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I’m at the door when he calls me back.

“Are you bringing Aras for dinner tonight? Before he goes on that trip tomorrow?”

I hesitate and Sol sees right through me.

“Other plans, eh?”

“Ne—no. I have already promised Aras we can see Poet, is all.”

“Then bring him. I need to thank him for putting up with Dav anyway.”

“He doesn’t put up with your dad. They work well together, I think.”

Well enough to dispose of fifteen firearms in the dead of the night, but despite Sol’s obvious cynicism, I keep that to myself and pull out my phone. I have Poet’s number now—he gave it to me before I left him this morning—and I have his. And so I open a message thread and see he hasn’t been active for more than a week and I don’t feel like breaking that streak for him.

You just want to see him again.

Already, and he has barely left my bed. I can still feel the brand of him inside me and I do not mean the obvious. Or, at least, not just that.

“Come with me,” I say to Sol. “I want to show you something.”

Sol takes a little persuading to leave the Joker before it’s time to board the Sirona and go to sea. He checks on Jack. On Mal. Then he goes to the cellar to find Skylar while I wait upstairs. Only then does he consent to follow me up the hill and out of town to the farm with no name.

We find the yard alive with quiet industry.

Poet is out in the hay fields, the baler rattling behind the tractor.

Dav is stacking bales beneath the temporary lean-to Poet built to house his hay while the main barn is so dilapidated. I pause at the fence so Sol can watch from a distance as Dav works. As he pauses to scoop up a stray hen and check her feet and beak before setting her aside.

Unremarkable to anyone else, perhaps. But I know Sol—know he’s seeing the father who taught him to be gentle with small things, and I leave him to however that makes him feel as Poet’s tractor rumbles through a gate a little way down the fence.

I am tall.

The tractor is huge.

I vault the fence so Poet can see me. Then I climb the steps to the cab and plant my lips on his mouth.

He laughs and says something I don’t hear over the engine noise.

I tap my ear.

He does something with his hand I don’t understand either.

Sign language.

Guilt eats at me.

I shake my head.

Poet shuts the tractor off and sudden quiet swamps us, laced with the gentle hiss of the engine and a haze of diesel fumes. “Miss me already?”

“Taip, and Sol wanted me to ask you to have dinner with us at the Joker later.”

Poet’s gaze strays to where I left Sol. I don’t know if he can see him from here, but I don’t think it matters. He sees things that don’t need to be said. “And you came all the way here to ask me?”

“I don’t like phones. Neither do you. But do not worry about dinner if you are busy. Is just fish and friends. And Aras, but I can bring him by after.”

Poet studies me for a moment, sunlight caught in hair as gold as the high crops in the neighbouring fields, as beautiful now as he was when he took such sweet care of me in my bed. “I’ll have to see what the farm says later.”