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"The number?"

"The number and the paper. Don't open it here, you'll get dirt on it." She looked at Olivia a second longer than a horse deal needs. "It's a good number, Liv."

"He's worth more than a good number."

"Then I got a bargain," Ainsley said, and went on down the pen.

"Water."

Brody. He'd come up on her left with a jug and a paper cup, and he poured, and she let the calf up and took it.

"Your mama said keep you watered. I'm doing what I'm told." He said it to the whole crew, easy. "Liv, your cap's on crooked."

"My cap's fine."

"Your cap's crooked, Bateman. You look like you slept in it." He put two fingers under the brim and set it straight, tucked the hair back under it where it had come loose, and took his hand away.

He'd done it where the fire could see it. Forty feet down the pen Owen was at the irons with Chase in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he'd said Olivia once this morning, over a calf, and gone back to the fire.

Dean drug the next one to the fire by both hind feet. Lauren went down on the front end, Olivia went down on the back, Knox came in on the head because he'd lost the argument with Jett, and the calf was a bull, and Remi did what she did, and Chase came with the iron.

Lauren was laughing, dirt to the elbow, hair in her mouth, and Mason went by behind her with a rope and touched the back of her neck in passing, one finger. Olivia saw it. She'd been seeing things like that all morning and she was sick of her own eyes.

"Liv." Brody, across the pen, loud, over the calves and Knox and the whole crew. "You riding home with me?"

Every head in the pen stayed down, and every one of them heard it.

"I've got my truck," she said.

"I know you've got your truck. I asked if you were riding home with me."

"Ask me after dinner."

"I'll ask you after dinner," Brody said, and grinned at the whole pen, and went off toward the trailer with the jug.

Owen was at the trailer, at the tailgate with his back to the pen, and Brody walked up to him with the jug in one hand and said something.

She couldn't hear it. It was short, four words or five, said with his head on one side, and Owen turned around.

Owen hit him. Once, in the mouth, with his right hand and his whole shoulder behind it, and the sound came across the pen flat and clear, and Brody went down on one knee in the dirt with the jug going over beside him, the water running out into the dust.

The calves kept on. Nothing else did. Knox let go of the one he had and it got up and walked off down the pen and nobody went after it.

Brody stayed down on the one knee a second. Then he stood up with blood in his teeth, and he put his head on one side and said something else to Owen, close, that no one in that pen but Owen heard, and he was grinning when he said it.

He didn't swing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the blood on it. Owen stood there with his hand still closed and his chest going and looked at nothing.

"Owen," Dean said, from the horse.

Owen didn't turn around, and Dean looked at Brody. "Get a rag on that."

"It's a lip, Dean."

"Get a rag on it anyway. Lara's looking."

John was up off the porch. He came down the steps and across the yard with the coffee still in his good hand, stopped at the gate, put that hand on the post, and stood there.

Nobody said a thing about her. Nobody looked at her. The whole pen, both families, the church women, every ground man John had hired, looked at Owen Royston and his cousin and the water running into the dirt, and they didn't look at Olivia Bateman standing over a calf with her mouth shut, and she'd have given the rest of the year for a hole to get into.