Page 32 of Kid Gloves

"Wade."

"Missed you," I say again, easier, because it turns out the gate swings freer the second time, and she surges up and kisses me like a payout, and Tank sighs from the rug like a chaperone clocking out.

We surface somewhere near five, starving, and raid her kitchen like partners in an old crew — she makes eggs in Gran's dented pan while wearing my recovered shirt, which she has formally annexed, "spoils of war, file a grievance," and I brief her on three days of detail work while she narrates her eggs, and it's the easiest hour I've spent in years, right up until the last five minutes of it.

Because dawn comes up gray and gold through her north window, and she goes to the sill with her coffee the way she does — one hand on Gran's enamel pot, reflex, a touchstone touch — and looks out at the black ribcage of the barn a half mile off, and I watch the happiness in her face make room for the other thing. Not grief exactly. Accounting.

"Contractor says they can start framing in three weeks," she says. "Insurance willing. Ray willing." A breath. "Twenty-seven days, the pups certify. Then the program goes home, per the contract. Your contract. The one you wrote."

"The contract can be amended. I've amended it once already."

"I know." She keeps her eyes on the ribcage. "That's the problem. Every good thing I'm standing in right now is an amendment, Wade. A clause. A temporary structure with a rainfall showerhead. I keep trying to find the part that's just — mine. Ours. Not pending anything." Then she catches herself, the way she does, hears her own weight hit the floor and scoops it back up with a joke: "Ignore me. It's five a.m. and you brought me gummies from a gas station like a Victorian sailor. I'm compromised."

I don't ignore her. I stand behind her and put my chin on her head and look at the burned barn with her, and the 0400 draft comes back to me whole, every clause of it, and it takes everything I've got not to read it into the record right here over the eggs. Not yet. Not as a comfort deployed at a weak moment — she'd smell that, and she'd be right. On paper. Done properly. Something she can read four pages of, standing up, suspicious, and find no catch in.

"Sleep," I say instead. "Both of us. Sunday's legal."

She sleeps like the drawer she thinks I haven't noticed: shut tight, full, one hip always braced against something.

I don't sleep. Old detail habit (the body stands its post a day after the post is gone) so I lie there in the lamp glow with her breathing on my chest and the brindle female snoring from the crate she's outgrown, and my brain does what it does at 0400, which is draft.

Because here's the situation on the ground, as of tonight: her barn rebuild starts within the month. The insurance will pay out, Ray's got it moving, and the pups certify at sixteen weeks, and per the contract I wrote, the program returns to the Boone facility, and the guest house goes back to being a compliant structure with nobody's grandmother on the windowsill. That's the paperwork as it stands. The paperwork as it stands is unacceptable.

So I draft. In my head, on her ceiling, in the oldest language I have.

Facility partnership, Iron Creek K9 and Boone Kennels. Not a lease, not a vendor renewal. A merger of operations. Her land stays hers. That's clause one, that's load-bearing, I've met her. Joint capital investment in the rebuild — bigger barn, her design, our money, shared equity in the structure only. The puppy program permanent, co-owned, her name on it. Fence-line gate, always open, maybe no fence at all along the working sections, and the north acreage, hers, the four hundred acres Halloran's circling with their vulture paper — folded inside Iron Creek's security envelope. Cameras, patrols, the whole perimeter package. Nobody touches her land without coming through ours.

Securing the north acreage. That's how it phrases itself at 0400, in contract voice, and I turn the words over and feel their weight and file them under refine later: securing the north acreage under Iron Creek control. Control's the wrong word. Control is the word the lawyers will like and the exact wrong word for what I mean, which is: her barn should never burn again while I'm alive, and if money and fence and federal-grade insomnia can arrange that, I'd like to be allowed.

Whereas the parties are better together than apart. Whereas the fence line was always a formality. Whereas the porch light stays on.

Monday I'll rough the concept into an actual memo and hand it to Ray to paper properly — Ray's drafted every agreement this ranch has signed for nineteen years, Ray will have it clean and watertight inside a week, Ray will know which county filings touch her acreage. And a rebuild plan drawn to her design, cedar where the spec says cedar, and the whole thing presented right: not a rescue, a merger. Equals. Four pages she can read standing up.

I'll fix the wording later, I tell myself, drifting at last, her heartbeat auditing mine. Securing the north acreage under Iron Creek control. Terrible phrase. Lawyer phrase. Nobody will ever hear it out loud.

I do not fix the wording later.

Chapter 13

Delaney

Happiness and I have a complicated history, so when a solid week of it shows up uninvited, I do what any reasonable woman with my track record does.

I audit it.

"Don't give me that look," I tell Tank, who's supervising from the whelping-room doorway while I run the morning weigh-ins. "People like me don't get a clean streak this long without a catch. There's always a catch. Somewhere in the fine print of all this—" I gesture at the room, the fat thriving puppies, the fifty-eight days of my life that keep coming up cherries—"there's a clause."

Tank yawns. The optimist's rebuttal. He's heard the audit before — I run it weekly, same time as the flea treatments, because dread responds well to a schedule.

But look at the evidence. The pups are a hundred days old and magnificent — every benchmark early, every temperament test green, even the brindle female, who has decided her large personality is best spent leading rather than escaping, mostly. The rebuild broke ground Tuesday: real trucks on my real land, cedar where the spec says cedar, a foundation twice the old footprint because somebody — a tall somebody, a somebody with a pencil behind his ear at my kitchen table at ten at night — keeps saying things like "if we're pouring concrete anyway" and "roughed-in plumbing costs nothing now and everything later," sketching my someday kennel like it's a foregone conclusion.

The insurance advance cleared. Ray walked it through personally, exactly like he promised, called me "honey" and told me not to spend it all on goats. The mortgage is current. The credit card from the vet year is, for the first time since the vet year, breathing.

The rebuild site is my favorite argument in the county. Tuesday evening we walk the framed skeleton of the new barn at golden hour, hard hats and long shadows, and have our standing fight about the whelping-room windows. Wade wants them east—"morning light, passive warmth, it's thermodynamics," and I want them north, on Gran's old sight line, where you could stand at the whelping-room sink and see straight through to the pens.

"North glass is inefficient," he says. "You lose heat all winter for a view."

"It's not a view. It's a supervision corridor." I plant myself where the sink will be and point through empty studs at where the pens will go. "Gran designed the old barn so a woman doing dishes could count puppies without putting her boots on. Forty years, she never lost one overnight. That's not sentiment, Mercer, that's engineering with a casserole in the oven."