19. Storm Season #2
"Hey," I say quietly.
She looks at me.
"You okay?"
She thinks about it honestly, the way she does everything. "Ask me again in an hour," she says. "After I've seen Maisie and had dry clothes and something hot to drink."
"I can do that," I say.
She looks at me for a moment longer than the answer required.
"I know you can," she says quietly.
We walk the rest of the way to the ranch house in the soft rain and I think that "I know you can" is one of the most complete things she has ever said to me.
Maisie is asleep on the couch when we get there.
June is in the kitchen with tea and the steady calm she brings to situations that have required her to hold things together for several hours.
She looks at us when we come through the door, takes in the mud, the wet clothes, the exhaustion, and says nothing beyond "tea's ready" which is exactly the right amount of words.
Maisie is curled up under the throw blanket from the back of the couch with Rowdy pressed against her legs and her turquoise boots still on because nobody told her to take them off and she never thinks of it herself.
She looks small in the way she only looks when she's asleep, the daytime energy completely absent.
Just a kid who wore herself out worrying about her dad in a storm, then finally let sleep take her.
I stand at the edge of the couch and look at her for a moment.
Laney appears beside me.
We look at Maisie together in the quiet kitchen light while June moves around behind us with the tactful invisibility she deploys when she understands a moment doesn't need her in it.
"She asked about you every twenty minutes," June says softly from the kitchen. "I told her you were fine. She'd say okay and go back to her book and then ask again twenty minutes later."
I look at my daughter asleep on the couch.
Something in my chest does what it always does when Maisie shows me how much she carries without complaining about it.
Laney puts her hand on my arm briefly. Warm. Steady.
Then she goes to get dry clothes from the cabin. I go upstairs and do the same.
June leaves quietly with a squeeze of Laney's hand at the door and the quiet grace of someone who knows when her part is done.
The ranch house is very quiet.
I come back downstairs in dry clothes to find Laney at the kitchen table with two mugs of tea, her hair down from the shower she took quickly. Her face clean of the mud she didn't know was there before. She looks up when I come in and slides one mug across.
I sit across from her.
We drink our tea in the quiet kitchen.
Outside, the rain continues its soft persistent version of itself. Inside the house Maisie sleeps, Rowdy snores, and the ranch settles around us into its after-storm self.
"Talk to me," I say.
She looks at her mug. "About what."
"Whatever you need to say."
She's quiet for a moment. The familiar Laney quiet that means she's deciding whether to say the real thing or the managed thing. I wait because I've learned that waiting is the only way to get honesty from her, and honesty from Laney is always worth waiting for.
"I was scared today," she says. Quietly. Straight.
"I know."
"Not about the ranch." She looks up at me. "I mean yes about the ranch. But underneath that." She pauses. "I kept looking for you. Every time I radioed Remy or Silas I was tracking where you were. Making sure." She looks at her mug. "I've never done that before. Not for anyone on this crew."
I look at her across the table.
"I've managed storms alone for four years," she says. "I knew how to do it. I was good at it." She turns the mug in her hands. "Today I didn't want to do it alone. Not because I couldn't. Because you were there and not doing it alone was," She stops. Starts again. "better. It was just better."
"Laney."
"I'm not finished." She looks up. "I trust you.
Completely. Not the careful provisional version I've been working with since you got here.
Not the trust that keeps one eye on the exit because the exit might happen.
" She holds my gaze steady. "All of it. The full version.
I trust you with the ranch. With Maisie. " A pause. "With me."
The kitchen is very still.
The rain comes down soft outside.
Maisie shifts on the couch and resettles without waking.
I reach across the table and take both her hands in mine and hold them and look at her in the kitchen light, this woman who has been brave in small increments since the first morning she handed me a coffee without being asked.
The first morning she let me start learning what that meant.
"I know," I say quietly. "I've been waiting for that."
"Was it worth it?" she asks.
I look at her.
"Every single day," I say.
Something in her expression releases. Not dramatically, just quietly, completely, the last of whatever she's been holding onto letting go all at once.
She looks at our hands on the table.
Looks at me.
"Maisie's asleep," she says softly.
"She is," I say.
"She sleeps like she's been switched off."
I look at her across the table.
She looks back.
Neither of us reaches for our tea again.
We make it to the bottom of the stairs.