Chapter 35 #2
Luke is watching me. When I turn, he's already looking away.
We help clear the table and somehow this results in Colt and Mason both in the kitchen.
Luke ends up on the back porch with me while the other two argue about the most efficient way to load a dishwasher, which they do not actually disagree about.
They're the kind of brothers who would rather argue than be quiet.
The valley below is going still. The aspens are almost done holding their gold.
The south pasture runs from here down to the river and up into the timber, and there's nothing pointed at it from out there anymore.
No boot prints, no staged carcasses, no 7:04 a.m. filings, no consortium trucks with Billings plates.
Jesse's family kept the house. Luke built the restitution arrangement himself.
Ellery told me, and I placed it in the same category as the fence moved at four in the morning and the coffee on the post and the French press he made while I slept.
Watch what he does. Not what he says.
I shiver. "Brrr."
He opens his jacket without being asked and I step in. His arm comes around me, his hand settles on my side, and we stand there looking at the valley while the first dusting of snow sits on the granite above us and doesn't move.
"Methods paper," he says.
"Revise and resubmit."
"Good?"
"Very good."
He nods. This is, I have learned, the sound Luke makes when he is pleased about something and has decided that performing pleasure would be redundant. I have an entire taxonomy of his silences. This is the warm one.
"The pack was on the eastern ridge this morning," I say.
"I saw the camera ping on your phone."
"You were asleep."
"I was awake. You think I don't notice when you check the feed at four forty-five?"
I look up at him. He's looking at the ridge.
"You could have said something," I say.
"You had your data face on." His thumb moves on my side. "I wasn't going to interrupt the data face."
I have been studying animal behavior for eleven years and I have never documented a species as internally consistent as this man.
The door opens behind us and Ellery leans out. "Come back inside," she says, to both of us. "I want to play something before everyone leaves. It's new. Still rough."
We go in. She settles on the arm of the couch with her guitar and plays without preamble, the way she does when something isn't finished enough to introduce but is finished enough to need an audience.
The room goes quiet. Nora climbs into Shane's lap and Hank blinks slow against Colt's chest. Mason's hand finds Viv's.
It sounds like early winter, the quiet of a valley going still, something beginning underneath the cold.
Luke's arm tightens around me. Slightly. Enough.
When she finishes nobody says anything for a moment. Then Claire, from the kitchen doorway: "Ellery McAllister, you are going to make me cry at my own table and I will never forgive you."
"You were already crying," Colt says.
"I was not —"
"Mom. You were."
There is more coffee, and Nora shows me a drawing she made of a wolf that is anatomically optimistic but emotionally accurate, and Mason puts his arm around Viv and says something in her ear that makes her laugh, and Hank falls asleep against Colt's chest in approximately thirty seconds the way small children do.
Like sleep is something you simply decide to do, thoroughly and without apology.
I watch Claire watch her family and think about standing in a livestock association room in September, never letting anyone see me looking for a place to put down a weight I'd been carrying since Missoula.
I think about driving to Viv's in August with a test in my jacket pocket.
I think about standing at the gate on June 3rd with a folder of permits and an excellent argument and absolutely no idea what I was walking into.
Claire looks up from her coffee and finds me across the room. She doesn't say anything. She holds my gaze for one beat, her eyes soft and certain, the smile of a woman who has been watching her children long enough to read what they aren't saying yet. Then she looks back down at her mug.
On the other end of the couch, Lucy is very focused on her coffee.
I look down at mine. My throat is doing something I am not going to be able to explain scientifically.
Luke's knee presses against mine.
I press back.
We're the last to leave. This keeps happening, and I notice it the way I notice data that contradicts my prior model.
The walk back to the cabin takes five minutes. The valley is gold and going still around us, the light stretched long and thin across the pasture. My collar app pings once. Eleven is moving east, steady. I check it and put my phone away and do not reach for it again.
At the cabin, Luke opens the door and we go inside.
I add a log to the fire. He hangs his hat.
Ordinary, all of it, and the ordinary has the weight of something earned, something that came through near-misses and bad weeks and one second in a livestock association room I misread and then we both got to be right about at the same time, which is, I think, as close to perfect as data gets.
"Come here," he says.
His hands find my face first, which is still the thing that gets me, the deliberateness of it. Both hands, thumbs at my jaw, and he looks at me for a full beat before he does anything else.
"Hi," he says. His eyes are very blue.
"Hi."
"You good?"
"I'm good." I press my hand flat against his chest. His heartbeat is steady under my palm. "Are you going to do the thing where you look at me for a while and then do something about it, or are you going to keep asking me questions?"
The corner of his mouth moves. "Both," he says, and kisses me.