Chapter 19
Holt
I woke up happy, which was the part I couldn't forgive any of them for.
I woke up before the light with Morgan warm and heavy against me.
The whole new shape of the night before was still in my body.
For about ninety seconds I lay there in the gray and was happier than I'd been in my whole life.
Then I made my plans. Chores first. Then coffee.
Then I'd ask him to stay, the way I'd promised myself on the floor of that shack.
I even had the order worked out.
I got up easy so I didn't wake him and went down to put the coffee on.
The phone started before I'd got the lid down.
It was Flynn first, before six, which Flynn never did.
"You seen it?" he asked, no hello, his voice gone careful in a way that scared me worse than if he'd yelled. "Holt. You need to see it before somebody shows you."
"See what?"
He huffed out a sound on the other end. "Just look it up. Look up his name."
I stood in Gus's kitchen and typed his name into the phone with my thumb, the same as I'd done in the back of the feed store the week before he came, when he was nothing to me but a problem arriving on Thursday.
It came up first. Hours old.
The studio's logo. MASTERSON GOES METHOD. The word authentic. The word exclusive.
And a photograph.
It took me a second.
Then the horse was Biscuit. The coat was the one off my own peg by the door. The brand burned into the gatepost, in the corner of the frame, just visible, just findable, was mine.
Three Saints.
And under it the valley's name spelled out for anybody who wanted to come look, and a date, and two words about the money.
Six figures.
The exact thing I'd been breaking my body over in the dark for two weeks, sitting right there on a little glass screen. And all I'd had to do to earn it was let them turn my home into a backdrop and my brand into a logo to put the realest thing I ever had on a television for strangers.
The kitchen went very quiet and very far away. The phone kept buzzing in my hand with the valley waking up to it. Dez. A number I didn't know. Dez again.
From the next room Gus called out, "Holt? What's all that ringing?" in his morning voice. His getting-better voice.
I could not make my mouth work to answer him.
He'd come here to use the ranch. That was never a secret and I never once made him pretend otherwise.
But somewhere along the way I quit hearing it.
I took his money to muck my stalls and I let myself believe the thing had turned into something else.
But it hadn't. It was exactly what it was the whole time. A man using my place for a part.
Now it was out there with my brand on it and a price on it. He was getting on a plane tomorrow, and the only thing that had changed was that I'd been fool enough to let it all the way in first.
He was on the stairs when I turned around.
He'd come down fast and he hadn't stopped for his boots. He didn't ask me what was wrong.
"Holt, listen. Please. I can explain it, just let me—"
He was coming toward me with his hands up.
"Did you come here to use the place?" My voice came out of me level and dead. I didn't recognize it. "Day one. The truth. Did you come to my ranch to get yourself a part?"
He stopped. To his credit, or his ruin, he didn't lie. "Yes. At the start. I had the part. But I came to learn so I could do it well. You know I did, I never—"
"And you're on a plane tomorrow?"
"I never said yes to them." He was not answering the question and he knew it. "Holt. I never said yes. I was going to call her this morning and kill it, all of it, I decided last night while you were asleep on me. I didn't know they'd go without—"
"How long have you had this?"
He didn't answer fast enough.
"How long have you known, Morgan?"
"Four days."
Four days. He'd been carrying it four days. Up the mountain and back and into my bed twice. The next part came up out of the oldest part of me and I let it come.
"You knew about it four days ago and you let me do everything we did."
His face went slack. "I didn't say yes to them. I never said yes."
"You didn't say no." I let that sit. "You stood out in my yard with that phone in your hand and you didn't say no. That's all it took, wasn't it. You just had to not say anything."
"Last night was not that." He had gone the color of the wall behind him. "Last night was the truest thing I have ever done in my life."
He heard how it came out. I watched him hear it and know it sounded exactly like a line.
"I know how that sounds. I don't have another way to say it. That's the problem, Holt, I've never had another way to say anything, but it's still true."
"I don't have to know anything."
But I did. That was the hell of it. He told me he loved me first, up in that bed, before I ever got it out. Nobody performed that. It didn't change one thing. He'd been sitting on this for four days while he said it.
"I don't know what you want me to do with last night." That was the one that broke my voice and I hated it. "Whether it was real or whether it was the part. I'll never know now."
"It was real—"
"I'll never know that now. And I'm not going to spend the rest of my life sat up at night deciding which one it was."
"It was real. Holt. It is the only real thing that has ever—"
"The money's real too." That was the trap of the whole thing, sitting there in six figures on a little glass screen. "You did the math, didn't you? You stood in my yard and you worked out that it'd cover the note."
He didn't say anything, which was an answer.
"You were going to save this place by putting it on television."
I set the phone down on the counter very carefully, because my hand wanted to throw it.
"I'd hand this ranch to the bank before I'd keep it as your advertisement. And you don't get to pay me off on the way out the door."
"That's not—" He was crying now, openly, the act gone, nothing performed in any of it. The worst part of that was that I believed him. I believed every wretched word but it didn't change one single fact.
I wanted to put my fist through the wall of my own kitchen.
I wanted to grab him and shake him until he gave it back.
And I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him we'd figure it out together, which was what he'd offered me at that desk four nights ago, and what I'd sent him to bed for.
That was the thing that finally made me cruel.
Wanting to be comforted by the man doing it to me.
I could not stand in my own skin, want him that much, and live through it.
So I shut the door on him instead. That I knew how to do. It had kept me alive a long while before he ever came up that road.
"There's a way out of this." He was crying and talking at the same time. "There is always a way out, it's what I do for a living, just give me one day and let me—"
"You're leaving tomorrow."
"I was coming back." He got it out fast, like he'd been waiting for a gap to put it in. "That's what I decided last night. Twelve weeks and then there's a gap in August. I had it worked out. I was going to tell you this morning, I was going to tell you all of it—"
"In August."
"Yes."
"The bank takes this place the first of next month." I watched that land on him. "There isn't going to be anything here in August."
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
I had finally told him the thing I'd been carrying since Monday, the thing he'd stood in that doorway with two cups of coffee asking me for. I told it to him as a weapon, and he took it standing up.
"I know about the note." He said it fast. "Holt, I know all of it. I've known for days. That's why I—"
"How?"
He didn't answer.
He stood there with his mouth open and nothing came out of it. I took that for exactly what it looked like, which was a man caught out. I made myself say the rest the cruelest way there was, which was the plainest.
"You've been leaving since the day you got here.
It was always coming and I let myself forget it.
That's on me, not you. So let's not drag it out one more day and make a thing of it.
Go on back to your life. There's nothing for you here but a busted ranch and an old man and a fool who should've known better. "
"Holt—"
He said something else. I didn't take any of it in. I'd already gone off somewhere he couldn't follow me, which was the only trick I ever learned, and I did it standing three feet in front of him.
"Go."
And then, because he wasn't moving, because his face was doing the thing that was going to undo me if I looked at it one second longer, I gave him the worst thing I had.
"You got what you came for. You got the genuine article. Now get off my place."
And I turned my back on him.
That was the hardest single thing my body ever did. Harder than the bank. Harder than not calling him back in the storm.
I walked out the door into the cold gray morning and across to the barn. I didn't look back. Not when I heard the screen door. Not when I heard the bunkhouse door.
Not an hour later when I heard the rental car start up, too smooth and too quiet, and go down the county road. The same low expensive sound it had made coming in, going the other way now, smaller and smaller, until the meadow took it.
I stood in the barn a long while with my hands flat on Biscuit's old back.
The horse he'd sat on that first day with his shoulders up around his ears, asking me if he ought to have a helmet.
Biscuit leaned into my hands the way he always did and waited to find out what we were doing.
I couldn't get one word out to tell him.
I didn't make a sound. Behind me the house had a sick old man in it and a phone that would not stop. There was nowhere left on the place to put a thing this size.
Gus found me out there when the sun was full up. He didn't say a word.
He came and stood at the rail beside me, one hand resting at his chest, and looked out at the empty yard where the car had been. After a while he put his old hand on the back of my neck, the same as he had the day he hauled me in at eleven, half-feral and meaner than sin, and left it there.
That was how I knew he'd seen it on somebody's phone too. And that he wasn't going to make me say any of it out loud. And that he loved me.
And that not one bit of that was going to help.
Trouble bawled for her hay. The sun came up over the Three Saints the same as it came up every morning of the world and lit the empty yard. I had kept my pride and lost everything else.
But there was a heifer to feed so I went and fed her.