PART ONE MACKENZIE
"You're quiet," he says, one hand draped over the wheel same as it was the first time I ever saw him, except now I know exactly what that hand can do to me and the knowing changes everything about watching it.
"I'm doing math."
"Dangerous pastime for you."
"Nine years in an apartment and it all fit in one trailer with room to spare.
Skis, a kayak I haven't paddled since the academy, a few boxes of books, and the cast iron, which I refuse to apologize for.
" I watch Idaho thin out behind us, the Montana line coming up somewhere past the next ridge.
"That's either very Zen or very sad and I haven't decided which. "
"It's neither. It's efficient." He glances over. "I like efficient."
"You would."
We stop in Butte to visit John and Miles for a quick hello.
Miles comes flying out of the house in socked feet, already narrating something about a rope swing he built without permission.
It takes Holt exactly four seconds to get pulled into a wrestling match on the lawn that ends in peals of tickling screams from Miles.
"You married into a circus," John tells me, handing me a coffee I didn't ask for and clearly needed.
"I'm not married."
"Give it time." He watches Holt get tackled by an eight-year-old with total, gleeful surrender. "I've known him since we were twenty-two, and he never laughed like that in any of it. Miles didn't do that. You did."
We're back on the road inside the hour, Miles's drawing of a black truck with too-big wheels riding shotgun on my dashboard now, a second one to keep the refrigerator company.
"Tell me something," Holt says, once Butte's gone small in the mirror. "You know everything about me. The Army, the ranch, the family. I don't know where you learned to throw a rope over a fence post like you were raised on one."
"Choteau. Until I was twelve." I watch the Big Belt Mountains come up blue on the horizon.
"My parents split that year. My mom remarried, moved to California, and decided the desert suited her better than snow ever did.
I don't talk to her much. She sends a card at Christmas that always has a beach on it, which feels like a joke she doesn't know she's making. "
"No brothers, sisters?"
"Just me." I say it easy, because it stopped being a wound a long time ago, mostly. "I went to the University of Utah. Accounting degree, if you can believe a woman who almost failed statistics twice built her whole career on numbers."
"I believe it. You've been running numbers on me since an airport curb."
Holt's thumb moves once over my knuckles, slow, like he's marking down every fact I hand him somewhere I can't see.
"I decided I wanted the Bureau at twenty. Sat in a career fair in Salt Lake bored out of my mind, and a recruiter mentioned financial crimes, and something in me just locked onto it like a dog on a scent. Never wavered since."
"Twenty's young to know."
"Some people just know right away." I look at him, and I let him see exactly what I mean by it.
Something in his jaw does the thing it does now when he's trying not to grin and losing.
"The rest of it: my friends are river people.
I guided three summers on the Colorado out of Moab before the Bureau.
Ran the Yampa in high water once and nearly lost a raft full of Boy Scouts, which is a story I will tell you in full only after several drinks. "
"Can't wait. What else?"
"Skied Alta and Snowbird every winter I could afford a pass. Trail ran the Wasatch until my knees started sending invoices." I watch a hawk work the thermals off the interstate. "I had a whole life before Rimrock, Blackwater. Turns out it just needed a trailer to move it."
"Good thing I've got a house with a mountain view and entirely too many dead things on the porch." His hand finds mine on the console, easy, certain. "Plenty of room for a trailer's worth of you."
"Hoover already voted. He did it the day I named him."
"Hoover doesn't get a vote."
The Front comes up ahead of us an hour past Butte, granite going gold in the late light.
Somewhere in front of that ridgeline is a house with a key already on my ring and a mountain view I've been dreaming about since a loft window in March.
"Ready to go home?" Holt asks, threading his fingers through mine on the console as he takes the exit off the interstate onto Highway 89, the last stretch running straight for Rimrock through the dusk.
"Yeah." I mean it more than the word carries. He said home, easy, like it was never a question.
And under it, where his fingers are still laced with mine, the same electricity there's always been, running straight down to my core. "I'm ready."