing, actually singing, some low note struck ten days ago finally coming up to volume. I was halfway to it. Halfway to gathering her clean off the quilt — I could feel my arms drawing the plan, her knees, her back, the distance to the footbridge, the door I'd left unlatched — and she felt it gathering in me and laughed, breathless, delighted, already moving to help.

The phone buzzed on the quilt between us.

I'd have let it lie. I let most things lie. But it buzzed again, and a third time, and Josie drew back an inch with her hands still in my collar, and I looked down at the screen.

Wyatt. Family meeting. House. Now.

I read it twice. Not for the words — for the shape of them. My brother wrote texts the way he wrote contracts, full sentences, qualifiers, a man who'd sign his own grocery list. Three fragments and a period on the end like a nail head. In thirty-four years I had never once seen Wyatt Calloway spend that few words on anything, and the fewness of them came off the screen like cold off ice.

Josie read my face before I said a word.

"Go," she said softly, climbing off me, already folding the towel over the basket. "I'll be waiting at the cabin."

I stood, and put my hat on, and felt the whole gold afternoon tilt under me like a plank bridge taking weight it wasn't built for, and I didn't yet know toward what.

***

The office still smelled like him. Five months, and Dad's pipe smoke was in the plaster to stay — you got it strongest just inside the door, like walking through a man — and Wyatt was standing behind the desk instead of sitting at it, which was the second wrong thing, the text having been the first.

He'd been sitting in that chair since November. Hated doing it and did it anyway, because the ranch's papers lived in that room and the ranch's papers were his, and somewhere along the way, the sight of my older brother at Dad's desk had stopped hitting me in the chest every time. Now he stood behind it with his hands flat on the blotter like a man at a lectern, and his face was a color I'd last seen at the funeral home — gray under the weather-brown, everything in it screwed down tight and exact — and spread across the desk in front of him, squared to the edges, corner to corner, were papers. Laid out in rows. Like exhibits.