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Twelve-forty. I’d been in the Bluebird for twenty-six minutes and a four-top of retired ranchers had diagnosed my entire situation, my professional judgment, and apparently my future plans.

I gathered my clipboard. The pen went in my pocket. The coffee stayed on the table, half-drunk, still warm.

At the door, the bell rang behind me. The noon sun hit the sidewalk and I squinted against it, my sunglasses still in my bag, the second pair I’d lose this week if I didn’t start keeping track.

***

In the parking lot, I sat in the car with the clipboard on the passenger seat and the diner’s coffee still warm in my chest.

The lot was gravel over dirt, two pickups and my rental sedan, which sat in the space like a memo from a different department. My boots had dried to a stiff gray crust. The linen shirt had a green smear I could identify as creek bank but not as anything I’d be able to explain at a client meeting.

I picked up the clipboard.

I’d said to Cash I’d think about the job, which was not a commitment, which was what producers said before they decided whether the job was survivable.

The job was not survivable.

I went through the list of problems.

Every item on that list was one person’s problem.

One person to find the certificate. One person to fix the site plan. One person to confirm the water, correct the orientation, solve the seep, build the turnaround, and explain to a county office that the Big John Calloway Memorial Rodeo was a real event and not a sentiment.

One person to hold all of it.

In Denver, I’d been that person — the one who held the contract, the schedule, the vendor list, the liability filing, the venue agreement, the permitting chain, the parking plan, the emergency services coordination, the sound, the lights, the insurance, the budget.

I’d held all of it, and it had still come down, and the debt I’d taken on to start again sat in my accounts like a second heartbeat, thumping every month when the payment came due.

I’d sworn I wouldn’t do it again.

Not the debt. Not the trusting. Not the architecture of disaster: one person holding everything, one person smiling, and the space between them filled with reassurance that had no foundation.

I’d sworn.

My phone sat in the cup holder. The screen was dark. I picked it up, checked it — no new messages, nothing urgent, nothing that needed me — and set it down again. Picked it up. Checked it. Set it down.

The screen stayed dark.

I sat in the parking lot of the Bluebird Diner in Silver Bend, Montana, population small enough to fit in a high school gym, and I did the thing I’d been refusing to do since I’d driven through the first cottonwood on the ranch road.

I thought about Cash Calloway.

Not the job. Not the certificate. Not the seep or the gate or the tape measure.

Him.

The sandy hair and the green eyes and the grin that took up his whole face and the dimples that he deployed like equipment, and the way he’d stood in the field with his hand out and his name hanging in the air and the absolute confidence of a man who’d never met a room he couldn’t win.

He was good-looking.

He was good-looking in the way that made women take calls they shouldn’t and men buy drinks for strangers and entire rooms rearrange their seating around the gravitational pull of a smile.

He was good-looking and he was charming and he had a belt buckle, and he had laughed and gone quiet when I’d suggested naming the rodeo after his father, and something in my chest had shifted before I could stop it.

I chewed the inside of my cheek.

This was not going to happen.