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I wasn't sure a man with my record and my silence and the things I could see myself doing to Derek Kane was allowed to keep any of it. I knew only that I would stand between it and the road until something bigger than me came to take it.
Behind the wall, the mattress creaked.
Josie turned once in the empty bed. I heard the quilt drag and then her breathing, faint through the logs.
I stayed outside.
Going back meant lying beside her and pretending my pulse was ordinary. It meant putting an arm around her while every part of me listened for an engine. Out here, at least, vigilance was honest. Out here, I could watch the road instead of simulating peace for a woman who had survived enough false calm.
At two-twenty, she turned again.
This time, she said something I couldn't make out. A soft syllable, worn down by sleep. Maybe my name. Maybe the other one.
My hand closed on my knee.
I stayed.
No headlights came.
At ten to three, the cold had worked through my coat and into the old scar at my eyebrow. I went inside, locked the door I'd been sitting six feet from, checked the front room windows, checked the fire, checked Biscuit. She looked at me with one ear up and one folded, withholding comment.
Josie had rolled into the hollow I'd left. I eased her over just far enough to fit myself behind her, and she came back against me without waking, trusting the shape before she knew it was there.
My arm went around her waist.
Only then did the last of the diner leave my hands.
I slept two hours.
***
By six, the sky had gone the color of a nickel left all winter in a stock tank.
The storm sat west of us, still invisible except in pressure and radio warnings, but the whole ranch had turned toward it. Men moved faster without looking hurried. Gates got tied twice. Every task ended with a second check.
We staged feed first.
I ran the loader while two hands built squared stacks under the near-barn lean-tos, cake and mineral and enough hay close to the calving barn that we wouldn't have to cross an open quarter mile when the world went white. Cash came in from the east fields on a lathered gelding before eight, reported every pair inside the near fences, changed horses, and went back out without a joke. His left shoulder rode a fraction low. Rain coming. He'd deny it if asked, so I didn't ask.
At nine, Wyatt stood beside the generator with a stopwatch and the service book.
"Load," he said.
I threw it over.
The generator took the barn, heat lamps, tank heaters, office lights, and every outlet Josie might need. It coughed once, caught, then settled into a hard diesel rhythm. Wyatt watched the second hand with his clean hat pulled low against the wind.
"Voltage?"
"Steady."
"Oil pressure?"
"Good."
"Run it thirty."
He wrote the start time down. Of course he did. If the world ended, Wyatt would want a precise record of when it had begun and whether the warranty still applied.
