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Each one clicks on the card. Each click is a year.

When the ring is empty, I hold it up. A split steel circle. Nothing on it. It weighs almost nothing.

It weighs about what her key ring weighed, the morning I took it out of Hector’s hand.

The county gives me back the two personal keys. My truck. The little rental past the south road. Neither opens anything at Barbed Crown. Neither answers whether the lease survives the review.

Sofia’s already gone to the east barn to recheck the heifer. She doesn’t wait in the yard to reward me for refusing Russell on camera, and I don’t go after her to ask where I sleep tonight. Refusing him made it possible for my next choice to belong to me. It didn’t make her owe me anything.

My leg throbs at the top of the boot, a steady five. I stop beside the county car and wait while the driver opens the back door. Letting him is another small thing without any ceremony to it, which may be why it feels honest.

I get in with a truck key and a house key and no ranch key, and no idea which of those still means I belong anywhere.

* * *

The driver takes me to the rental. I sit on the edge of a bed that doesn’t smell like her for the first time in days and look at my two keys in my palm.

For the first time since I was nineteen, I’ve walked away from a McCall order without knowing if I still have a home.

I don’t turn on a light. I sit there while it gets dark and think about my mother’s coffee can full of bills, and a truck I slept in for four months, and a bunk with my name on a strip of tape.

Every place I ever had, somebody gave me. Every one of them came with a price I didn’t get to see until I was already paying it.

My phone buzzes at nine. A text from a number I saved four days ago.

Got the money. My wife cried. Thank you for calling. Nobody ever calls. —Tomas

I read it four times. Then I set the phone face down on the bed and put my hand over my eyes and sit like that for a while, in a rented house that might not be mine next month.

It isn’t forgiveness. He didn’t give me that, and I didn’t ask.

It’s just that I did one thing right, on purpose, because nobody told me to. And it turns out that’s a feeling. I didn’t know.

I don’t text Sofia. I want to so badly my hand aches. But she left me on my own porch last time because she needed a night, and she walked away to the east barn today without looking back, and I’ve done enough deciding for her to last the rest of my life.

I lie down on top of the covers in my clothes, the way she did that first night in the line camp, and I don’t sleep much.

At six-forty the next morning, my phone rings. It’s the county driver.

“Dr. Rios asked if I’d bring you to her place at seven-thirty,” he says. “If you want to go. She said a visit. She said your rental and your ride home stay exactly how they are.”

I close my eyes.

“Tell her yes,” I say.

Chapter 21

Sofia

Ididn’t sleep much. The bed was too big.

It’s been one night. One. I lived alone in this house for four years and never once thought the bed was too big. Last night I lay on my side of it looking at the crutch-shaped dent in the wall paint and felt ridiculous and furious and something else I refused to name at two in the morning.

Cole arrives at seven thirty-two with both crutches, no ranch radio, and a paper sack from the café near the county road. The driver waits until I confirm he’ll be called for the ride back, then leaves.

Cole sets the sack on my kitchen table. “Breakfast. Bought with my own money. No ranch account.”

“That disclaimer is almost romantic.”