Page 82 of Wild Sanctuary

A promise is still a promise.

And even if it wasn’t, she’s leaving soon.

Giving in now just means I get to lose her twice.

I finish my coffee and rinse the mug, shoulder to shoulder with Maggie, who bumps me with her elbow in a way that could mean everything or nothing.

“You’re going tonight.” It’s not a question.

“I spent two thousand dollars. Not a lot of room to maneuver.”

“Dolly Briggs has called me four times.” She bites into her toast. “Four, Wyatt. She has theories about you that would make a romance novelist blush.”

“Dolly has theories about the mailman. Doesn’t make them accurate.”

“Dolly’s theories about the mailman turned out to be dead-on, actually, but that’s a story for another Sunday dinner.” She polishes off the crust and wipes her hands on her scrubs. “It’s just dinner. I’m sure you’ll survive.”

I’m not as sure about that as she is, but I nod like a man who has the situation firmly under control, and she leaves the kitchen trailing the faint smell of antiseptic and a woman who’s been up since four delivering a calf.

The hours between morning and afternoon pass in feed runs and fence checks and the kind of physical work that keeps a man’s hands busy while his mind goes wherever it wants. Mine goes where it’s been going all day, which is nowhere useful.

June gets back around three and the kitchen fills up the way it does on weekends, by gravity rather than invitation.

West comes in from the paddock, quiet as a closing door. Colt is back at the table with what looks like his third coffee and the remains of a sandwich. Maggie reappears, showered and in clean clothes, an improvement over the iodine-smeared scrubs.

June sets two grocery bags on the counter and turns to face the room, clearly enjoying the power of withholding whatever she knows.

“So.” Her eyes land on each of us. “The Blackstone Inn.”

“Here we go,” Colt murmurs.

“Shelby’s pulled out all the stops for tonight. The Bozeman Gazette and the Helena Independent are both sending people. Apparently, a small town rallying to save its ranching families is the kind of feel-good story editors can’t resist.” She says it lightly, but the satisfaction underneath is real.

And deserved.

“Auction couples are to be seated for dinner first, and afterward they’re opening the back terrace for the rest of town.” She pauses, and it has a quality to it I recognize from fourteen years of living with this woman. “And they’ve set up a mechanical bull.”

The silence that follows is specific and weighted.

Colt’s mug stops halfway to his mouth. “A mechanical bull?”

“And a lasso station. And a barrel racing course.” June unpacks groceries with the calm precision of a woman who has orchestrated every detail of this and is now watching the consequences unfold exactly as intended. “Photo opportunities for the winners and their dates. The Gazette wants action shots. Very on-brand for the western theme.”

Colt sets his mug down. His face cycles through three things in quick succession: the cocky grin that’s his factory setting, a raw edge underneath that most people would miss entirely, and then the grin sliding back into place so smooth you’d swear the middle part never happened.

I caught it, though. I always do.

A man who rode saddle bronc at the national level is sitting at my kitchen table, treating a mechanical bull at a charity dinner like the funniest thing he’s heard all week.

The space between the joke and the truth is the place where my brother lives most of his life. He’s got his own auction date tonight, and this puts him back in a saddle, even a fake one, in front of the whole town.

He’s already grinning.

Same dance I do with all of them. The work of catching what they don’t say. Three years on, and I’m still figuring out how Dad managed it without any of us catching him at it.

“I’m bringing popcorn,” Maggie pipes up from the counter. “To watch the fallout.”

West, who hasn’t said a word since he walked in, leans back to extend his fist toward Maggie. She bumps it without hesitation. Crisp and silent.