Page 16

"Working," Knox said. "Where else. He'll be at Uncle John's tomorrow with everybody."

"Tomorrow, then." Brody drank, and his eyes went over the room while he did it, the booths, the pool table, the jukebox, a man checking a place against his memory of it. They came around the room in an arc. Olivia knew they'd land on her before they landed, and made herself sit still and let it happen.

They landed.

For a second the noise went right on around the two of them and had nothing to do with either. Brody looked at her across Harvey's, and she watched the show drop off his face, not far, an inch, the grin going from performance to something quieter, and seven years of not knowing sat between the booth and the bar and waited.

Then he came over.

He came the way he'd come into the library, at speed, direct, no drink-carrying stroll, and he stopped at the end of the booth with his beer in one hand, and he looked older up close, finally, fine lines at his eyes that the door light hadn't shown, years of sun from somewhere that wasn't here.

"Olivia Bateman," he said.

"Brody Royston."

"You're still here."

"Not for long," she said. "The place is up for sale. We're gone in June."

"I heard." Of course he'd heard. He'd have heard before his boots touched Texas; Remi alone would have filed a full report. He looked at her a moment, and she looked back and held it, because she'd decided two weeks ago that whatever this was going to be, she wasn't going to flinch through it. "Selling his cows, though," he said. "Mick Bateman was the best hand with a cow this county ever produced, and better than that at telling a man when he was wrong, and I needed a lot of telling. That has to be its own kind of awful."

"It is," she said. "Thank you for saying his name. People mostly don't anymore."

"You still teaching the little ones?"

"Kindergarten. Eight years now."

"God help them." The grin tipped. "Do they know their teacher used to outshoot the whole church youth group?"

"They know their teacher can tell when somebody's stalling," Olivia said. "It's the same look at any age."

"There it is." He laughed, and then didn't stall. "Who's getting the herd ready? That's real work, a sale like that."

"Owen's been helping. We're running them through his pens."

Something crossed his face, there and gone, too fast to read and too small to ask about.

"Course he is," Brody said.

"This is Lauren," Lauren said, into the pause. "Since nobody's doing it. I'm with Mason."

"I know exactly who you are." The show came back up, full wattage, and he shook her hand across the table. "The flower shop. I got passed around Dean's wedding on a telephone, and your flowers came up twice before anybody thought to hand me back. Mason talks about you the way Knox talks about money."

"I like him," Lauren told Olivia.

"Everybody does," Olivia said. "It's his whole trick."

Brody laughed, one real note of it, and pointed the bottle at her, and for a half second across the top of the joke his eyes were serious, and hers were serious back, and neither of them said one word about the fence, or the leaving, or any of it. Not in a bar. Not with the county at every table and his family twelve feet off and both of them too practiced at keeping their faces. The question she'd carried since that night stayed a question, and what she got instead was this. He'd walked over. He'd said her name like it was easy. Whatever he'd taken away from that fence, he hadn't come home carrying it where she could see it, and she didn't know if that meant healed or buried, and she'd been living long enough among men who buried things to know she couldn't tell the difference across a bar table.

"Liv." Remi arrived and took Brody's arm in both hands. Everybody got a name from Remi, and hers had been Liv since the third grade, and it had stopped mattering years ago that only two people used it. "I'm stealing him. Daddy doesn't know he's home yet, do you understand that, John Royston is sitting out there watching the weather like it's a personal enemy and his son is drinking a beer in town. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me and it has to happen now, before somebody calls ahead and ruins it."

"Nobody's calling ahead," Knox said, from the bar. "We took a vote. We're following you out to watch."

"You're not following me out," Brody said.

"Big convoy," said Jett. "Real slow. Headlights on. Harvey, you want to come watch John Royston cry?"

"No," Harvey said.