CHAPTER 2 #2
The laugh in him thinned, but did not disappear. Harlow had been pale and exhausted and fierce, with Beau bundled against her chest. Instead of saying ew, she had said look at her, Colt, as if the whole world had narrowed to that one impossible face.
"No," he said. "Your mama said you were beautiful."
"Even slimy?"
"Especially then."
Beau leaned against his side, warm through his work shirt. Colt kept watching the heifer because looking down might cost him more than he had to spend before bedtime.
By 7:18, he had the barn closed enough for evening, the heifer marked in his head for another check, and Beau marching back to the house with two pieces of hay stuck to her sock. Bath took twelve minutes because she argued that ranch dirt should count as skin. Colt washed it anyway.
He warmed milk in the small pan because the microwave left hot places no matter how much he stirred. While it heated, he opened the bill basket again.
The top numbers were not a surprise. Feed. Fuel. Parts. The preschool payment due Friday. Della's wedding week would pull half the town into errands and favors, and favors cost time even when they did not cost cash. He could cover the essentials if the auction went right and nothing else broke.
On the desk in the corner, beneath an old pocketknife and a stack of cattle records, lay the cream envelope Bennet Orvell had handed him outside the courthouse two weeks ago. Colt could see the lawyer's precise handwriting from the kitchen.
Colt Duvane.
The envelope remained sealed. His thumb had never slipped under the flap. Whatever waited inside belonged to a part of his father's life Colt had spent years refusing to let steer him. Bennet had said there were deadlines. Bennet always said deadlines like the word itself carried a fine.
The milk trembled at the edge of a simmer. Colt shut off the burner.
"Daddy?"
He turned. Beau stood in the hall in her nightgown, hair wet and eyes suspicious. "Is it ready?"
"Almost."
"It's bedtime soon."
"I know."
"You have to read."
"I know that too."
He poured the warm milk into the star cup, tested it against his wrist, then carried it to her.
When she went ahead of him down the hall, he crossed to the desk, picked up the Bennet envelope, and shoved it deep into the bottom drawer under last year's breeding records.
The drawer stuck halfway. He put his shoulder into it until it closed.
There. Gone enough for tonight.
The hallway outside Beau's room held the soft mix of warm milk, saddle soap from his own hands, and little-girl shampoo rising from her damp hair.
That smell could undo him quicker than any hard memory.
It belonged to the life he had now: small cups, clean sheets, leather work carried home in his skin, a child waiting for him to tuck the blanket right.
Beau's room was lamplit and crowded with the necessary treasures of five years alive. Picture books leaned sideways on the shelf. Star stickers dotted the wooden footboard where they were not supposed to be. On the bed, folded with care that had become ritual, lay Harlow's star quilt.
It was faded at the corners, blue and cream and soft from years of washing before it ever belonged to Beau.
After the funeral, Colt had put it in a cedar chest for one week, thinking he was protecting it.
Beau had cried herself hoarse until he understood the quilt was not a shrine.
It was comfort. It was still allowed to do work.
"Stars up," Beau said.
Colt spread the quilt over her, stars facing right because she checked. He tucked the edge under her feet. She took her milk in both hands and drank with slow seriousness.
"Story," she said after the last swallow.
"Medium one," he allowed.
Her grin came quick. She picked a book about a lost calf. Colt sat in the chair beside her bed, read every page, and kept his voice level through the part where the calf cried for its mother.
When the book ended, she did not ask for another. She rubbed the satin edge of the quilt between two fingers.
"Daddy?"
"Right here."
"Do people leave because kids are too loud?"
Everything in him went quiet.
The house ticked as it cooled. Colt set the book on the floor with care, as if a sharp movement might make the question bigger.
"No," he said. "Kids are allowed to be loud."
"If I cry?"
He moved from the chair to the edge of her bed. The mattress dipped under his weight. "Beau, look at me."
She did, chin tucked, eyes wide and the same brown as his in every way that mattered.
"Children do not make grown-ups leave by being loud," he said. "Or messy. Or sad. Grown-up leaving is about grown-up things. It is never a child's fault."
She rubbed the quilt harder. "Mama didn't leave?"
His throat tightened around the answer. He would not lie to her. He also would not hand a five-year-old more grief than her arms could hold.
"Mama died," he said softly. "That is different from leaving. She loved you every minute she had."
Beau's lower lip pushed forward. "Even when I cried?"