Chapter 24 Bastien — Day 70
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The rain had come and gone before dawn — a short West Texas rain that didn't fix anything but left the alley behind Cassia's bookstore smelling clean.
Bastien stood at the window of the back apartment and watched the last drops run off the gutter above the door.
He had a mug of coffee. He wasn't drinking it. He'd been up since four.
He'd been up since four for thirteen days.
Cassia's back apartment was one room and a kitchen — an old iron bed under a window, a table with two chairs.
On the table sat a paperback she'd loaned him, not the one he'd already returned.
That had gone back to her weeks ago. This was a thin volume of Texas poems with a bent cover.
He hadn't read a page. He'd read the wall clock instead.
The second hand moved. He watched it move.
He was waiting. He knew that about himself now. He was waiting the way a man waits at a door somebody else has shut, listening to see whether they might come back and open it.
The knock, when it came, was too light for Cassia. Cassia knocked with her whole hand.
He set the mug down. His pulse moved once, settled, moved again. He crossed the room and opened the door.
Mara stood on the wooden step in an old blue shirt and boots gone gray at the toes. Her braid was loose over one shoulder. There was hay dust at her collar. Her eyes were the kind of tired that comes when a person hasn't slept but has decided to do a thing anyway.
She wasn't smiling. She wasn't unsmiling either. She was there.
She looked, to him, like a woman who'd driven thirty-eight miles through a country that wasn't kind to thinking about a man who hadn't earned back the room he'd walked out of.
She'd done the thinking on the road and come the whole way anyway.
That was the miracle he took in at the door.
Not that she'd forgiven him. That she'd driven.
“Mara,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he'd meant it.
“I found your letter,” she said. “In the drawer. You should've finished it.”
“I know.”
She took the leather watch off her wrist. He knew that watch the way you know a person. He'd worn it once, for a night, and had given it back at dawn with something like reverence. She held it out to him now on her scarred palm.
“You can carry this while you tell me the rest,” she said.
He looked at the watch. He looked at her.
He took it. Her fingers brushed his knuckles as it left her hand — a bare pass, deliberate, no more than that — and he closed his fist around the leather and it was warm from her wrist.
“Come in,” he said.
She came in.
She sat at the small table. He took the other chair. He didn't put the watch down. He kept it in his hand.
“I don't know where to start,” he said.
“Start with your brother.”
He nodded. He looked at the table.
“Julien,” he said. “Two weeks before I came here. Heli-ski accident, British Columbia. It was fast. Or that's what they told me. I don't know if fast is true, or if fast is the word people give you when they don't want you to think about the rest of it.”
Her hand was on the table. It didn't move toward him. It didn't move away either.
“He was thirty-six,” Bastien said. “He'd been out with the same guide five winters running.
I got the call at four in the morning. I remember the light in the apartment because I remember I'd left a lamp on.
That's what I remember. Not the words. The lamp.
I couldn't tell you what my mother said to me on the phone. I could draw you the lamp.”
She nodded, once. Nothing more.
“He was older,” Bastien said. “He was who ran the company. Ours. Lorne Ascend. Hotels — the kind you already know about even if you never went in one. My father built it. Julien was raised to take it. I wasn't.”
“But it came to you.”
“It came to me. My mother, the board, the trust, my cousin Ilya — everybody looked at me like the chair had grown my name on it while I was crying. Everybody except me.”
“So you ran.”
“So I ran.”
“To Marfa.”
“To Marfa.” He turned the watch in his hand. “I picked it off a map because I couldn't have picked it out of a lineup. I wanted a place I had no history. I asked a man at a diner if anybody was hiring. He said try Vale's, they'd lost a hand. I drove out. You know the rest of that morning.”
“You told me your name was Beau Lorne.”
“That's a name,” he said. “My grandfather used it. Beau instead of Bastien. It's not a lie the way a false surname would've been a lie. But it's not the whole truth. I knew it wasn't.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because I liked being a hand.” The quiet of the room ate the words down to something honest. “Because you paid me a wage and expected me to earn it.
Because for the first time since I was ten years old, somebody looked at me and didn't see a chair or a name or a number. You looked at me and saw a man who could stack hay.”
She didn't answer that. Her jaw moved once.
“The fifty thousand,” she said.
“That was mine. Personal money, sent through outside counsel's client-trust account with an irrevocable gift letter. The bank verified the source. I asked counsel not to give you my name.”
“You started it before the second week I'd known you was over.”
“You needed it.”
“You didn't know me.”
“I knew you enough.”
She looked at the watch in his hand.
“I told myself it was a bonus,” he said. “I told myself I owed it for room and board. I told myself a lot of things because I didn't want to hand you my whole self to hold along with the money.”
“And the sixty.”
“That was mine too. Same process. Ilya's people were closing in on the story. I thought if I could get you out from under the auction before the story broke, I could —” He stopped. “I didn't have a plan past keeping the ranch on its feet. I was buying time. For you. For me.”
“For us.”
“I didn't have the right to say us yet.”
“But you thought it.”
“I thought it every day.”
She was quiet. She put her hand flat on the table. He watched her scar go pale against the wood.
“Ilya,” she said.
“My cousin. My father's sister's boy. He's run the company as interim since Julien died, nearly three months now. He leaked the location and the tabloid because he wanted me public, compromised, and out of his way.”
“And Houston calling my bank.”
“That was me.” He made himself keep looking at her. “I asked outside counsel to review the loan terms and send formal compliance questions to the parent company. They found real issues. I didn't ask them to invent a violation or threaten anyone, but I used my name and lawyers without asking you.”
“The ninety-day extension.”
“Your deed correction gave Selene the collateral reason. The compliance review gave Houston a reason to stop resisting. Both mattered. I should have told you before you heard it from Selene.”
“And your mother.”
“I went to Montreal on Day Fifty-three. Less than a day in the house. Long enough for her to touch my face and ask me not to disappear, not long enough for me to stay and grieve with her. Then I came back here and still failed to tell you.”
“Why come back?” she asked. He closed his hand around the watch. “Because this is the first place I have ever chosen. Because I love you. Neither answer excuses what I hid.”
She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that he heard a car go by on the street outside and the front door of the bookstore open and shut. Cassia would be at the counter pretending to read the register. Cassia was a decent friend.
“The money,” Mara said finally.
“Yes.”
“Doesn't earn you anything with me.”
“I know.”
“The staying does.”
He set the watch down on the table then. He set it down carefully, the way you set down a thing that belongs to somebody else. He didn't take his hand off it.
“Tell me what I need to do,” he said.
“Pay the remaining balance at the bank.”
“Yes.”
“In your own name. Bastien Lorne. Not Beau. Not another gift. Not a rescue.”
“Then how?”
“As a loan for the balance that remains after the two gifts. To me. From you. Veda drafted it this morning. Same interest the bank charged, a term the ranch can meet, no balloon clause, no land as collateral. I signed before I drove here. You read it and sign it. Only then do you wire the payoff.”
“Mara —”
“That's the only way I take another dollar.” Her eyes were dry. Her mouth was set. “The gifts are already in the cure account; unwinding them now would punish the ranch, not you. They earn you nothing with me. The remaining balance is a loan between equals, or we stop here.”
He looked at her — at the set of her jaw, at the small tell at the corner of her mouth that meant she'd already decided, at the gray-green of her eyes, which had never once let him off easy and weren't about to start.
“I can tell the difference,” he said.
“Say it back to me.”
“Loan for the remaining balance. My name. Your terms. No land lien. Veda's note, both signatures before the wire. I pay you on my clock.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
She let out a breath. It was small. It might have been relief.
She reaches inside her jacket, brings out a slim manila envelope, and sets it beside the watch. Then she stands.
“The note is in there. Bring my executed copy and the watch after the wire clears. Tomorrow or the day after.”
“You want me to come out.”
“I want the papers signed at my kitchen table. I don't yet want you upstairs.”
“I understand.”
“I don't know yet when I will.”
“I understand that too.”
He walked her to the door. At the door she turned. She was close enough that he could smell the barn on her — hay and horse and the faint metal-sweet of Roman's coat. He didn't touch her. She didn't touch him. That was a thing they were doing on purpose.
“I loved you before I knew what your last name was,” she said. “That part hasn't changed. What changed is I don't yet know if I can trust the man attached to the last name. Give me time to find out.”
“Take it.”
“I intend to.”