Chapter 8
LUKE
The storm rolls over the western ridge of the mountains the way trouble usually does. Fast, without adequate warning, and at the worst possible time.
I'm on the eastern slope checking the south fence line when the light goes wrong.
One minute the valley is the warm green of a June afternoon.
Then the shadow moves across the valley floor like a hand wiping a slate clean, the wind switches direction hard and the sky goes dark purple to the northwest, and a rancher's kid knows what that means.
I'm already turning the truck when I see her.
Her rig is on the two-track below mine, fifty yards down the slope.
Driver's door open. She's standing at the rear wheel with her phone up, doing something controlled with her face that would read as fine to most people.
I watch her look at the tire. Look at the sky.
Look at the tire again like it might reconsider.
It won't. Rear left, flat to the rim, and the storm is already dragging the pine tops sideways and she is half a mile from cover.
I pull up alongside. Roll the window down.
"Get in the truck."
"I have a spare."
Thunder, close, the kind that doesn't build but arrives. First drops hit my windshield. She doesn't move.
"Get in the truck, Mags."
"I can change a tire in the rain, Luke."
"I know you can."
That stops her. She looks at me the way she reads collar data, checking for the thing I'm not saying.
"Spare's in your bed," I say. "It'll keep. Truck will keep. Everything here will still be broken in twenty minutes. Get in."
She checks the sky. Lightning, walking toward us from the west. She grabs her field pack and laptop case from the front seat and gets in.
I pull us off the two-track before it floods and take the access road up to the ridge.
I park and kill the engine and the storm breaks around us like it's been holding its breath.
Neither of us says anything. Rain hammers the cab roof in a solid curtain. Windows fog immediately.
"Thank you," she says. Once. The version that isn't going to say it again.
"Two-track would've washed out."
"I know."
"I know you know."
She cuts me a sideways look.
I reach forward and adjust the vent on her side, just two degrees, heat aimed at her instead of the dash. She doesn't comment.
I know she noticed. That was the point.
She drinks from her water bottle. The rain holds the silence, and I watch the warm air do exactly what I aimed it to do.
The slow climb of color up her throat, the same pink I clocked across my mother's kitchen table when Mason lit his match.
I aimed a heat vent at her like a man running an experiment.
She doesn't know that. That's the part I'm going to have to sit with.
Her hair is damp at the temples. Her jeans caught the first drops before she got in and the denim is clinging to her thighs, wet from the rain. I put my eyes back on the windshield. Leave them there.
Outside, the storm is committed now, the kind that opens the sky all the way and means it. Inside, the silence stretches between us and neither of us is in a hurry to break it, which is its own kind of information.
She turns her head. Not toward me, just enough to angle her voice differently. She rotates the steel water bottle in her hands, once, slow, and then she says, "What's the south pasture?"
The words she's been carrying since the gate two weeks ago, set down between us on the seat.
I watch the rain sheet down the windshield. She's still looking at it too, and the cab is warm now, and her knee is four inches from mine, and I am going to answer her because I want to and I have not wanted to tell anyone anything in a very long time.
"My father's," I say.
I let that sit.
"He died," she says.
"January 2021."
"And everyone else was —"
"Colt was deployed. Mason was on the circuit. Lucy was at school." I stop. "My mother was present. In the way grief makes present mean something different for a while."
She doesn't say anything. I watch the rain. I'm aware of every inch of her, the way she's stopped rotating the bottle, the certain quality of her not-moving that is not the same as not-paying-attention.
She is eighteen inches away and I am talking about my father and I cannot stop being aware of her thighs in wet denim and I have no idea what to do with either of those facts simultaneously.
"So you stayed," she says.
"Yes."
"And the south pasture specifically?"
"My dad and I had a conversation the day before he died. About the south fence line. He'd been thinking about where it should run for years, some old marker, some calculation he kept going back to. We were going to ride out and settle it." I stop. "He didn't make it to morning."
She doesn't fill it.
Most people fill it, with I'm sorry or that must have been or the false sympathy that is just their own discomfort wearing a hat. She puts both hands around the cylinder, and she lets the silence be as big as it is.
I don't look at her because if I look at her, I am going to close the eighteen inches, and if I close the eighteen inches the entire situation changes in ways I am not prepared to navigate right now.
I look at the rain.
"How long did you hold it alone?" she asks. When she asks it, her voice is level and quiet and doesn't perform anything.
"Two years. Give or take. My dad wasn’t able to do much."
"Until Colt came home."
"Until Colt came home and fought Wentworth with Ellery and saved the operation publicly." I hear the thing in my voice I don't usually let out. I don't correct for it. "There's no bitterness in that. He did what needed doing."
"I didn't say there was."
"No." Rain. The sound of it hammering the cab roof. "There's just something between invisible and invisible that's hard to name."
She turns her head and looks at me.
Not sideways. Straight at me, directly, and I look back, and she is close enough that I can see where the rain has curled her loose hair at her temple and her mouth is right there and the eighteen inches is suddenly closer to twelve.
"Yeah," she says. Quiet. Flat. No performance at all. "I know exactly what that is."
She holds my eyes for one beat, two. Long enough that we both know what's happening and neither of us is pretending otherwise. Long enough that her gaze drops once, just once, to my mouth and comes back up.
The collar app chirps.
She looks at her phone before I can do something irreversible. Her eyes move across the screen and whatever she finds there changes the shape of the silence immediately.
"What is it?"
She looks up. "Eleven's gone dark," she says. "No signal. Not degraded. Gone."
"Storm interference. Elevation could —"
"It dropped in three minutes flat, Luke.
" She's already pulling the location history, her finger tracing the line.
"Last logged position was fixed. No movement for forty minutes, which is atypical.
Then at 4:52 the signal stops." She turns the phone and holds it so I can see the screen.
"Equipment fades. It drifts off frequency, throws bad pings, degrades. It doesn't just stop."
I look at the flat line on the screen. Twelve inches. Her mouth. The way her eyes had dropped and come back up. I file all of it somewhere I'm not going to be able to ignore, and I don't know when I'll be this close again, and that is a thought I have no business having right now.
I look at the last fixed coordinates, which are on the eastern slope.
South pasture.
"When the rain breaks," I say.
"When the rain breaks," she says back.
Not agreement. A woman logging a fact she will not be losing.
The storm runs itself out the way Montana storms do.
All at once, like it had somewhere else to be.
Rain to rattle to drip to nothing. The valley comes back through the windshield in pieces, vividly green the way it only gets after rain, the peaks above the tree line brilliant white with the snow these cold fronts bring in June.
She opens her door. Drops down into the wet grass. Pulls her pack, straightens, stands with her face to the clearing sky for one second in that way she has of reading country, slope, drainage, pressure, everything, before she turns and looks at me across the hood.
Her expression is the one she uses when data comes back wrong.
"That collar didn't fail," she says.
Not a question. Not a theory.
Evidence.