Page 18 of Kid Gloves

"Grady sent me the hole," she says, holding up her phone, delighted. "It's a tunnel system, Wade. They had a spoil pile. I've raised a heist crew."

"Waffle Iron," I say.

"You named a goat after breakfast equipment."

"I name for the record. That animal ate a federal demonstration script."

"And nothing else all day, she's very disciplined." She scoots over. Trough hospitality. I sit, and the evening does what Texas evenings do, goes gold and then blue, and the kennel wall's still warm at our backs and neither of us fills the quiet, which, with her, I've learned means something's coming.

"That thing you said to Duarte," she says finally. "'We've found unpredictability training improves outcomes.' You covered for my goats in front of the government."

"I closed on your goats in front of the government. Different thing."

"Wade Mercer." She turns to look at me, and it's dark enough now that looking is safe, which is a lie I notice myself telling. "You laughed today. In front of witnesses. Wanda's going to have to open a new page in the ledger."

"There's a ledger page for that?"

"There's been a ledger page for that since last May. Jake showed me. I'm down for 'before the Fourth,' so really, you laughing today was fiscally⁠—"

I never find out what it was fiscally. She's close, is the thing — closer than the trough requires, puppy breathing in her lap, hair still wrecked from the ambush, eyes doing the storm-glass thing they do when she's talking fast to outrun a feeling, and the fence line we agreed on is somewhere behind us both in the dark, and I watch her register it the same second I do, the way the air goes weighted, the way her sentence just — stops. Neither of us moves. Then both of us do, an inch, the inch, her chin tipping, my hand finding the trough edge beside her hip, close enough to feel her breath stall⁠—

Gary crows.

Not distant. Not muffled. From the kennel roof directly above us, 2114 hours, a full tactical rooster reveille eight feet over our heads, and Biscuit startles awake and headbutts Delaney in the jaw, and she yelps, and I'm on my feet in a combat stance facing a chicken, and the moment isn't dead, it's been given a military funeral.

Delaney looks at Gary. Gary, backlit by the yard light, surveys his work.

"He was trained," she says, rubbing her jaw, laughing in that unguarded bark I'd sell acreage to hear on schedule. "Somebody trained him. This is a psy-op."

"Goodnight, Delaney."

"Wanda's going to want a statement⁠—"

"Goodnight."

I get her laughter all the way across the yard, which is worse than the almost, or better. I've lost the ability to grade it.

At the whiteboard, the marker's where she left it — four goat entries since #14, none of them my proudest filing. I write:

Incident #19—2114 hrs. Subject: GARY. Crowed from Kennel B roof. Startled personnel. Corrective action:

And I stand there, marker capped against the board, because the honest end of that sentence isn't about the rooster, and the yard light's on across the way, and her shadow crosses the guest house curtain once, twice, talking to somebody — the dog, the puppies, the drawer she thinks I haven't noticed her jaw tighten at. The truth is I owe Gary. Another two seconds on that trough and I'd have kissed her with the government's ink still wet, with her barn still a hole in her life that my contract profits from, with everything unsaid. She deserves the version of this where I've said things.

Corrective action, I write: none sought.

Let Jake tell Wanda. He will anyway.

Chapter 7

Delaney

Avoiding a man on his own three hundred acres requires logistics, and I've been running them since 6 a.m.

Not avoiding, I tell the puppies while I set up the morning's surface work. Staggering. Wade Mercer and I are staggering our schedules like reasonable adults who almost made a catastrophic filing error on a water trough last night and were saved by a rooster. If I take the pups to the small yard at seven, and he runs the obedience group at eight, and we both agree to develop a sudden fascination with opposite ends of the property, then nobody has to stand in daylight and look at anybody, and the ranch can go on pretending the air out here didn't change composition at 9:14 p.m.

"It's a solid system," I tell Biscuit.

Biscuit bites the wobble board. Everyone's a critic.