Chapter 9
Conner
I go to Dutch’s on Wednesday afternoon because a woman told me the coffee was growing on her, and I’ve been thinking about it for twenty-four hours.
Not just the coffee line. The gas station.
The way she said “I know who you are” like it had slipped out before she could catch it, and the flash of something—annoyance, maybe, at herself—that crossed her face afterward.
The broken card reader banter. The fuel gauge she spotted.
The almost-laugh I caught before she pulled it back behind the wall.
And the last thing. The thing she said without turning around, looking straight ahead through the windshield like she was talking to herself as much as to me.
I don’t know anyone here. And I don’t trust easy. But Dutch’s coffee is growing on me.
That wasn’t an accident. That was an invitation from a woman who doesn’t give them lightly, and if I don’t show up, the door closes.
So I’m here. Three-thirty on a Wednesday because, for some reason, that feels like the right time. The diner is quiet. Patty is restocking the pie case, and the jukebox is playing to an empty room. I take a seat.
Patty pours me a coffee with the efficiency of a woman who’s been doing this since before I could reach the counter. “You’re here early.”
“Slow day.”
“Uh-huh.” She gives me a look that says she’s not buying it, but is too professional to say so. Or too entertained.
I drink the coffee. It’s bad. It’s always bad. I’ve been drinking it my whole life.
The door opens.
I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. My wolf tells me before the bell finishes chiming: the sudden stillness, the focus, the pull that locks onto her.
She walks past me to a stool three seats down. Sits. Doesn’t look at me directly, but I catch the half-second where her eyes track across my face before she turns to the counter.
“Hey, Patty. Coffee, please.”
“Coming up, hon.”
Patty pours. Willow wraps her hands around the mug. The silence between us has a strange quality. Not awkward, not hostile. Charged. Two people who’ve been circling each other for days, sitting three feet apart, both pretending they ended up here by coincidence.
I break first. “You came.”
“The coffee.” She takes a sip. Doesn’t react to the taste, which tells me she’s either very polite or very focused on not looking at me. “It’s growing on me. Like you said.”
“I’m pretty sure you said that.”
“Did I?” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Must have been the gas fumes.”
I shift one stool closer. She doesn’t move away.
“So,” I say. “You tried the Caldwell place. The Hollis ranch. Nobody’s hiring.”
“Nobody’s hiring outsiders. That seems to be the theme. What did your foreman say?”
“He’s running a full team already.” I feel bad as I say it, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I like the idea of her being just one of my family’s hired hands.
“Great.” She pulls a face. “Can’t catch a break anywhere.”
“It’s not personal. The ranches around here run family crews. Have done for generations. Taking on someone new means vouching for them, and people don’t vouch for strangers.”
“That sounds personal to me.”
“That sounds like the Hill Country.” I take a drink of coffee. “What brought you out this way? Specifically. There’s a hundred towns between here and Arkansas where a person who knows cattle could find work.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Considering. Choosing what to share.
“I’m traveling with a friend. Briar. We’ve been moving around for a while, looking for somewhere that fits.” She turns the mug slowly between her hands. “Briar’s more of the keep-your-head-down type. I’m the one who talks to people. Probably why she’s smarter than me.”
“She’s the one in the hills?”
A small hesitation. “She likes being outdoors. Doesn’t do well sitting still.”
Briar. The quiet one has a name. I log it without reacting.
“And you?” I ask. “Do you do well sitting still?”
“I used to. Not anymore.” She stares down into her coffee. “After a while, moving becomes the default. You forget what it feels like to stay.”
There’s something underneath the words. Loss. Displacement. The tone of a woman who’s talking about more than a road trip, and who knows it, and is deciding how close to let me get to whatever’s underneath.
I don’t push.
She’s looking out the window at the hills. “It’s dry,” she says. Not a complaint. An observation. “Where I’m from, there’s water everywhere. Creeks in every hollow. Here it looks like the land’s holding its breath.”
“That’s because it is. You want to know what makes this place tick? It’s not the ranches. It’s not the cattle. It’s the water.”
“Tell me.”
“You see those hills?” I nod toward the window. “Underneath all of that is the Edwards Aquifer. Biggest underground water system in Texas. Every spring, every creek, every swimming hole within sixty miles… that’s the aquifer surfacing. The whole landscape is built on top of water you can’t see.”
“And the ranches tap into it?”
“Some do. Wells, mostly. But the springs are what matter. In August, when the plateau dries out and everything goes brown, the only green left is where the springs break through. The live oaks and the bald cypress crowd around those spots like they’re guarding them.
You can map the aquifer just by looking at where things are still alive. ”
She’s turned on the stool to face me. Not all the way; one elbow still on the counter, her coffee between her hands. But her body’s angled toward me, and she’s listening with everything she has.
“What about drought years?” she asks. “When the water table drops?”
“Then it gets ugly. The springs go dry. The creeks stop running. Ranchers who don’t have deep wells start losing cattle.
” I take a drink. “Happened a few years back. The Pedernales—runs about twenty miles south of here—went down to bare rock in places. Hadn’t done that since the fifties.
Some of the older ranches lost a third of their herd. ”
“But not yours.”
“My grandfather drilled three wells when he built the compound. Went deeper than anyone else was willing to pay for. People called him paranoid.”
“Smart paranoid.”
“That’s the Forrester motto. Should put it on the gate.”
She almost laughs. I see it. The shift in her expression, the warmth surfacing. She’s trying to keep her distance, but she’s losing the fight.
“What about the cedar?” She nods toward the hills where the dark trees crowd the ridgelines. “I’ve never seen it this thick. Where I’m from, it’s all hardwood… oak and hickory.”
“It’s actually Ashe juniper. The Hill Country’s curse. Half the county’s allergic. Come January, the pollen’s so thick you can see it rolling off the hills. Looks like smoke. People think there’s a wildfire and call 911.”
“Seriously?”
“Every year. Dispatch has a standard response: ‘It’s cedar fever, ma’am. Close your windows.’” I shake my head. “The old-timers cleared it when they could, but it grows back faster than you can cut it. Aggressive. Stubborn. Takes over everything if you let it.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“The cedar or the old-timers?”
“Both.”
This time, the laugh gets out. Brief, warm, real. Her face opens, and for a second I see her without the walls: the quick intelligence, the warmth she keeps banked, the lines at the corners of her eyes that say she used to laugh more than she does now.
My chest does something I’m not prepared for.
“There’s a swimming hole,” I say, because my mouth is apparently operating independently today.
“In a canyon south of town. A spring feeds it year-round. Even in August, it’s full.
The water’s so clear you can count pebbles on the bottom from twelve feet up.
Trees all around it. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t feel like it should exist.”
“Hidden?”
“Not exactly. Locals know it. But it’s not on any map, and you can’t find it from the road. You have to know which trail to take.” I hear myself and stop. I’m describing my favorite place to a woman I’ve known for less than a week.
“Where I grew up, we had a place like that,” she says, quieter now.
“A pool at the base of a waterfall, tucked into a hollow between two ridges. Hickory and red oak so thick overhead you could barely see the sky. The water was cold. Always cold, even in July. When I was a kid, I thought it was magic.”
“Where was this?”
“East. Hill country, but different from yours. Green. Wet. The kind of place where everything grows, whether you want it to or not.”
“You miss it.”
The pause is a beat too long. “Every day.”
“What happened?”
Another pause. Her expression doesn’t close exactly, but something behind it steps back. “Things changed. People left. The land’s still there, but it’s not the same place it was.”
I know that feeling. Not from personal experience. My world hasn’t changed, not for me. But I’ve watched other wolves lose territory to politics, to expansion. I know what it looks like in a person’s face when they talk about a home that still exists but isn’t theirs anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be. It made me who I am.” She reaches for a nearby napkin and folds it. Then folds it again. “All of it.”
The way she says all of it carries significance I don’t fully understand. As if “all of it” includes more than a change of scenery. Loss. Damage. Things she’s not going to tell me over diner coffee.
She’s quiet for a moment. She folds the napkin yet again… slow, absent.
“There’s a thing this weekend,” I say. “Saturday. Barbecue at the compound community grounds. Live music, food, the whole town comes out. Open event, not a family thing.”
She tilts her head. “Are you inviting me?”
“I’m mentioning it exists and suggesting you might enjoy it.”
“That’s smooth.”
“I try.”
“You don’t, actually. That’s what makes it work.” She drains her mug. “What time?”
“Starts around four. I could pick you up.”
“I’ll drive myself.”
“That’s a yes?”
“That’s a ‘I might enjoy it.’” She stands. Pulls a few bills from her pocket and puts them on the counter.
“I should get back,” she says. “Briar will be wondering where I am.”
“Saturday,” I say.
“Saturday.”
She walks out, and the door swings shut. Patty appears at my elbow, refilling a cup I don’t need.
“She seems nice,” Patty says, with the carefully neutral tone of a woman who’s already composing the text message to every friend she has.
“She seems like a lot of things.”
“Mmhmm.” Patty moves on. The mmhmm carries enough weight for a sermon. I smile as I push my mug away. I don’t leave yet, though. I sit for a minute. The diner is quiet. The jukebox plays something with a fiddle. Patty wipes down the counter, not looking at me, not needing to.
I think about the way she talked about her hills. The pool. The waterfall. The land that isn’t hers anymore. I think about how she said “all of it” and the weight the words carried.
And I think about how easy it was. Not the attraction; that’s been easy since the Railhead…
easy and impossible and entirely outside my control.
I mean the talking. The way conversation moved between us without effort, the way she asked questions that showed she understood the answers before I gave them.
She knows land. She knows water and cattle and the way a place gets into your bones.
She knows it the way I know it; not as information, but as identity.
I’ve never met a woman who speaks my language like that.
My wolf is settled. Quiet. Waiting with the patience of something that knows what it wants.
I should be worried about that.
I am worried about that.
But I’m already thinking about Saturday.