Chapter 28
LUKE
The parking lot empties around me and I don't move.
Hat on the wheel. Engine off. The last few people from the meeting are filing out, crossing the gravel in twos and threes, and I watch them without seeing them because what I'm seeing is Mags's face in the moment before she got in her truck.
The careful, flattened expression of a woman who has been here before and knows exactly where it ends.
I have been in love with her since June and I haven't said it out loud and now I'm sitting in a parking lot wondering if I ever get the chance.
I think about my cabin. The way she looked in my kitchen the morning after the break-in. The way she fit there like the cabin had always had a space for her that I just hadn't known to leave open.
I think about the cottonwood bend, her laugh low against my throat, her hands in my hair, the way she looked at me after like I'd handed her something she hadn't known she was waiting for.
I said you ruined me out loud like a man who had forgotten how to be careful and she didn't laugh at me for it.
She put her hand on my jaw and looked at me like I'd said something true.
I think about four weeks ago. Her hand flat on my chest in her apartment, stopping something I hadn't misread.
I know I hadn't misread it. And the look on her face that had nothing to do with me.
Something she was carrying that I couldn't see.
I backed off because she needed me to and I have been backing off ever since.
Tonight the silence finally cost me something I can't afford to lose.
She was gone before I got to my truck. I made the wrong call, and she doesn't have the full picture and she didn't stay long enough for me to give it to her.
She's driving home with two unanswered texts and every reason to believe she was right about me.
I'm not sure I blame her.
The photograph is on my passenger seat.
Cutter laid it face-up on my row when he was making his rounds. I flipped it over before the meeting was done. I know what's in it. I was there for the original. Mags and me at her kitchen table, lit from above.
I pick it up and look at the angle.
Camera low. Stabilized, or the photographer was braced against something solid. Telephoto. Taken from the east side of the fence gap, where the dumpster enclosure juts out and gives you a wall to lean against and enough shadow to stand in without being seen from either direction on Main.
I run the short list of who had reason to be standing in that gap on an early July night.
I get to three names.
I stop at one.
The sun is dropping behind the mountains and lighting up the western faces orange and red, the kind of August evening that under other circumstances would make you pull over. I sit with the name for what is probably ten minutes and feels like considerably more.
Jesse Harvey has been on our ranch since before I could ride. He taught me to cut a calf from a herd when I was eleven. He sat the third pew at my father's funeral, wife and kids in a row, and he cried without making a sound, which is the only way men like Jesse cry.
He refused a salary increase last fall and I let him, because Jesse doesn't take things he thinks he hasn't earned.
He wouldn't take money I offered in April, either.
His youngest, Britta, had been in and out of Children's Hospital in Billings since February, kidney trouble, and I'd seen the second mortgage go through the county clerk's records in June when I was pulling easement documents.
I'd offered to help. Directly, in private, standing in the barn with the door shut. Made it plain there were no terms attached, nothing owed. Just: the kid needs what she needs and the money's there.
He'd said, Luke, I appreciate it, and no.
The boot prints. The collar transmitter pulled and resoldered with a precision that requires knowing what you're looking for before you open the housing.
The angle of the photograph. The timing of every Cutter filing, always a day after something moved on this ranch, always specific, always evidence of someone who didn't need to guess.
I put the photograph face-down and start the truck.
Ellery answers the door in her boots and a dish towel over her shoulder. She takes one look at my face and turns around without a word. "Colt," she calls toward the back of the house. "Luke's here."
She pours coffee into a mug from the cabinet by the stove, sets it in front of me, and leaves the room. That is one of the many things I appreciate about my sister-in-law. She knows the difference between a conversation that needs witnesses and one that doesn't.
Colt comes in from the back porch. He reads me the same way Ellery did, which is the annoying curse of having people in your life who've known you since you were climbing fence rails. He pours his own coffee and sits down across from me.
I turn the photograph over and set it between us.
He looks at it. Then at me.
"You know who took it," he says. Not a question.
"Yeah."
He is quiet. Out in the living room, Hank is making the noise Hank makes at eight-thirty when Ellery is trying to get him down and he has decided that's optional. Colt doesn't look toward the sound.
"Who?"
I tell him.
The stillness that comes over Colt is something I've only witnessed twice.
Once when I called him in Afghanistan to tell him about Dad and the line was silent for about 20 seconds.
Once when he came home and found the books and understood what the ranch was facing.
It isn't shock. It's a man absorbing something he may have already believed was possible and finding out the possibility was worse than he'd let himself sit with.
He looks at his coffee. "You're sure?"
"Boot prints match the east ridge, the rodeo, Viv's cattle guard, Durrell's lease. He's got the telemetry background. He had the access and he knew every move we made before we made it."
Colt is quiet for a long moment. "He was with Dad since before either of us could work the south pasture."
"I know."
"How'd Cutter get to him?"
"Britta was in Billings from February. I offered in April. He said no." I pause. "I think he'd already said yes to someone else."
Colt sets his mug down. Outside, Hank has apparently accepted his fate and gone quiet. The refrigerator hums.
"You want me to come with you?"
"No."
"Luke."
"Dad hired him," I say. "I'll go alone."
Colt holds my eye for a moment. He has the McAllister face, same jaw, same way of going completely still when something is decided. Then he nods once, the way our father used to when a thing was settled and there was nothing left to pull at.
"Ellery called me from the parking lot," he says. "She said Mags walked."
"Yeah."
"You think you've lost her?"
I push back from the table. "First woman in years I've given a damn about, and I sat on my hands in front of sixty people." I pick up my hat. "So yeah. Maybe."
Colt looks at me the way he looked at me the morning after Dad died, when neither of us had slept and the ranch still needed feeding. Steady. Not fixing it. Just present.
"Go take care of Jesse," he says. "Then go get her back."
"In that order?"
"In that order. You use one to buy the other and she'll know it."
I put my hat on. He's right and we both know it and neither of us says so, which is the McAllister way of agreeing on something.
"Dad would've handled it the same way," he says.
I look at him. "Which part?"
"Both."
The drive to Jesse's place is eleven minutes from Colt's.
I know the road without thinking about it.
I've driven it a hundred times, usually to pick Jesse up for an early start or drop parts off when his truck was in for service.
The road knows my tires and I know every bend in it.
Tonight it feels like the longest eleven minutes I've covered in a long time.
I think about the way Mags's hand felt on my chest four weeks ago, flat and deliberate, stopping me before anything could start, and the way I'd stepped back without asking why because I'd seen something in her face I didn't want to crowd.
I'd told myself it was patience. Maybe it was.
Maybe it was also the cowardice of a man who'd rather wait than hear something he can't fix.
I should have asked.
I'm almost to the turn.
Jesse's porch light is on.
I pull in, cut the engine, and sit for one more minute in the dark with the mountains at my back and my father's land somewhere behind me and the name of the man who helped take pieces of it settling into my chest like a stone dropping into still water. Slow. Final. Already too far down to reach.
Then I get out of the truck.