CHAPTER 16
Colt
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By midmorning, the storm had left every weak place on the Duvane ranch speaking plain.
Colt stood in the low pasture with his boots sunk past the crust of wet clay, one hand on a splintered cedar post and the other wrapped around a tamping bar.
The old crossing had held just long enough to lie about itself.
Two panels near the wash had twisted where flood trash caught them, and the lane to the hay shed wore a rut deep enough to swallow a tire.
Tuck set a new post in the hole and leaned his weight against it. "Plumb enough?"
Colt sighted down the line. The fence ran crooked where the ground had shifted, but crooked could hold cattle if it was honest about its strain. "Half inch toward me."
Tuck moved it.
"Good."
Colt drove the bar down and packed clay around the post in hard strokes.
Wet grit flecked his jeans. Barbed wire lay coiled beside his boot, dulled with mud and torn weed.
Every foot of it cost money. Every hour down here stole time from the pasture rotation he had planned before weather made plans into suggestions.
The cows waited on higher ground, restless and offended. They needed fresh grass by evening, but not before he knew this stretch would keep calves from testing the creek. A delayed move was trouble. A loose herd was worse.
Tuck watched him tamp. "You fixing fence or trying to bury something?"
"Fence."
"Mm."
Colt kept working. The ache in his shoulders gave his hands somewhere to put what had been moving through him since Wren stood in the chapel yard yesterday and told him why the letter never came.
Odette Pryce had hidden it. Pushed. Cut. Smiled while she did it, most likely, all polished manners and poison tucked under the tongue.
For eight years Colt had built his anger on one clean board: Wren left and did not answer.
Now that board had a crack through it. She had still left.
She had still believed what had been handed to her instead of asking him to his face.
But her silence had not been empty. It had been tampered with, crowded, steered by a woman who knew exactly where to press.
Absolution stayed out of reach for both of them. It changed what his anger was made of.
Colt set the bar against the post and flexed his fingers. Old rope-burn scars tugged in his palms. "She didn't know about the letter."
Tuck took a staple from the pouch at his belt. "Figured that was what yesterday was."
"You believe her?"
"I asked you first, in my way."
Colt looked past the torn fence to the creek, brown water sliding around caught branches and white limestone. The ranch did not care what had caused a weakness. It only cared whether a man fixed it right.
"I believe her," Colt said. "Doesn't mean I know what to do with it."
"Could start by not chewing nails every time she breathes near you."
"That your wisdom for the morning?"
"All I brought."
They stretched the wire across the new post. Colt ratcheted the come-along until the line hummed low, leaving enough give for hard water and enough bite to turn a calf. Fence had rules a man could trust. Pressure mattered. Give a line no room and water took it. Leave too much slack and cattle did.
"Hold," he said.
Tuck held. Colt stapled, then hammered.
"She rejected Odette's money," Colt said before he meant to. "Odette tried to pay for a hotel if Wren left early."
"Sounds like Odette."
"Wren said no."
"Sounds like Wren."
Colt turned. "You know her better than me now?"
Tuck met his eyes for one flat second. "No. But I know stubborn when it stands in my pasture with creek in its boots."
The wind moved through the wet grass, carrying mud, bruised cedar, and cattle waiting too long. Colt looked away first.
"She shouldn't have had to choose between being bought and being believed," he said.
Tuck's expression barely changed, but Colt saw the weight land.
"No," Tuck said. "She shouldn't."
They worked until the repaired section stood with new posts at both ends, braced high against the bank and loose enough at the bottom to let the next hard water slide through. Colt walked it twice, pulling staples and reading the ground under his boots.
The pasture rotation was delayed, but controlled.
If they opened the upper gate after lunch and kept the herd away from the low corner until Monday, he could hold the weight on them without risking another break.
It would cost hay for two more days. The hay shed roof needed tin screws and flashing.
The crossing needed gravel. The rut in the lane needed filling before a delivery truck found it.
In the barn office, hidden deep in the bottom drawer, Bennet Orvell's unopened envelope waited under old breeding records. Colt knew exactly where it was. Hidden did not mean forgotten.
He checked his phone. One message from Junie: Beau helping sort buttons. Wearing flower crown made of receipt tape. Asking if lunch has pickles.
"I need to get her," he said.
Tuck gathered the remaining staples. "I'll check the hay shed."
"I can do it after lunch."
"I said I'll check it."
Colt gave him a long look. "You getting bossy in your old age?"
"You getting slow in yours?"
"I'm thirty-two."
"Then act like you can delegate."
Colt huffed, pocketed his phone, and headed for the truck before Tuck could make any more sense.
By the time Colt reached Junie's feed store, Beau had a receipt-tape flower crown sliding over one eyebrow and three star stickers lined up along the back of her hand.
She was sitting on a stool behind the counter, sorting buttons into a muffin tin while Junie rang up a ranch hand's order near the front.
The store smelled of feed dust, coffee, damp denim, and the sharp mineral note of vitamin blocks stacked by the door.
Beau saw him and lifted both arms. "Daddy, I helped."
"I can see that."
"The blue buttons are shy."
"Are they?"
"They need their own cup."
"Sounds serious."
Junie slid a receipt across the counter, then looked at Colt over her glasses. "She had crackers, half an apple, and exactly one pickle because she negotiated with your daughter-like precision."
"Thank you."
"You fix what the storm broke?"
"Some of it."
Junie heard the rest in his voice but did not pull it out in public. She just nodded toward Beau's crown. "Her work."
Beau touched the paper flowers with careful pride. "I made it like Wren makes pretty things, except mine has tape because tape sticks."
Colt's hand closed once around his hat brim. "Good engineering."
Beau accepted the compliment with a nod. Then her eyes went serious in the quick way that always caught him unprepared. "Is Wren coming to the wedding?"
The ranch hand near the door took sudden interest in the feed sacks. Junie turned to straighten a shelf that needed no straightening.
Colt crouched in front of Beau, bringing himself level with her. "Della's wedding?"
"Yes. The big one with flowers and Della's dress and Ruston being married."
"Wren is Della's sister. She'll be there."
Beau considered this, then lowered her voice. "Can she come as our friend too?"
There were questions a man could answer with rules. Shoes before the yard. Hands away from wire. No climbing the gate without him. Then there were questions that reached past the rules and touched all the tender places he had not sorted.
Our friend.
She meant friend, steadiness, and room for Beau to keep every piece of Harlow. Beau had not asked for forever. She had asked for a place at a wedding where everyone would be watching.
Colt rested his forearms on his knees. "Wren is my friend from a long time ago," he said carefully. "And she has been kind to you."
"She helped my flower crown at the picnic."
"I know."
"And she listens when I tell the star sticker rules."
"That matters."
Beau's brow wrinkled. "So can she?"
He would not use his daughter to pull Wren closer. He would not make Beau a bridge adults walked over and forgot to protect. He also would not punish Beau's open little heart for seeing what he wished she had not.
"She can be your friend," Colt said. "But grown-up things are grown-up things. I won't promise you more than that."
Beau leaned forward. "More like what?"
Junie coughed once into her hand.
Colt kept his face steady. "More like what happens after the wedding, or where people live, or how often we see them. Those are grown-up things."
"Oh. " Beau thought about it, then nodded with relief only a child could find in a boundary. "But at the wedding she can stand by us if she wants?"
"If Della says where everybody stands, we listen to Della."
"Because bride."
"Because bride."
Beau slid off the stool and threw her arms around his neck. He caught her, hand wide across her back. She smelled like crackers, feed dust, and paper tape. The weight of her settled every loose wire in him for half a breath.
"Can we take pickles home?" she asked against his shoulder.
"One small jar."
"For lunch and emergencies."
"I don't know many pickle emergencies."
"That means you're not ready."
Junie laughed from the shelf. Colt stood with Beau on his hip because she would not let go, and because he needed the hold as much as she did.
After lunch at the ranch kitchen, Beau went down for rest with Harlow's star quilt tucked under her chin and a promise that he would wake her before evening chores if the clouds stayed light.
Colt sat at the kitchen table after her breathing slowed, the house quiet except for the refrigerator's hum and the tick of water dripping from his hat brim into a dark spot on the floor.
The bill basket waited by the phone. He turned it enough to see what had come in Friday's mail.
A parts invoice. A supply estimate for wire, staples, tin screws, gravel.
The numbers were not fatal. That was the word he used when a thing was bad but survivable.
Survivable meant there was still work to do.
Survivable meant a man did not get to sit with his head in his hands.