Chapter 11 Bastien — Day 28 #2
She didn't know names or accounts. But she knew the fifty thousand dollars in the Alpine bank had come through him.
She knew the way she knew a horse was going to bolt before it bolted.
She'd watched him receive the news, watched his hands, and women who'd run kitchens their whole lives learned what guilt looked like when it asked for bread.
“Beau?” Mara said.
He put his spoon down slowly.
“Sorry. Ate too fast.”
“You didn't eat too fast.”
“I did.”
“Beau.” Mara's mouth quirked. “You eat like you're being observed. You always have.”
“I am being observed.”
“By who?”
“By all of you,” he said. “You people are relentless.”
Rafe laughed. Thayer hid a smile in his spoon. Orin ate.
The joke worked. The moment passed. Mara went back to her stew. Bastien tore another piece of bread and put it in his mouth and didn't taste it.
He got up when Opal came back with the water and he took the pitcher from her hand and filled everyone's glasses himself.
It was a small courtesy. He did it because he needed his hands to do something before they did something else.
Opal let him take the pitcher. She didn't thank him.
She didn't look at him. She just moved past him to clear a bowl, and as she passed she put her hand on his forearm, briefly, the way a woman puts her hand on a horse she's decided not to be afraid of yet.
He finished pouring water. He sat back down.
He got through the rest of the meal by counting each bite.
He did the dishes with Orin. Orin, at nineteen, took dish duty like a chore he'd been born to; he stacked and rinsed and didn't chatter unless spoken to. Bastien preferred it. They worked through the plates in the kind of companionable quiet Bastien had almost forgotten a room could hold.
Mara came in with two empty cups from the porch and set them on the counter.
“Leave it,” she said, of the last pan. “Opal likes to scrub that one herself, don't ask me why.”
“Yes ma'am,” Orin said.
“You don't have to ma'am me forever, Orin.”
“I know, ma'am.”
She flicked him lightly on the shoulder with a dish towel, and Orin grinned, and Bastien watched the pleased curve Mara tried to hide.
“I'm going to sit on the porch a minute,” Mara said. “Bread out. Kitchen closed.”
“Yes ma'am,” said Orin.
She looked at Bastien. She didn't say join me. But her eyes did, and then she turned it off and went out and the screen door cracked shut behind her.
Bastien dried his hands.
“I'll be up,” he said to Orin. “You good?”
“I'm good, Beau.”
“Thanks.”
He didn't go out to the porch. He wanted to.
He wanted to more than he'd wanted anything in weeks.
But he couldn't sit down beside Mara Vale on that porch tonight with a lie under his tongue and pretend the lie was the shape of his mouth.
He couldn't put his shoulder near her shoulder and let her forget, for even a minute, that she didn't know what she was letting near her.
He went up the stairs to the guest room instead.
Once the scorched bunkhouse wall had been opened, repaired, and cleared, Rafe and Orin moved back across the yard.
Mara put Bastien in the upstairs guest room instead of sending him with them.
Opal had made the bed that morning, tucking the corners with stubborn precision.
The west window looked over the yard and barn.
Bastien stood in the doorway a second before he went in, then closed the door and left the lamp off.
He lowered himself onto the mattress and let the room stop moving around him.
He put his head in his hands.
He stayed like that a long time. He heard the porch chair creak once, down below. He heard Mara's voice, low, to Opal, and Opal's, lower, back. He couldn't make out the words. He didn't want to. He was afraid of them.
He thought about the wire.
He'd funded the gift from his personal account and routed it through outside counsel's client-trust account.
Counsel had documented the irrevocable transfer; Sul Ross Bank had verified the lawful source.
Mara did not know his name because he had requested confidentiality and called that restraint instead of concealment.
He hadn't thought, when he'd done it, that he'd have to lie to her about it.
Or he'd thought it, and he'd told himself she wouldn't ask, and he'd told himself the lie wouldn't be a lie because he wouldn't have to say it out loud. And now he'd said it out loud, and it was a lie, and there was no way to take it back that wasn't worse than leaving it.
Maybe somebody saw the default filing and decided the ranch was worth preserving.
He heard his own voice, in the yard, saying it. He heard the pause before Mara had answered. She'd known. She hadn't known what she knew, but she'd known.
Some kindnesses are their own trap.
Opal had said it to him and he'd felt it land in his chest like a rope going tight around a horn.
He thought about his brother, who'd been mostly kind, at the end.
He thought about his mother, who hadn't called since the funeral.
He thought about his cousin, who was in an office in Toronto right now with a smile Bastien didn't need to be in the room to see.
He thought about all the ways money had ever been a rope tightening on someone's throat, and how many of those ways he'd personally paid for, and how certain he'd been, that morning in Marathon, that this time it would be different.
Because he loved her.
He hadn't said that word to himself before. He said it now, in the dark, with his head in his hands, and he didn't lift his head, because if he lifted his head he'd have to look at the wall, and the wall wasn't going to help him.
He loved her.
He'd have to tell her. Not tonight. Not tomorrow.
But at some point he'd have to sit her down at that kitchen table and tell her, and if he waited too long the telling would become the thing that broke her instead of the thing that saved her, and he'd have to know when that day was, and it wasn't going to be any of the days he wanted it to be.
He stayed on the edge of the bed.
He heard the porch chair creak again. He heard the screen door.
He heard Mara come up the stairs, past his door, into her room. He heard her boots come off, one and one.
He didn't lie down.
He sat there until the moon crossed the window and the shadow of the sash moved across the floor and became a different shadow.
Then he stood up and went to the window and stood at it with one hand flat against the cold pane and watched the yard, and the barn, and the low dark line of the horizon beyond, and none of it, none of it, gave him back what he'd come here for.
He didn't sleep.