Chapter 25 Bastien — Day 72
◆
The Big Bend Café at ten in the morning smelled like coffee that'd been sitting too long and eggs somebody had cooked well.
Bastien liked it. He liked the sound of a spoon against a heavy mug and the way the front window let a wedge of hard Marfa sun onto the black-and-white floor tile.
He liked that the waitress had looked at him once, decided he wasn't going to be trouble, and moved on.
He took the booth by the window because Rivas had asked for the booth by the window. That was the kind of man Rivas was. He wanted to be seen doing this, and he wanted to see who saw him.
Bastien didn't mind being seen anymore. That was a thing he'd learned in the last two weeks. Once your face was on a magazine cover in a supermarket in Alpine, the shape of a booth stopped mattering.
He ordered two coffees. Black, both of them. He didn't know how Rivas took his and he didn't much care. He set the second cup across from himself, exactly where a man's hand would land if he sat down expecting to be poured for.
Then he waited.
He was good at waiting. He'd waited on his brother his whole life — for Julien to come down a mountain, to close a deal, to answer a phone, to grow up. Waiting on a Presidio County developer was a small thing next to that.
Rivas came in at two minutes past ten. He was a tall man gone soft around the middle, in a good pearl-snap shirt and a hat that had never been rained on.
Fair-skinned, weathered on the neck the way a man got who drove a lot and walked a little.
He had the smile of somebody who'd been told his whole life his smile was an asset.
He slid into the booth without shaking Bastien's hand.
“Mr. Lorne,” he said. He said it the way a man says a name he's been practicing. Loor-neh.
“Lorne,” Bastien said. He didn't correct him further. “Coffee's yours.”
“I don't drink it black.”
“You'll want to today.”
Rivas laughed, short. He looked at the cup. He didn't touch it. “You've got a mouth for a man who's been playing possum out on that ranch two months.”
“I've had a mouth the whole time,” Bastien said. “I just wasn't using it on you.”
He took his own cup in both hands. He felt the heat through the ceramic, and he thought of Mara's hand yesterday around the same shape of mug, at the same temperature, in her kitchen — of her thumb tracing the rim while she wouldn't look at him. He let the thought move through him and go.
Before he said what he meant, he took the measured breath that had carried him through every hard turn of the last two months: in through the nose, out slowly, enough room to choose the truth. Then he met Rivas's eyes.
“I know what you and Ilya cooked up,” he said.
Rivas didn't answer. He kept the smile.
“The land grab dressed as a rescue,” Bastien went on. “The bank pressure. The auction stunt last month. The tabloid piece two weeks back. All of it. I don't need you to nod. I'm telling you. It's over.”
“Is it.”
“The magazine ran. My face is public. My company is what it is. Whatever leverage you thought you had on Vale Ranch through me is gone. There's no billionaire in hiding to expose anymore. There's just a man in a booth telling you to walk away.”
Rivas leaned back. The booth vinyl creaked. Bastien watched him build his answer behind his teeth before he opened them.
“I don't need your permission to walk on that land, son.”
“No,” Bastien said. He had known the sentence was coming for two days.
The night before, after returning the executed promissory note at Mara's kitchen table, he had stood on her porch and rehearsed this answer to the dark.
Mara had said good night from the doorway.
He had driven back to Cassia's. The boundary she set was still the boundary.
“No,” he said again. “But you need it to walk off it clean.”
Rivas's smile went thinner.
“An internal audit preserved the trail,” Bastien said.
“Your consulting agreement with Ilya's crisis firm. The invoice for the photographer. The El Paso rental receipt. The reimbursement of your auction deposit from a Lorne Ascend discretionary account. My counsel has copies, and so does independent board counsel. If you want discovery, subpoenas, and a state review of every easement option you filed around Vale, keep going.”
“Big talk from a man in a borrowed hat.”
“It's my hat,” Bastien said. Opal had bought it for him, Junior had chewed it the next day, and it fit him now the way a thing fits a man who's worn it through weather. “You want the other option?”
Rivas didn't answer. His eyes moved once to the window and back. Somebody's diesel truck was idling out on the square.
“There is another option.” Bastien slid a folded agreement across the table.
“You keep the McKay parcel you bought. You withdraw every option, access request, utility easement, and purchase offer touching Vale land. You stipulate to the corrected eastern boundary and stop contacting Mara except through counsel. Once the filing clears, I introduce you to two Nevada counties actively seeking the project. Cleaner title, better transmission access, no family ranch in the middle. The offer closes at noon.”
The waitress came by with the pot. Bastien lifted a finger, half an inch. She read it and went past.
Rivas looked at his untouched coffee. He looked at Bastien.
He didn't say anything for a long time.
Bastien counted. He didn't do it on purpose; he just did it, the way a man raised on his grandmother's kitchen clock counted seconds without knowing. He got to thirty before Rivas moved.
Rivas unfolded the agreement. He read every page, took Bastien's pen, and signed where the tabs waited. Then he laid a folded twenty on top of his copy, one crease at a time.
“Your counsel files this before noon,” Rivas said.
“The moment we leave.”
“And Nevada.”
“After the filing receipt arrives, I make the introduction.”
Rivas slid out of the booth. He stood beside it with his hat in his hand, looking down as if deciding whether one last sentence was worth the cost.
“Tell your rancher-girl,” Rivas said finally, “she plays a hell of a hand.”
Bastien didn't answer at once. He thought about correcting the possessive. He thought about telling Rivas that Mara Vale didn't belong to anybody, least of all to the man across from her. He decided the correction wasn't worth Rivas hearing. He'd say the true version to the right person later.
“I'll tell her you said so,” he said instead.
Rivas put on his hat. He touched the brim, more habit than courtesy. He walked out. The bell over the café door rang once as he went, small and cheerful and completely uninterested in what had just happened underneath it.
Bastien sat another minute in the booth. He drank half of the cold coffee that had been Rivas's. He wasn't sure why. Maybe because leaving it full felt wasteful. Maybe because he wanted his mouth to have something bitter in it while his hands stopped shaking.
His hands were shaking. He noticed it now that the man was gone. He set the cup down and flattened his palms on the table until they were quiet.
The waitress came back — maybe twenty-two, pale-skinned, freckled across the nose, hair up in a clip.
“Refill, hon?”
“No, thanks. But there's a twenty on the table for you. From the other gentleman.”
“Oh.” She looked at it. “He's a regular. He tips a dollar.”
“Today he tipped twenty.”
She smiled, small. “Guess you're good for him.”
“Guess I am,” Bastien said.
He left his own bills under the saltshaker and walked out into the Marfa sun.
*
The F-150 sat across the square in the shade of a cottonwood that was doing its best. Bastien got in and shut the door and put both hands on the wheel a moment before he did anything else.
It was strange to feel afraid after the hard part was over.
He'd been steady across from Rivas. He'd been steady in his own kitchen at four that morning when he'd made coffee in the dark and gone through the numbers one more time.
Now he was alone in the truck with the second call still ahead of him, and his chest went tight the way it hadn't gone tight in the café.
He'd loved his brother. That was the problem under every other problem.
Loving Julien had shaped thirty-four years of his life, and Julien had been dead nearly three months.
Ilya Moroz had been there for much of it.
When Bastien was eight and a sailboat boom knocked his thumb into a cleat at Muskoka, Ilya had wrapped the bleeding hand in his own shirt while Julien ran for help.
Bastien could still see the boy—wet hair, frightened mouth, none of the polished cruelty he wore now.
He was about to say a thing to that boy grown up that couldn't be unsaid.
He took the phone out of his jacket pocket. He set it on the dashboard. He drew the slow breath again — in through his nose, out through his mouth, quiet and long, longer than it needed to be because this time nobody was watching.
Then he picked up the phone and called Toronto.
Ilya answered on the second ring, in French, the way he always did when he wanted Bastien to remember the family was older than the company.
“Bastien. Tu es en vie.”
“English, Ilya.”
“Fine. English. You're alive.”
“I'm alive.”
“You've been busy.”
“I've been in a diner in Marfa,” Bastien said. “I told your friend Rivas to take his solar farm to Nevada. He took the offer. He walked out ten minutes ago.”
Silence on the line. Bastien could hear Toronto behind it — the hush of a corner office, a room with too much glass and too much rug. He could see the room. He'd sat in it a hundred times as a younger man, waiting on his brother.
“That's a shame,” Ilya said. Mild.
“Is it.”
“I was fond of the parcel.”
“You were fond of using it. There's a difference.”
“You should come home.”
“I'm already home.”
“Bastien.” A shift in the voice — careful, elder-cousin, the tone he'd started using nearly three months ago when Julien died and Ilya had been the one to call.
“Come home. Sit in your brother's chair.
Grieve like a Lorne. The board wants you.
The family wants you. Your mother wants you.
This — whatever this is with the ranch and the woman — you'll thank me in a year for pulling you out of it.”
“Ilya.”
“Yes.”
“You financed Rivas at the McKay auction to close the ranch in from the north. When that did not bring me back, you leaked my location and sent the photographer. You wanted me exposed, panicked, and controllable. Fine. I am public. Independent board counsel has the audit, your discretionary account is frozen, and a special committee opened a review this morning. I will not bury it. If they keep you, you will stand in your own name and explain every dollar in the light.”
Ilya didn't answer.
“I resigned the voting trust this morning,” Bastien said.
“My shares go into an irrevocable blind trust with an independent trustee.
I renounced the chair. The trust's dividends will seed a Trans-Pecos land-and-water fund governed by an independent Texas board.
Mara's name appears nowhere. She has not been assigned a job, a signature, or a dollar. I am done using her as a shield or making choices for her.”
“You can't walk away from control.”
“The signed instruments say I can.”
“You would put Lorne money into ranches you've known for ten weeks.”
“I put it under people who know the land better than either of us. You don't get to touch it, and neither do I.”
Another silence. Longer this time. Bastien watched a blue heeler mix cross the square in the sun, tongue out, unhurried, and he thought of the dog they'd talked about getting at the ranch — Mara laughing at his suggestion of any breed with the word “poodle” in the name, him laughing back, the two of them at the kitchen table with a coffee gone cold between them, the last morning before the tabloid.
The last easy morning.
He wanted it back. He wanted it so badly it was almost physical, a pull in his sternum that felt like a rope had been tied there years ago and only now pulled taut.
Ilya laughed. Once. Sharp. The same laugh from the dock, thirty years later, dried out.
“You're a fool, Bastien.”
Bastien nodded to himself alone in the truck, as if Ilya could see him. He tipped his head back against the headrest and looked at the roof-liner and smiled a little.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I'm a fool who's coming home.”
He hung up.
He set the phone face down on the passenger seat. He kept his hand on it a second — a gentle weight, the way you rest a hand on a horse's neck to tell it you were done — and then he took his hand back and started the truck.
The engine caught on the first turn. It always did. That truck had been the smartest fifteen thousand dollars he'd ever spent, and he'd once spent nine million on a hotel in Prague.
He pulled out of the square. He drove east.
*
The road to Vale Ranch from Marfa was one of the roads he'd learned by heart in the last two months without meaning to.
The bend past the water tank. The dip where the asphalt went pink because somebody had patched it with the wrong mix twenty years ago.
The stand of mesquites at the fork where Thayer had once told him a cow-elk sometimes stood at dusk.
He drove with the windows down and his elbow on the sill and his left thumb — the one with the boat-cleat scar, thirty years faded to a pale line — hooked lightly at the bottom of the wheel. He didn't turn the radio on. He wanted to hear what he was thinking.
At the first red light, Bastien took out his phone.
Mara's contact still read MARA—no last name, no photograph, the way he'd saved it in the first week when he was trying not to want the sight of her face. He pressed call.
She answered on the fourth ring. “Bastien.”
“Rivas signed a boundary and noninterference agreement,” he said. “I resigned the company trust. Nothing has been created in your name. I am telling you what I did, not asking you to reward it.”
The line held only her breathing for several seconds. Then she said, “Good.”
“I won't come out unless you ask.”
“I need six days,” she said. “No calls unless the ranch is in danger. No messages through Opal or Renata. I need to hear my own mind.”
“You have six days.”
“On Day Seventy-eight, park at the gate. Don't drive up. I'll decide whether I walk out.”
“I'll be there.”
She ended the call. Bastien sat through the green light until the driver behind him tapped the horn, then turned the truck back toward Cassia's instead of east toward Vale.
For six days, he worked where he could, met his lawyer, called his mother, and did not cross the boundary Mara had named.
On the sixth morning, he drove to the ranch and stopped at the gate.