Chapter 4
FOUR
Gage
She fell asleep somewhere around Boerne.
I noticed because the conversation—which had been easy in the way conversations are when two people have already said the hardest things and have nothing left to prove—just stopped, and I glanced over and she was out, her head tipped slightly toward the window, her hands loose in her lap, the cross at her throat catching the light.
I turned the radio down and drove.
It gave me forty minutes to think, which turned out to be forty minutes more than I needed to arrive at a conclusion I'd been avoiding since the parking lot.
She was twenty-six years old.
I'd known that. It was in the contract, her date of birth, right there in black and white, and I'd read it and filed it and told myself it was relevant only insofar as it spoke to her health and her fertility and her general suitability for the arrangement.
Which it did. She was young and healthy and she wanted this, and those were the facts.
The other fact, the one I'd been not thinking about since she'd hopped onto my tailgate in cutoffs and looked at my spreadsheet like it was a problem she could solve, was this:
She was twenty-six years old and I was thirty-eight and she had told me she hadn't been with anyone in three and a half years.
That meant she'd been working and saving and building toward this specific dream while men her age were out there being twenty-something and useless, and now she was in my truck driving north to live on my property for however long it took and I had essentially—without meaning to, without quite realizing it until this moment—taken her off the market.
For a year.
Minimum.
She couldn't date. Couldn't meet anyone.
Couldn't do the normal twenty-six year old thing of figuring out what she wanted from a man while she was trying to have my baby on a ranch in the Hill Country.
The arrangement precluded it. The contract precluded it.
I had, in the quiet efficient way I handled most things, removed that option from her life without fully accounting for what that meant.
I looked at her sleeping.
She had a small smear of something on her cheek—ink, maybe, from the little notebook she’d been writing in all morning, some kind of planner from the looks of it.
Her hair had mostly come down from whatever she'd had it in and was loose around her face.
In sleep she looked younger than twenty-six, which was not helpful information.
I looked back at the road.
The guilt was reasonable, I told myself. It was appropriate. She was doing something significant for me and my family and I owed her more than a cottage and a monthly stipend and the dubious pleasure of my company for a year. I should feel some responsibility for what I was asking her to give up.
What I should not feel was the other thing.
Mine.
That was it. That was the whole thought. No preamble, no qualifier—just that word sitting in my chest like a brand, hot and certain, from the moment she'd hopped onto my tailgate and said I want you to knock me up with her chin up and her face on fire.
Mine to take care of. Mine to fuck. Mine to put a baby in and watch go soft and round with it, and that thought alone was doing things to me that had no business happening while I was driving north on 281 with her asleep in my passenger seat.
I shifted in my seat.
Looked at the road.
She was right there. Asleep, loose-limbed, her hair down around her face, that gold cross warm against her throat, and I could smell whatever she used on her skin and the AC was blowing it directly at me and I was thirty-eight years old and I had negotiated a legal contract that gave me the specific right to take her to bed and try to get her pregnant and she had signed it and I still felt like a man standing outside a window looking at something he hadn't earned yet.
Because I hadn't.
She didn't know me. Not really. She knew I had land and a dead grandfather and a complicated uncle and seven goats with stupid names.
She'd spent forty minutes on a tailgate with me and decided I was a reasonable risk and that was—that was not nothing, but it was not the same as wanting me.
It was not the same as her being in that truck because she wanted to be there with me specifically, as opposed to any man with a ranch and a legal problem and a truck with working AC.
The arrangement was the arrangement.
What happened inside it—whether she looked at me like something other than a solution, whether those dark eyes ever went soft the way I'd caught them going once or twice in the parking lot before she shut it down—that was not guaranteed. That was not in the contract.
I needed to remember that.
She didn’t stir until we hit the gravel drive at Holt Creek, and I slowed the truck down to come to a stop. She let out a sweet little sleepy sound when I got out of the car, and I paused to smile at her.
“Just gettin’ the gate,” I said. “We don’t have one of those newfangled automatic ones out here—just a plain old chain.”
She frowned. “You keep it locked–?”
I shook my head. “No. You can come and go as you please.”
She looked nervous, but of course she did—and I needed to get the gate, so I hopped out to get the chain. When I got back in the truck, I glanced into the rearview and caught Sawyer with a shit-eating grin on his face, like he knew I was down bad even if I hadn’t admitted it yet.
I pushed that to the back of my mind.
Right now, I had a job to do.
We drove through the pastures first—the east field with the Longhorns in the shade of the live oak stand, their horns catching the afternoon light, a dozen of them unbothered and enormous. Then the horses at the fence line—two quarter horses who ambled over to say hello.
Millie looked over with wide eyes. “Are they friendly?”
“They don’t bite, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said, glancing over at her. “But uh…”
I reached behind the front seat, where I kept a stash of carrots just in case, then handed her one.
“They’ll like you better if you come bearing gifts.”
We slowed to a stop and I waved Sawyer around, letting him pass in his own truck, the trailer rattling behind him. We didn’t really need it; she hardly had any possessions to her name, but it felt good to do this for her regardless.
Millie rolled down the window and the horses came right to it.
“What are their names?” she asked.
"The bay is Shiner," I said. "The roan is Lone Star."
She turned to look at me.
"My dad named them," I said.
"Your dad named the horses after beer."
"Mom named the goats after country musicians. Dad named the horses after beer. The cattle don't have names."
"The cattle don't have names," she repeated.
"There's a hundred and eighty of them."
"Fair enough." She turned back to the window.
Shiner had his whole enormous nose through the gap and was investigating her with the focused enthusiasm of a horse who has identified a carrot.
She held it flat-palmed the way you're supposed to, which I noticed, and he took it with the delicate politeness of a horse who has just found their new best friend.
"Hi," she told him. Quiet, like she was introducing herself. "I'm Millie."
Shiner breathed on her hand.
"He likes you," I said.
"He likes the carrot."
"Same thing, at first."
She smiled at that without looking at me and fed the last of the carrot to Lone Star, who had been waiting with slightly less patience than his paddock mate and made his feelings known about the wait by exhaling loudly directly into her face.
She laughed and pulled back and wiped her face and I handed her another carrot without being asked.
She did it again.
I watched.
Thirty-eight years old, I told myself. Act like it.
I put the truck back in drive.
The main house came into view as we rounded the cedar break—the limestone rambling low and long, the wraparound porch, the live oaks spreading their canopy over everything, the whole thing sitting in the afternoon light like it had grown there instead of being built.
I watched her take it in through the windshield. She didn't say anything. Just looked.
Then she saw the cottage.
And Dolly.
Dolly was on the porch swing. Planted on it the way she planted herself on everything she'd decided was hers, which was everything.
I pulled up and killed the engine.
Millie got out and stood in the gravel drive and turned in a slow circle—the main house, the barn, the stable, the pastures going out to the limestone bluffs in the distance—and I stood by the truck and watched her do it and tried to see it through her eyes.
Twenty-four hundred acres of Hill Country that I'd been so deep inside for so long I'd stopped seeing it the way you see something the first time.
She saw it that way.
Her face was—I wasn't going to think about her face.
She turned toward the cottage and stopped.
Dolly looked at her.
Millie looked at Dolly.
A beat.
"That's Dolly," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I figured."
"She does this."
"Does what."
"The swing." I put my hands in my pockets. "It's hers now. We've had words about it."
"How did that go."
"About as well as any conversation with Dolly goes."
She was quiet for a moment, just looking at this ridiculous goat sitting on a porch swing like a retired schoolteacher, and then she started laughing—that full unrestrained laugh.
Behind the cottage the rest of the herd materialized one by one from wherever they'd been—Loretta first, then Tammy, then Willie trotting over from the water trough, then Merle and Waylon ambling in from the far side of the pasture. George Jones descended from his boulder.
Millie looked at all of them looking at her.
"Hi," she said, to the herd generally.
Loretta headbutted her shin gently.
"That means she likes you," I said.
Millie smiled. "How do I know you're not making that up?"
"You don't."