4. Gabriel
Gabriel
I haven’t slept right since Bigfork.
Daniel used to say I could sleep through a mortar drill, which from a former Ranger is either a compliment or a diagnosis.
He never specified which. I’d put my head down, and the dark would come up to meet me, and that was that.
Early bedtime, dawn chores. A simple machine of a man. That’s me. That was me.
Then a barrel racer broke the machine.
And now she’s in my kitchen, at the table, boots hooked on the chair rung, braid coming undone like it did in Bigfork.
I watch her eat a sandwich the size of a doorstop.
She eats like a person who’s worked for her food her whole life.
No fuss or apology. Elbows where she wants them.
She pulls the sandwich apart with her hands, picks the tomato off, and sets it on the plate edge without comment.
I log it—no tomato—the way you log a horse’s quirks, the side it likes you to mount from, the gate it won’t pass without a fuss.
She eats the whole thing in five minutes, then stares at the empty plate. “I could eat another one of those,” she says, sounding almost angry about it. “I’m always starving lately.”
I make her another one. While my back is turned, I ask myself the question I haven’t said out loud since she got out of that truck: why did she drive all this way to find me now?
It’s been four months since Bigfork. One night, that’s all it was supposed to be. But it wasn’t, not for me. She’s been in my head ever since.
I went looking for her after. My brothers noticed my absences, but all I got was a circuit schedule and one entry form with a PO box that went nowhere.
Then the doubts crept in. She left before dawn that night at the motel.
A woman leaving before the sun comes up is saying something pretty clear, and I heard it.
I heard it the way I hear everything about myself—as confirmation.
I decided that the kind of man whose birth killed his own mother doesn’t get to chase a woman down and ask her to stay.
I lean against the counter and let myself look because she’s distracted by the sandwich, so it’s safe. Safe is the word a careful man reaches for when he means he’s already in trouble.
“You’re staring.”
I come back to the present so fast that I nearly give myself whiplash.
“Am I?”
“You are. It’s fine.” Evie takes another bite of the sandwich and talks around it, which should not be charming but is. “You’ve got the whole brooding-rancher thing happening. Real gothic. Did you cultivate that, or were you born with it?”
“Born with half. Earned the rest.”
She huffs a laugh through her nose. And there it is again—the thing where she laughs and I have to look at the floor.
One night. No strings. No last names.
Her words from Bigfork echo in my brain.
She laid out the rules and watched my face to see if I’d flinch. I didn’t because—God help me—those rules sounded like the safest thing anyone had ever offered me.
No strings. No commitment. No future in which I’d have to be the kind of man who stays, who gets looked at every day, who disappoints somebody slowly over the course of years.
One night. A man like me could survive one night.
A man like me had spent his whole life being told, in the gentlest possible ways, that one night was about all of him anybody should sign up for.
So I said yes to her rules. And then I broke every one of them in my own head before the sun came up because by the time she slipped out—carefully, before dawn, like leaving was a thing she also knew how to do well—I already wanted the strings.
All of them. The whole tangle. But I didn’t even know her last name.
“Gabriel.”
I look up.
Evie has stopped eating. She’s got that look—the one from The Honey Pot, the one where she’s deciding something. Her hand rests on the table, and I notice it the way I notice everything about her, filing it away. I don’t know what it means yet, but I notice.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the food.”
It’s not what she was going to say. I’d bet the ranch on it. But I let her have the swap because the kitchen door opens behind me.
Daniel fills the doorway, gray eyes taking the whole room in one sweep—Evie, the sandwich plate, my face, back to Evie.
I watch him decide not to ask the forty questions stacking up behind his teeth.
Delaney’s right behind him with her hand on his back, and she’s quicker than he is to smile, warm and real.
“Well,” Daniel says.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
Behind him, Delaney presses her lips together like she’s holding the rest of it in for both of them.
Evie watches this with open interest, the way you’d watch two dogs decide whether they’re friends.
“Older brother?” she asks, looking at Daniel like she’s confirming something she already clocked.
“What gave it away?”
“You walked in like you were going to read us our rights.”
Daniel’s eyes narrow, but his mouth twitches.
Delaney laughs out loud. Evie just won over my brother’s wife in less than two sentences, and Delaney’s on Evie’s side for life now. This is going to be such a problem.
“She’s not wrong.” Delaney chuckles, sliding onto the bench across from Evie and propping her chin on her hand as if she’s settling in for the good part. “He read me my rights the first time we met. Told me where the property line ran before he told me his name.”
“It was relevant information,” Daniel says, pulling out a chair.
Evie looks at the two of them, then at me. She raises an eyebrow that asks, Is it always like this?
I tip my head a half inch and give her a look that says, You have no idea.
The brief exchange across the kitchen, the two of us agreeing on something without a word, will keep me awake later.
Then, because the universe hates me, Ethan appears with his wife, Jenna. I love my family, but having them all present when the woman I haven’t stopped thinking about for the last four months has reappeared unexpectedly is enough to make my defective heart stutter.
Ethan carefully scans Evie like she’s a dataset he needs to classify.
Jenna takes one look at Evie and me and arrives at a conclusion she’s far too polite to say out loud. “Hi, I’m Jenna. Ignore all of them. You look tired. Did you drive a long way?”
“All the way from Nevada,” Evie replies.
Nevada? Eight hundred miles, give or take, and she did it alone.
Of course, Jenna would notice the shadows beneath Evie’s eyes. She made her own risky drive here to Ethan not so long ago, only her journey ended in a ditch. The thought of the same thing happening to Evie on some dark highway makes my blood run cold.
“Is that your F-150 parked outside?” Ethan asks, interested in all things mechanical and technical.
Evie nods. “It is.”
“What kind of mileage are you getting?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-three on the highway. Twenty-four if I’m running light. Two hundred and forty thousand on the clock,” Evie says proudly. “She’ll outlive all of us.”
Ethan purses his lips and nods. “Original transmission?”
“Rebuilt it myself at one-eighty.”
My cautious, guarded brother pulls out a chair and sits across from a woman because she knows her own truck.
I turn to put the cutting board away because if I keep watching this, my expression will reveal something I’m not ready to share yet.
When I’ve schooled my expression and turn around again, my brothers are doing the thing. The looks. Over Evie’s head. To each other. To me.
Daniel: Who is she?
Ethan: Why is she here at ten at night?
They glance at each other, then back at me, twin smirks pulling at their mouths, the bastards.
Daniel: Ah.
Ethan: It’s like that.
And I hate it. I hate it because they’re right and because they’re watching me unravel over a woman. There is nothing in this world a man wants less than to be obviously, visibly wrecked in front of the brothers who’ve spent their whole lives gently managing him.
“It’s not like that,” I mutter.
“Not like what?” Delaney asks, stealing a triangle of crust off Evie’s plate like they’ve known each other for years.
I shake my head. “Never mind.”
I watch the whole table fold this stranger in without a vote, the way water closes over a stone, and I think, there’s a spare chair at this table, and she’s already in it.
Because her being here is going fine. That’s the thing. It’s going stupidly, dangerously fine.
Evie’s holding her own with all of them, blunt and quick. Delaney’s laughing, and Jenna’s pushing a water glass toward her.
I’m beginning to think I might survive this when Miss Maggie comes in. White braid down her back and a sequined tank top winking under an open flannel. She clocks Evie in half a second.
“Hi, sweetheart. I’m Maggie,” she greets. “None of these reprobates made you coffee yet?”
“Hi Maggie. Nice to meet you. I’m Evie. Evie Gale. And no to the coffee, but I haven’t been here long.”
Maggie nods, turns to the cupboard, pulls down the decaf, and starts a pot.
Evie looks at me. “Your mom?”
Daniel’s hand tightens on the table. Ethan’s eyes flick to me behind his glasses. Delaney’s smile freezes. Jenna bites her lip. The whole room holds its breath, and my heart gives one hard, erratic knock that I feel in my throat.
Miss Maggie, God bless her, keeps pouring the decaf and says, light as anything, “Oh, honey, I’m the help.
Been the help since before this one was a glint.
” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder at me while setting the cup in front of Evie.
“His mama was Caroline. She was tougher than me by a country mile and twice as pretty. But we don’t talk about her enough in this house, which is its own kind of shame.
” She pats Evie’s shoulder gently. “Drink your coffee, sweetheart.”
Maggie smooths over the awkwardness, handing Evie a way out and me a way to keep breathing, all in one motion, the way she’s been doing for this family for decades. “The help” doesn’t come close to what Maggie is to us. To me.
Evie’s face has paled under the sun-brown. She looks at me, understanding that she inadvertently stepped on something buried. I watch her decide not to make it worse by apologizing nineteen times.
“Sorry,” she says quietly, so only I can hear.
“You didn’t know.”
“Still.”
I gentle my voice. “It’s fine. Drink your coffee.”
She settles into her seat and drinks her coffee.
The room slowly comes back to life around the hole that opened in it. The machinery of the family clanks back into motion.
Ethan starts a story about a fence—a heifer that put herself through a brand-new run of wire on the day he finished it.
Jenna laughs, and Delaney joins in.
Evie asks about the wire, and Ethan answers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
I stand at the counter and remember the way she said my name that night, breathy and needy. I don’t know why she’s here—yet—but I do know I’m in trouble because I already want her to stay.