Chapter 15
SEBASTIAN
Lennox has opinions about boots.
This shouldn’t surprise me. Lennox has opinions about everything—the way I take my coffee, the route I drive into town, the fact that I don’t say good morning before I’ve spoken to another human being for at least twenty minutes.
She informed me of that last one on day four of the contract like she was filing a formal complaint.
But the boots are something else.
She’s been standing in front of the same wall of them for fifteen minutes, arms crossed, head tilted, like she’s negotiating a land deal.
Hector, who has owned this shop for thirty years and has never once looked uncomfortable in his own store, is watching her with an expression I recognize because I’ve worn it myself. Waiting. Not sure if he should speak.
I lean against the counter and say nothing.
She pulls a boot off the display—dark brown, simple, good leather—turns it over, checks the sole, sets it back. Pulls another. This one she holds longer.
“These,” she says.
Hector exhales.
“Good choice,” he says. “Those are—”
“I know what they are.” She hands them over. “Eight and a half, please.”
She says it without looking at me, which I’ve come to understand means she’s aware I’m watching and has decided not to give me the satisfaction of reacting to it.
I pull out my card before Hector can even move toward the register.
“I have money,” she says.
“I know.”
“Sebastian.”
“Lennox.”
She looks at me then. The look she gives me is the same one she’d give a fence post that had been installed wrong—annoyed, resigned, already calculating how much energy it’s worth. Then she turns back to Hector and says, “Thank you,” and lets it go.
Hector boxes up the new ones and we head out of the store. I follow her out onto the main street of Madera in the middle of a Thursday afternoon and think that three weeks ago I did not have a wife and now I have this one, and I am still not entirely sure what to do with that.
The town is quiet, a few trucks at the diner, a couple of old men outside the feed store, the stillness of a place that runs on its own clock and doesn’t much care what the rest of the world is doing.
I’ve been coming here my whole life. My grandfather’s photograph is on the wall inside the bank.
The Drakes built half of what’s standing on this street and purchased the other half, and there is not a person in Madera who doesn’t know my name.
Lennox stops on the sidewalk and looks up and down the street. “It’s smaller than I expected,” she says.
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Something that matched the ego.”
I look at her. She looks back, perfectly composed. She smirks and I find myself grinning.
“There’s a diner,” I say. “If you’re done insulting me.”
“I could probably eat.”
We’re halfway down the block when I hear it.
“Drake.”
The word lands loud enough that the men outside the feed store look up. Loud enough that a woman coming out of the post office stops with her hand still on the door.
I stop walking.
Beside me, Lennox goes still. “Sebastian, who is that?” she whispers as I turn around.
Thomas Marshall is crossing the street toward us, and he is not interested in being subtle about it. He’s a big man, my father’s age, the kind of man who was raised to take up space and has never once been given a reason to stop. He’s got two of his ranch hands with him, hanging back a half step.
His face is red. “You’ve got some nerve,” he says, “showing your face in this town.”
I keep my voice even. “Thomas.”
“Don’t.” He stops six feet from me, and I am aware of the street, the distance, the angle of his hands—not reaching for anything, just fists at his sides, looking for somewhere to go.
“You know what you did. You know exactly what you did and yet here you are standing here on this street like it’s nothing. ”
“This isn’t the place.”
“The hell it isn’t.” His voice goes up an octave, and I hear a door open somewhere behind me.
“That land has been promised to my family for forty years. Forty years.” He stops.
Works his jaw. “You went around me. You went to the county, you found some surveyor from Austin who’d never set foot in this county in his life, and you took it. ”
“I made an offer that was better than yours, there’s nothing more than that,” I say. “That’s business, Thomas, nothing else.”
“It’s stealing.” The word comes out like he’s been holding it in his teeth for months.
What I am aware of, more than anything Thomas Marshall is saying, is Lennox standing to my left. How close his men are to her. The fact that she’s beside me, in the open, I don’t like it.
I angle my body slightly, just enough to protect her if I need to. But Thomas notices.
His eyes go to Lennox for the first time, and I watch him register her, assessing relationship and relevance. His eyes cut back to mine.
“This your wife?” he says.
“Yes.”
Lennox doesn’t say anything. I can feel her looking at the side of my face.
“Heard you’d gotten married.” Thomas’s voice shifts. Not softer—something else. Calculating, under the anger. “Didn’t take you for the type.”
“People surprise you.”
“They do.” He looks at her again, longer this time, and something moves behind his eyes that I don’t like. “From Montana, right? Heard that too.”
“Thomas.” My voice is still even. I am very good at even. “Whatever you have to say to me, you say it to me.”
His eyes come back.
“I’m going to get that land back.” He holds my eye. Then he looks at Lennox one more time, deliberate and slow, and something in my chest does something I’ve never once felt in my adult life. I want him to stop looking at her. Now.
Thomas turns and walks back across the street.
His men follow. A truck door slams. An engine turns over.
And then he’s gone and the street is quiet again and the men outside the feed store look away and the woman from the post office finishes her walk to her car, and Madera goes back to its Thursday like nothing happened.
Lennox is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “How long has that been going on?”
“Almost a year, give or take a few days.”
“And the land?”
“Is mine.”
She looks up the street where Thomas’s truck was. “He doesn’t think so,” she says. I look at her.
She glances at me and her expression is not frightened, not rattled, not the soft worried expression I might have expected from a woman who just watched a man twice her size shout in the street. It’s assessing, and careful.
“He’s not done,” she says.
“No,” I say. “He’s not.”
She nods once, like she’s filed it, and then she looks at me and says, “You moved in front of me.”
I don’t answer that.
“When he looked at me, you stepped between us.”
I hold her gaze and she holds mine, and the street’s quiet and warm around us, and I’m not going to say what she’s waiting for me to say, which is that the look on Thomas Marshall’s face when he’d clocked her standing next to me put something cold in my chest.
“Can I take you to lunch?” I say instead.
She watches me for another beat.
“Yeah,” she says, finally.
We walk the half block in silence. I hold the door to the diner open and follow her inside into the smell of coffee and the low hum of a lunch crowd and the careful ordinary noise of a town that knows who I am and has already decided not to ask.
This town doesn’t ever change.