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Drank.

Her eyes closed for half a second. Not long. Not a performance. The coffee was good — I’d made it strong because she looked like a woman who needed strong coffee.

She opened her eyes and drank again.

“Thank you,” she said.

Two words. Delivered flat, already moving past them, her gaze tracking toward the bunkhouse door. But she held the mug with both hands, and she hadn’t put it down.

“Site plan’s inside,” I said.

She followed me up the steps. The bunkhouse floor creaked under her boots. She stopped two steps in and looked at the table.

She blinked at it for a moment then walked closer and set the mug down.

She didn’t touch the paper. She stood over it, clipboard against her hip, and read it the way Doc Whitmore read an X-ray — slow, systematic, top to bottom, left to right. Her eyes moved along each line. Her lips pressed together once at the seep marking, then released.

She pulled a pen from her pocket. Leaned down. Made one small note in the margin near the turnaround — a measurement I hadn’t included, the radius of the curve.

Then she straightened.

“It’s good,” she said.

I waited for the rest.

“Not perfect.” She tapped the pen against her clipboard. “Your stock alley overlaps the vendor footprint by about fifteen feet. The water haulage path crosses pedestrian access. And you haven’t marked power runs for the sound system.”

I looked at the plan. She was right. All three.

“But the bones are right,” she said. “The orientation’s correct. The drainage problem is identified. The emergency access is addressed.” She capped the pen. “It’s good.”

The word sat in the bunkhouse.

Good.

Not “this will need redoing.” Not the flat inventory voice from her first day, the one that filed me between the gate and the seep. Good. Said plainly, without qualification, without the softening prefix of someone managing a fragile ego.

She meant it.

Something turned over in my chest. Quiet. Not the roar of a room laughing at the right line, not the slap of a back, not the cheer after Lot 14 sold. Smaller than all of that and heavier.

I didn’t say anything. I picked up her mug from the counter and refilled it from the pot on the stove. Set it back beside her elbow.

She picked it up without looking. Drank. Set it down. Picked up her clipboard.

“We need to file today,” she said. “County offices. Madison County planning and permits — they’re in Virginia City.”

“I know where they are.”

“I know you know. I’m telling you we need to be there when they open.” She checked her watch. “If we leave in five minutes, we’ll make it by nine.”

She looked down at her boots.

The gray stain. The creek mud that had set into the leather like a tattoo. She’d cleaned them and they were still wrong — city boots, wrong boots, the boots of a woman who’d dressed for the job and gotten the job wrong the first week.

“Wish I had better shoes for it,” she said quietly. “I didn’t have time to get new ones.”

“They’re fine,” I said again. “Virginia City’s seen worse. Half the people in that office wear manure to work and call it cologne.”