Chapter 16 Bastien — Day 35 #2
He attached no invented sale and no false invoice.
The public filing proved the debt; the bank had verified the escrow; counsel had confirmed the transfer would be irrevocable and free of any claim against Mara or the land.
Everything in the file was true except the moral story he kept telling himself — that lawful secrecy was not still secrecy.
He typed the amount.
$60,000.00.
His hands were steady. He watched them the way a man watched his own hands do a thing his mind had already agreed to. The steady was a professional steady. It came from twenty years of watching his father sign documents in a room with a view of the St. Lawrence and no visible emotion at all.
His stomach was not steady.
His stomach had been doing the small clenching thing every morning for a week, ever since he'd started thinking seriously about the second transfer. It was doing it now, quietly, and he ignored it the way he'd been taught to ignore it.
He clicked submit and confirmed the donor-confidentiality request.
The screen turned for four seconds, then displayed a green confirmation: donor authorization received; disbursement released.
Sixty thousand dollars moved from his personal account through counsel's trust account into the same restricted cure escrow at Sul Ross Bank. The bank knew the lawful source. The woman whose name stood on the loan did not know the donor was sleeping in her bed.
He closed the laptop.
He sat with his hands flat on it another minute and made himself breathe in the slow deliberate way a different man in a different room had taught him. In. Hold. Out. He hadn't used it in years.
Then he got out and walked into the hotel lobby and used the bathroom because he'd been sitting for two hours and his body was a body, and he washed his hands twice, and he looked at his face in the mirror for a full three seconds and then looked away.
He bought two pounds of sugar at the mercantile. He picked up the sandwich at the Big Bend. He ate his own turkey in the truck on the way home because he wasn't hungry and he wanted to be finished with it.
The sun was going low when he came up the ranch road.
The house was gold on its west face the way it was that hour, and there was a truck he didn't recognize in the drive.
He parked next to the barn and got out with the sugar and the sandwich bag and the paper receipt for the fuel filter in his shirt pocket.
Mara came out of the house before he'd shut his door.
She was moving fast. He read the fast wrong for a second — bad news, some new blow — and then he saw her face. It was open, wide open, the way he'd only seen it once or twice before. She was laughing.
“Beau!” she called.
“What?”
“Come here.”
He came. She met him halfway across the yard and hit him like she meant it, both arms up around his neck, up on her toes, her braid swinging. He caught her without thinking. She was warm. She was laughing.
“Whoa,” he said, into her hair. “Hey.”
“Selene called.”
“Okay.”
“Another one came in.”
He didn't understand for a beat. Then he did.
He kept his face very still against the top of her head.
“Another payment?” he made himself say.
“Sixty thousand.” She pulled back to look up at him, still laughing, gray-green eyes bright. “The same anonymous donor added a supplemental gift to the cure escrow. Selene says the paperwork is clean and the donor still wants confidentiality.”
“Mara.”
“I know.” She shook her head. Her eyes were shining. “That's a hundred and ten, Beau. Between the two gifts. It isn't the whole thing — but it's real.”
“Real money.”
“Real money.” She let go of his neck and grabbed his face in both hands and kissed him, hard, once, on the mouth. “Somebody up there likes me.”
He held her elbows.
He set his jaw and let the moment pass through him.
He opened his mouth.
He'd rehearsed the sentence in a dozen versions on the drive home without meaning to. Every one of them started with her name. Every one of them ended with her looking at him differently than she was looking at him right now.
He closed his mouth.
He kissed her forehead instead. It was a small kiss and it took everything he had.
“I'm glad,” he said.
“I know you are.”
“You should call Veda.”
“Left her a message from the porch. She'll call back.” Mara stepped back and wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand even though it was dry. “Opal is going to lose her mind.”
“Probably already has.”
“Probably.”
She looked at him a moment longer, still smiling, and he made himself smile back, and he thought — very clearly — you are lying to her with your face right now.
“Sandwich,” he said, and lifted the bag.
“You are a saint.”
“I am not.”
“For the sandwich you are.”
She took the bag and headed back toward the porch calling for Opal, and he stood in the yard with the two pounds of sugar in his other hand and watched her go.
The truck he hadn't recognized turned out to be one of the feed guys. He talked to the man for ten minutes about a delivery Wednesday. He unloaded the sugar. He washed up. He ate half a bowl of Opal's chili because Opal put it in front of him and Opal didn't accept a refusal.
They went to bed early.
Mara was tired — the good tired, the kind that came after a day when the world had, for once, tipped the right way — and she fell asleep quickly, one hand on his sternum, her braid loose across the pillow. The watch was on her wrist. The room was dark.
He lay awake a long time.
He listened to her breathe. He listened to the house settle.
He listened to a coyote somewhere past the west pasture make its small statement to the dark and get no answer.
He thought about the green check on the screen.
He thought about the way she'd laughed in the yard.
He thought about the way she'd said somebody up there likes me, meaning God, meaning luck, meaning anything but him.
He thought about how easy it would have been to say it in the yard. Two sentences. Three, if he wanted to be thorough. My name is Bastien Lorne. That money came from me. Every word he knew, and none of them were words he could put in order and hand to her while she was laughing.
He'd told her that morning that he was warm.
He hadn't told her anything true since.
He put his hand over hers where it lay on his chest, careful of the watch, closed his eyes, and slept beside her knowing that every breath he took in this bed, this house, this life she was letting him have — every one of them — was a lie he was choosing not to end.