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“This is captivity,” she says.

“Yes.”

“It isn’t protection just because you admit what it is.”

“No.”

“Do I get to leave?”

“Not yet.”

She holds my gaze until I can feel every key on that ring pressing into my hip. “Then nothing I do in this building counts as consent. Nothing.”

The words find the exact line and put a fence around it.

“Understood,” I say.

I can see the rest of it now, clear as the rifle report. I’m going to be in this building with her. I’m going to hear her through the walls. I’m going to want her every hour I’m here, and none of that wanting gets to touch her while that door locks from my side. That’s the rule. I don’t have to like it. I just have to keep it.

So I say it again, to her. “Understood.”

If 14C goes down, I open the door. If the law reaches this building, I tell them she’s here. If Warren Vale shows up, he doesn’t touch her samples or her cow.

She believes I can stop a man from crossing a room. She doesn’t believe I’ll open the door myself.

She’s right about both.

I close the bedroom door and turn the brass key.

The sound it makes is small. I feel it in my back teeth.

The radio in the next room crackles before I take my hand off the key. A man’s voice, flattened by the old scrambler.

“Barrett. Photograph the certificate. Destroy the paper. No loose wire.”

The voice isn’t Garrett’s. The call doesn’t use the current security code. And Garrett would never tell me to destroy a document, not after the last time a destroyed record almost cost him the ranch and the woman he’s going to marry.

No loose wire. Russell has been saying that since I was nineteen.

I take the folded certificate out of my shirt. I photograph nothing. I lock the original in the drawer under the radio.

Russell told me to contain the veterinarian. Now he’s telling me to destroy the reason.

I stand there in the empty radio room with my hand on the drawer, and on the other side of the wall I can hear her moving. One step. Two. Then nothing, like she’s standing still in the middle of the room, listening for me too.

For a full minute, the two of us stand on opposite sides of a concrete wall, listening to each other not move.

Then the bed frame creaks. She’s sat down. I take my hand off the drawer and go find the rest of the day’s work.

* * *

There’s plenty of it. I walk the fence line and find where the shooter lay up, a flattened patch of grass behind a mesquite with two cigarette butts and nothing else. I call Nate on the handset and tell him to leave it for the county. I haul water for the cow. I stand in the treatment shed and look at the building, and I can pick out her shape moving past the window twice. Once toward the bathroom. Once back.

I go out to the treatment shed at dark and sit on an upturned bucket twenty feet from the cow, with my back against a post and the building in front of me.

Her window is lit. After a while, she comes to it. She stands at the six-inch gap with her arms crossed and looks straight out at me.

I don’t look away. I should. I don’t.