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“A man being funny at a woman who’s already told him no isn’t charm. It’s just making her say it twice. She’d have laughed, maybe. She’d have liked me. And the answer would still be the same, except now she’d feel worse about giving it.”

The road unwound. The river fell behind. Open range spread to the east, brown grass and sage, the mountains holding the far distance in blue.

“I’ve done it before,” I said. “The charm. The room. The whole performance. I’ve done it in rooms where it was welcome and rooms where it wasn’t, and the difference is something I should’ve learned a long time before I did.”

I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel and the thing I’d just said sitting in the cab between us, heavier than I’d intended.

Priya was quiet.

Not the clipboard quiet. Not the working quiet. A different one — the quiet of someone rearranging a picture they’d already finished.

“Huh,” she said.

One syllable. Flat. Not a judgment, not a compliment. The sound of a woman filing new information into a cabinet she’d thought was closed.

We drove.

The valley opened ahead, wide and sunlit, the hayfields pale gold on both sides of the road. Irrigation pivots stood like skeletons against the sky. A hawk circled over the east pasture, riding thermals in slow, tilted arcs.

I reached for the radio.

The dial was old — AM/FM, one speaker in the dash that worked and one in the door that didn’t. The volume knob was sticky. I found a station by feel, the way I always did, and country guitar filled the cab at low volume, something with a fiddle and a man singing about a road.

Then I stopped.

“What do you want on?” I asked.

She looked at me.

Not a quick glance. Not the professional scan she gave a room or a site plan or a problem on a list. She looked at me the way someone looks at a door they didn’t know was there.

“What?”

“The radio. What do you want to listen to?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her hand went to her hair, pushed it behind her ear, came back to her lap.

“I don’t—” She stopped. Looked at the radio. Looked at me. “Nobody has asked me that before.”

“It’s a radio, not a deposition.”

“I know what it is.” She said it sharper than the question deserved, then softened. “I mean — people don’t usually — I pick the playlist for events. I pick the music for the drive. I pick the—”

She stopped again.

Her hand was in her lap, fingers laced together, and she was staring at them with an expression I hadn’t seen on her before. Not the competent mask. Not the tired foundation. Something younger and less guarded, the face of a woman who had just noticed something about her own life that she hadn’t expected to notice in a truck that smelled like hay.

“Whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“You care.”

“I don’t.”

“Your smartwatch says you care. You’ve checked it four times since we got in the truck. You care about everything.”

Her mouth twitched.

“Country’s fine,” she said.