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"Told you it would." He nodded at me. "Tate."

I walked off to look for paint and chicken wire. When I came back with it, she was at the counter asking him about his granddaughter's soccer game. She knew the girl's name and even what position she played.

Hazel had been in Ridgewood Falls a month. I'd been here six years, and I couldn't have told you whether the man had grandkids.

I watched her while he rang us up. She made everybody she talked to stand up a little straighter. She asked about things and actually listened to the answers. People wanted her around. I could see it on every face in the store.

I'd built my life up that mountain so nobody would want me around. It had worked.

"That everything?" the owner asked.

I set a box of small LED puck lights and a spool of wire on the counter beside the paint.

Hazel picked up the box. "What are these for?"

"Shop."

She put it back down. I didn't tell her what they were really for.

The owner bagged everything and pushed the tape across the counter. "Your girlfriend picked out the good tape, at least."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out fast enough.

Hazel's face went pink all the way to her ears.

"She's my intern," I said, a beat too late.

"Sure she is." He handed me the receipt and grinned at her. "Come back and see me, Hazel."

I carried the bags out to the truck without saying another word. She followed me and climbed into her seat, and neither of us mentioned it.

I should have hated it. I'd hated every time someone in this town tried to get into my business. But the whole drive out of town, I kept hearing him say it, and I didn't hate it at all.

That bothered me more than anything had in years.

Walt Pruett's farm sat in a hollow ten minutes east of town. He met us at the barn in his work boots, pointed us toward a stack of bales taller than my truck, and went back to the tractor he'd been fixing.

"There's forty," he called. "You're loading them."

I dropped the tailgate and pulled on my gloves. I handed her the spare I kept on hand. She put them on and looked up at the stack.

"If I get up top, I can toss them down to you," she said. "It'll be twice as fast."

"No."

She was already climbing.

"Hazel."

It was the first time I'd said her name. She stopped halfway up and looked down at me, surprised, and then she smiled.

"I'll be careful," she said, and kept going.

She tossed the bales down one at a time. I caught them and stacked them in the truck bed. We found a rhythm as the bales piled up in the back. Twenty, then thirty. Straw got in her hair and stuck to her sweater. When I looked back up, her cheeks had gone red with the cold and the work.

I should have been watching the bales. Instead I was watching her. Walt could have dropped a tractor on me and I wouldn't have noticed.

At thirty-four, she reached for the next bale, and the one under her shifted.