CHAPTER 16 #2
He wrote the figures on a scratch pad anyway. Hay for the delayed rotation. Gravel if he could not trade labor. Flashing for the shed roof. Fuel for the extra trips. Tuck's pay. Preschool on Friday. Wedding obligations he would not let Ruston carry alone.
The pencil point snapped.
Colt set it down.
Across the room, the desk drawer was shut.
The Bennet envelope was inside. He could feel it like an animal under a board.
He could open it and let the lawyer's precise language tell him what his father had left, what the mineral lease meant, which deadline was marching toward him with clean shoes and a pen.
The envelope stayed closed.
Today was too soon. Today the problem in front of him had wire, mud, and a child asleep down the hall. Today he knew the cost of screws and gravel. He knew less about trust than he did about any of that.
His gaze drifted to the hallway.
Beau had asked if Wren could come as their friend.
Wren had said Odette hid the letter. Wren had said no to money meant to push her out. Wren had stood with her face pale and proud and told him the truth even though it gave him the power to say she had been a fool.
He had been a fool too. A hurt one. A quiet one. A man who wrote one letter, got no answer, and decided pride would serve in place of another question.
Harlow would have named that cleaner than he liked.
The thought came so clear he stood before he had made the decision. He checked Beau again, found her asleep with one hand curled in the quilt, then called Junie.
"I need twenty minutes," he said when she answered.
Junie's voice softened around what she did not ask. "Bring her here, or I come there?"
"She's asleep."
"Then I'll come sit on the porch. Don't make coffee. Yours is too strong when you're in a state."
"I'm not in a state."
"Colt Duvane, I have known you since before your voice dropped."
He looked at the ceiling. "Thank you."
"That's better."
Junie came within fifteen minutes and settled on the porch rocker with a feed-store ledger in her lap. Colt told her Beau was asleep, pointed to the hallway as if Junie did not know the house, and drove out before gratitude could turn into talk.
The ranch family plot sat beyond the live oaks, above the low pasture where the ground lifted out of flood reach.
The fence around it had weathered silver.
Harlow's marker stood near the middle, simple and clean, with her name cut into granite and small stars worked along the lower edge because Beau had picked them from the choices the stoneworker showed them.
Harlow would have rolled her eyes at the expense and loved it anyway because Beau's small finger had landed there with such certainty.
Colt took off his hat before he opened the little gate.
The storm had shaken leaves across the plot and left damp grass flattened around the stones. Afternoon sun had broken through since then, hard and gold, warming the granite until it held heat like a palm. Colt knelt and set his hand against Harlow's marker.
Sun-warmed granite pressed into his skin.
For a while he said nothing. The ranch spread quiet behind him. From here he could see the repaired fence line in the distance, the hay shed roof flashing dull, the pasture waiting for cattle to move. His life, all of it, arranged in work and weather and a child's rest time.
"Beau asked about Wren," he said.
The words sounded rough in the open air. He kept his hand on the marker.
"She asked if Wren could be our friend at the wedding. I told her yes, but not more than I can promise. " He swallowed. "I am trying to do right by her. By Beau."
A grasshopper clicked somewhere near the fence. Colt stared at the stars carved under Harlow's name.
"I loved you," he said. "I don't know if I ever said that enough when saying it could still do you good. You knew it, I think. But knowing and hearing are different."
His thumb brushed dust from the carved edge.
"You were never second place," he said. The sentence had lived in him a long time, unspoken because there had been no one safe to hear it.
"I need that said somewhere. Wren being back does not make you less.
It does not make what we had some waiting room.
You were my wife. You are Beau's mama. I am going to keep telling her that until she is old enough to get tired of me saying it. "
The wind moved over the hill and through the live oak leaves. He bowed his head.
"I'm afraid," he admitted.
There. Plain. No work wrapped around it. No fence to blame.
"I am afraid of wanting Wren and finding out old hurt can still choose for both of us. I am afraid of letting Beau care and then having to explain another empty place at the table. I am afraid that if I take one step toward Wren, people will think I am leaving you behind."
His hand tightened against the warm stone until the edge pressed into the heel of his palm.
"And I'm afraid if I don't, I will teach Beau that love is only safe when it's already gone."
That one emptied him.
He stayed there until the sun shifted and the heat under his palm cooled by a degree. Then he took his hand away, brushed leaves from the base of the marker, and stood.
"I won't let her replace you," he said. "I won't ask her to. I won't ask Beau to carry any of it. But I think I have to stop using fear like it is a vow."
The words left him unsteady, but not broken. There was a difference.
He put his hat back on, latched the little gate, and drove home by the long way so he could check the repaired crossing without thinking too hard about where he was headed next.
Beau was awake when he returned, sitting at the kitchen table with Junie and solemnly counting pickle slices on a plate.
Colt kissed the top of her head, thanked Junie, and took the ordinary life handed back to him.
He finished evening feed early. He moved the cattle through the upper gate with Tuck walking the far side, slow pressure and no shouting.
The herd went where he asked, reluctant but contained. The new fence held.
By the time he washed his hands at the barn spigot and changed into a clean shirt, the western sky had gone peach over the wet pastures.
Beau ate supper, told him the blue buttons were still shy, and fell asleep before the second book ended.
Junie had already agreed to sit once more, though she gave him a look when she arrived that said she knew exactly which road he meant to take.
"Don't make a mess of a true thing just because you can explain the mess," she said from the porch.
Colt paused on the step. "That supposed to be encouragement?"
"It's supposed to be useful."
He nodded. "It is."
Sudie's lane was still damp where shade held the storm in the ruts.
Colt drove slowly past the fence line, past the place where he had first seen Wren back in Dusthallow with her hands full of wire and her mouth full of things she would not say.
The cottage porch light was on. A stack of wedding crates sat near the steps, covered with a tarp.
The old live oak near the drive dripped once onto his windshield though the rain had been gone for hours.
Wren opened the door before he knocked, as if she had heard the truck and taken the time to decide whether to let him get that far.
She wore jeans, a soft gray shirt, and no shoes. Her hair was tied up in a knot that looked made for work, then worried loose by a hand that had gone through it too many times. Behind her, the cottage held lamplight, ribbon spools on the table, and a ledger open beside a mug gone cold.
"Beau?" she asked first.
Something in his chest eased. "Asleep. Junie's with her."
"Good. " Wren's hand stayed on the door. "Is something wrong with the ranch?"
"Yes."
Her face changed.
"Nothing new," he said quickly. "Storm damage. Fence is up. Rotation's delayed but handled."
"Then why are you here?"
He looked at her bare feet on Sudie's worn threshold, at the tense set of her shoulders, at the way she had braced for bad news before asking after herself. He had come with words and found they still had to pass through his stubborn mouth.
"Because you told me the truth yesterday," he said.
Her fingers tightened on the door edge. "I told you what happened."
"Truth doesn't get smaller because it came late."
Her eyes searched his face. "Colt."
"I went to Harlow's marker today."
Wren went still, but not in the shut-down way he had seen when Odette's name came up. This was respect. She did not fill the space.
"I needed to say some things where I couldn't dodge them," he said. "About Beau. About you. About being scared and calling it responsibility when sometimes it is only fear with clean boots."
Her mouth softened, then trembled once before she held it steady. "You are responsible."
"I know. That's why I have to know the difference."