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Wyoming was dark and long and I drove it without the radio. The road unspooled in the headlights and the yellow center line came at me in a steady rhythm. My hands were at ten and two. The drawing pressed against my chest with each breath.

Somewhere past Casper, the sky began to lighten. Not dawn — the pre-dawn, the gray that comes up over the plains when the sun is still below the horizon and the land reveals itself in stages, the buttes first, then the draws, then the fence lines, then the grass. I’d been driving for five hours. My eyes were dry. The smartwatch on my wrist said 5:47 and the heart rate was elevated and I hadn’t eaten since the half bagel in Denver, which had been a long time ago.

I passed Sheridan at seven. The town sat in a valley with the Bighorns behind it and the morning light was on the peaks and the peaks were the color of bread crust. I drove past the exit because stopping was a decision and I hadn’t made it yet.

I was past Sheridan when the question assembled.

I’d been trying to draft the sentence since Denver. The stationery had one line — To: Carrow Creek Ranch — and the line was a memo header, a professional document, the opening of a handover or a proposal or a request for a meeting, and every version I’d run in my head had been a version of the memo. I’d like to discuss the remaining vendor contracts. I’m available to consult on the event. I apologize for the manner of my departure. Each one landed flat because each one was a producer’s sentence, and the producer was not the woman who needed to walk through his door.

What did I need?

Not the job. The job was done — the binders were finished, the amendment was through, the permit was on his fridge. He didn’t need a producer. He had a rodeo.

Not to be fixed. He’d told me that in the tack room — I can’t fix it — and I’d said I know, that’s why it worked.

Not absolution. Ansel had offered absolution in a cardigan and I’d turned it down because absolution handed to you by someone who only knew the file was a receipt, and I had a drawer full of receipts.

I needed evenings.

His floor. The pen. Permission to be silly for an hour — to draw cows with desk jobs and name them and laugh and have a man’s voice read me a western in a cadence I could feel through his shins. Permission to stop being the woman who checked everything. Permission to put the phone on the shelf at nine and let the shelf hold it and let the room be a room instead of a control center.

I said it out loud. In the car. At seventy-five miles an hour on US-14, with the Bighorns behind me and the Absarokas ahead and nobody in the car to hear it.

“I want evenings on your floor.”

The words sounded ridiculous. They sounded small and nothing like a grand romantic declaration. They sounded like a woman asking a man for crayons.

I drove on.

The Absarokas rose on the left. The road climbed. The air thinned and the engine adjusted and the landscape changed — the high plains giving way to the mountain west, the grass going from brown to gray-green, the fences getting closer together, the ranches getting smaller and more frequent. Montana was ahead. The sign said WELCOME and the state line was a line on the road and the road kept going.

I drove on.

***

Eleven hours.

The GPS hit zero at 12:03 p.m. and I turned off the state highway onto the county road and the gravel started under the tires and the sound changed — the rattle of small stones against the wheel wells, the sound that meant Carrow Creek was eight miles ahead.

I’d been driving for eleven hours and my hands were shaking.

Not dramatically. A fine tremor in the fingers, the kind that came from low blood sugar and eleven hours of white-knuckling a steering wheel and not eating since a half bagel in Denver, which had been — I did the math — twenty-three hours ago. The smartwatch said my heart rate was ninety-four at rest, which was not resting, which was the heart of a woman whose body had started filing complaints.

I knew this body. I’d been running it on coffee and deadline for two years, filling the tank when it was empty and calling it efficiency, skipping meals and calling it focus, running on four hours and calling it dedication. The body had cooperated because the body had no choice — I was the one driving it, and I drove it the way I drove everything, past the warning lights, past the indicators, past the point where a reasonable operator would stop and assess.

The body was done cooperating.

My vision had gone soft at the edges around Livingston. I’d blinked it back. My right wrist — the one I’d wrenched — had started aching somewhere past Bozeman, a deep slow throb that radiated from the carpal bones up into the forearm, and I’d ignored it because ignoring it was the thing I did, and I’d been doing it since before Denver, since before Montana, since I was nine years old and organizing the shoe rack by color and season.

But the shaking was new. The shaking was the body’s last communiqué, the message that said: we are stopping now, whether you drive us or not.

I slowed down. The gravel road was familiar — the same ruts, the same dust, the same fence lines with the same posts. I’d driven this road in June in a rental car with good boots that were the wrong boots and a linen shirt that would never survive Montana and a clipboard on the passenger seat and a phone in the cup holder and a plan. I’d driven it every day for three months, to the feed store, to the permit office, to the arena, to the Bluebird for coffee at six-thirty in the morning.

I was not driving to the ranch.

Not yet. Not like this. Not shaking and empty and running on cedar and adrenaline and a sentence I’d said out loud in the car at seventy-five miles an hour. I could not walk onto that property and into that bunkhouse and say “I want evenings on your floor” while my hands were trembling and my vision was soft and my body was three missed meals past functional. I could not arrive at a man’s door asking for crayons while looking like a woman who couldn’t take care of herself, because the whole point — the whole point — was that he’d taught her she could be taken care of, and showing up unable to stand straight was not the same as showing up willing to be held. One was surrender. The other was collapse. He’d know the difference. He’d see it in the first second.

I turned onto Main Street.