Chapter 26
MAGS
I put the test in my jacket pocket. Luke's truck is gone from the alley. I lock both locks.
The Rocking C sits adjacent to McAllister land on the same county road I have driven every workday since June. I know where the turnoff is. I have passed it a hundred times without stopping.
The house is visible from the road, set back with lodgepole pines and blue spruces rising behind it.
I know Viv keeps the porch light on because she read somewhere that it deters coyotes, and when Gina told her porch lights cannot deter coyotes, Viv said, "It deters them from coming onto my porch specifically, Gina, which is what I care about. "
I turn down the gravel driveway.
It is five-forty in the afternoon, and I am here because my apartment is fourteen steps above Willa's bakery, and Willa is Ellery's best friend, and Ellery is Luke's sister-in-law, and that chain is short enough that I cannot think inside it.
The porch light is on.
I knock. Thirty seconds of silence. Then boots on hardwood, not the quick efficiency of someone expecting company but the slower deliberate rhythm of someone in the middle of something else who doesn't particularly care. The door opens.
Viv is wearing barn boots with a yellow sundress and has a streak of something green along her left forearm I choose not to identify.
She is also wearing the engagement ring Mason gave her in May, a wide white gold band set with a diamond and flanking stones she keeps rotating with her thumb, the new-weight habit of a woman who made an enormous decision and is still getting used to it.
She takes one look at me and steps back from the door.
"Kitchen," she says. Not a question.
The Rocking C kitchen smells like coffee. There is an impressive espresso machine on the counter and a single blue mug on the second shelf, handle angled out, separate from the others the way objects belonging to dead men tend to be.
Viv fills the kettle without asking if I want tea. She sets it on the burner and pulls out the chair across from her usual seat, worn on the right-hand armrest where she rests her elbow. She puts a box of crackers on the table.
I take the seat and look at the crackers.
"I'm pregnant."
Viv stands at the counter with her back to me for three seconds. Then she takes down two mugs and puts a teabag in each one without turning around.
"Okay," she says.
"That's it? Okay?"
"You want me to do something else? I can hug you. I can cry. I can call Willa, in which case she will show up in ten minutes with something warm from the oven and so much love you won't get a single quiet thought in for two days."
"No."
"Okay then." She turns and leans against the counter. Her eyes read the room faster than most people realize. "How long have you known?"
"Since this afternoon. I suspected for eight days. I confirmed it today."
I tell her the whole thing. The crackers in the morning. The coffee I couldn't finish. The bacon incident at Sunday breakfast. The trip to Livingston with the test buried in a bag between almonds and a water bottle.
"Does Luke know?"
"No. I haven't told him," I say.
She nods. No follow-up. Behind her the kettle begins to build.
"Good," Viv says.
I look at her.
"I mean it." She leans back against the counter. "You tell him tonight, he shows up with coffee and fixes something, and you both spend the next month watching each other's faces instead of saying the actual thing. Don't do that."
"I wasn't planning to."
"I know. I'm saying it out loud anyway." She glances at the stove. "Whatever you decide, decide it before he's in the room. Make him meet your decision. Not make it with you."
The kettle clicks off. Viv turns, pours the water, sets a mug in front of me, and sits down across from me with her own.
"There was a man," she says. "After college. He knew I had loans. He paid them off. All of them, didn't tell me, left a note on my kitchen counter." She wraps both hands around her mug. "I cried. From gratitude. Stood in my kitchen and cried."
"And then?"
"Eight months of finding out exactly what he thought that gratitude had purchased.
" She puts the mug down with the clean precision she uses on sentences she's already made peace with.
"I'm not saying Luke is that man. He isn't. But the mechanism, letting someone else get into the room before you know what you want, that part I know something about. "
The overhead barn light clicks on outside, triggered by something in the yard. Neither of us looks.
"I'm having the baby," I say.
Viv nods. The unhurried nod of someone waiting for the person to catch up. "Okay."
"I'm telling him when I'm ready. Not when the situation requires it."
"Also okay."
"He doesn't get to factor into a decision I've already made."
"Correct."
"I'm aware I'm narrating my own logic back to you."
"You're welcome to keep going." She pushes the crackers toward me. "I have time."
We grab our mugs and take them out to the porch. The light is going long and orange across the pasture. Somewhere along the eastern fence line one of the Rocking C horses moves through the grass, dark against the gold.
"Does it scare you?" Viv asks.
"Which part?"
She looks at me sideways. "All of it."
"The baby is its own category." I watch the horse. "The rest of it. Whether this makes me the thing I was always afraid of being."
"What's that?"
"The woman who let a man get into the decision."
Viv is quiet for a moment. "I don't think deciding on your own and then telling him is letting him into anything. I think that's just how it works when you're not alone anymore."
"That's either reassuring or terrifying."
"Probably both." She looks out at the pasture. "Welcome to having people."
I drive back through the dark with the radio off.
Somewhere to the north, a couple miles off, the McAllister ranch sits dark against the tree line.
Luke has been home for hours. His truck is long since cool, the cabin lit or dark, and I have no way of knowing which. I keep coming back to the way he looked when he left my apartment — hat on, jaw set, the knuckle to my chin that was gentle in a way that cost him something.
He said both locks like a man trying to give himself something useful to do with the worry. I wonder if he is sitting with the silence of my stalling and deciding it means what silences have meant for him before. The thought puts an ache in my heart that I do not have a field notation for.
A deer idles on the shoulder. It watches me pass without moving.
The decision sits in my chest like a field confirmation, the kind that arrives after weeks of contradictory data and lands so completely it takes your breath away and you know, with total certainty, that you are never going to argue with it again.
I am having this baby. I am telling Luke when I am ready, on my terms, after he has had the chance to stand still and receive something without turning it into a problem he needs to solve. Not before.
I drive through Copper River's main intersection. Past Duke's, which sends a quick squeeze of guilt through me. Past Benny's specials board, which still reads THE GRUMPY RANCHER: STRONG. DARK. FINALLY TAKEN, which I am choosing not to think about right now. Up the stairs, both locks behind me.
I open my laptop and pull up the ridge camera feed.
The pack is on the eastern ridge. Eleven is moving northeast along the tree line, collar signal clean and steady. Right where the falsified data says she shouldn't be.
I log the time and open a new entry in my field notes and type the date.
Then: Decision made.
I save the file, give the camera feed one more look, and that is when my phone buzzes.
Not Luke. A calendar notification from the Copper River Livestock Association: emergency meeting, three weeks out. Subject line: WOLF CORRIDOR UPDATE. ALL MEMBERS REQUESTED TO ATTEND.
I set the phone face-down on the table.
Three weeks is enough time to ride to the ridge, find what Dave McAllister buried there, and walk into that room with something Cutter cannot touch.
I pick up my phone and text Luke.
Go signal. Tomorrow.
His reply comes in under two minutes.
I'll bring horses.