Chapter 5 Bastien — Day 10 #2
He took out the second phone. The one that lived in the glovebox with the other wallet and the passport with his real name. He held it in his palm and let his thumb hover.
He drew in one long breath and let it out, slow and deliberate, the way he'd been letting them out since he was a boy and his mother had told him — breathe first, decide second.
Then he made the call.
Ilya answered on the third ring, and Bastien could hear he was somewhere with a wet glass in his hand.
“Cousin.” Ilya's voice was silk on gravel. He'd learned that voice in London and it hadn't left him. “You're breathing. I'm relieved.”
“I need something.”
“Ah.” The clink of ice. “I've been waiting.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty.”
“Thousand. American. From my personal account, through outside counsel's client-trust account. Counsel documents an irrevocable gift; the bank verifies the source; my name stays confidential to the recipient.”
There was a silence.
“Cousin.”
“Yes.”
“Are you buying anonymity from a woman?”
“No.”
“You're buying time beside one.”
Bastien didn't answer.
“Interesting distinction,” Ilya said. “I look forward to hearing you defend it.”
“The recipient is Vale Ranch Operations, Sul Ross Bank of Alpine, Texas.
I'll text the loan number and the bank's escrow instructions.
Open an irrevocable third-party-gift file today.
Counsel verifies the public default, the source of funds, and the bank's restricted account. I need it cleared as fast as the process lawfully allows — three weeks at most. My identity stays confidential to the recipient.”
“That's very specific.”
“I've thought about it.”
“You've thought about it for ten days.”
Bastien closed his eyes. Of course Ilya knew how long he'd been gone. Ilya knew how many hours of sleep he'd had. Ilya knew what he was reading. That was Ilya's job, or Ilya's hobby, and Bastien had long since stopped being able to tell the difference.
“Open the file today,” Bastien said.
Ilya made a sound that was almost a laugh.
“Bastien. My grieving cousin. The board meets in nine days.
They'll ask if I've heard from you, whether you're ever going to sit in Julien's chair, whether I should stop keeping it warm.
If I route fifty thousand of your money through outside counsel to a cattle ranch in Texas while you hide under your grandfather's name, do you understand what that looks like if it becomes public?”
“It looks like a lawful private gift, documented down to the dollar.”
“It looks like the heir of Lorne Ascend financing a stranger's survival while concealing that he sleeps in her bunkhouse.”
“It isn't a mortgage.”
“It's a hundred-and-eighty-seven-thousand-dollar operating loan, if I've read the county filings correctly.”
Bastien opened his eyes.
Ilya had read the county filings.
“You've been looking.”
“I look at everything, cousin. It's what you pay me for. It's what you don't pay me enough for.”
“Fifty. As soon as counsel clears it. She has seventy-four days left and she's a hundred and thirty-seven thousand short. Even if review takes three weeks, it buys breathing room, not a rescue. She'll still have to work for the rest. She'll want to.”
“She.” Ilya said it slowly. “She has a name.”
“She does.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“You know what I think,” Ilya said, and now the silk was gone and only gravel remained.
“I think you've found a woman who doesn't know who you are, and you're using money to postpone the moment she has to know.
Call it a gift if that helps you sleep. If she learns you arranged it while standing in her kitchen as somebody else, she'll hate the secrecy the way a horse hates waking with its foot tied to a post.”
“Ilya.”
“I'll have outside counsel open the file.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me. You'll answer for it later.” A pause. “Bastien.”
“Yes.”
“Come home before you have to.”
Bastien didn't answer. He said what he'd come to say. “Send me the application number today and the confirmation when counsel clears it.”
He ended the call.
The phone lay in his palm and didn't light up.
The gas pump ticked in the sun. Somewhere on the far side of the lot a screen door slapped, and someone shouted at a child, and the child laughed and shouted back, and the ordinary noise of the ordinary world kept going as if none of the last four minutes had happened.
He put the phone back in the glovebox. Locked it. Put both hands on the wheel.
He'd come out here to buy sweet feed and salt blocks.
He'd come home with two books he hadn't needed and an irrevocable gift agreement he hadn't been asked to arrange, moving into legal review, lawful in every box and concealed in the one way that mattered from the woman who thought she was standing alone on her father's ground with seventy-four days on a clock.
If it cleared, Selene would tell her an attorney-administered emergency gift had arrived and the donor had requested confidentiality.
Mara would sit at the kitchen table and hate that she couldn't put a face to it.
She might cry, or laugh, or simply close her eyes and thank a stranger who was not a stranger at all.
She wouldn't thank Bastien Lorne.
Because Bastien Lorne wasn't supposed to be in Texas.
Bastien Lorne was in Montreal, grieving in a suit, or in Toronto, sitting in his brother's chair.
Bastien Lorne was a photograph on a business page.
He wasn't the man in the bunkhouse at Vale Ranch who ate her stew and drank her coffee and slept two hundred yards from her bedroom window.
Beau Lorne was.
And Beau Lorne had just set unseen machinery in motion to buy her time without asking.
He tightened his grip on the wheel until the tendons stood up on the backs of his hands. The truck was hot. The country was flat. The road was straight. He'd have thirty-eight miles to decide whether what he'd done was a kindness or a violation, and he was already afraid the answer was both.
He turned the key. The engine caught. He put the truck in gear.
And he drove back toward Vale Ranch, with the fox-haired woman's copy of Blood Meridian sliding a little on the passenger seat every time the road curved, and his own heart doing the same thing under his ribs, and Ilya's voice — she'll hate you the way a horse hates a man who tied its foot to a post — riding in the cab with him the whole long, straight, hot way home.