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“Country’s what’s on.”

“Then country’s fine.”

I left it. The fiddle played. The road carried us north.

She leaned her head against the window. Not all the way. An inch, maybe. The glass would be warm from the sun.

She didn’t check her watch again for the rest of the drive.

***

We sat at the bunkhouse table with the graph paper between us and Dena Fry’s conditions on top of it.

Priya worked fast.

She’d taken the denial — fire ban, water haulage, inspection, fees — and the original list, and she was building something out of them that looked less like a list and more like a battle plan. Her pen moved in clean strokes, numbering items, drawing arrows between dependencies, separating the things that could happen now from the things that had to wait.

“Fire ban lifts on county authority,” she said, not to me, to the page. “We can’t control that. We can control the water documentation. A licensed hydrologist — is there one in Ennis?”

“Doc Whitmore might know somebody.”

“Ask him. That’s yours.” She wrote his name on my side of the page. “Water haulage plan is mine. I’ll draft the volume estimate from creek data and submit it with the hydrologist’s certification once we have it.”

She drew a line between the two items. Dependency. His before hers.

“Insurance certificate. Mine. I’ll call three brokers Monday afternoon.” She wrote that down, circled it, and moved on. “Stock contractor deposits. Yours. Arena prep — yours, but the seep drainage has to be engineered before any construction starts. I’ll find a grading contractor. Vendor outreach — yours, but no contracts until I review them.”

She tore the page in half.

Not dramatically. Along a clean line she’d drawn down the center, the paper separating with a soft rip. She slid my half across the table.

I picked it up.

At the bottom, in small letters, she’d written a date: July 15 — file deadline.

“You’re good at this,” I said.

She looked up. The pen hovered over her half of the list.

“I’m adequate at this,” she said. “I’m good at the part where I hold everything together and don’t sleep. That’s the skill set you’re looking at.”

She said it flat. Not self-pitying. Inventory. The same voice she’d used on the seep and the gate and the ambulance access. She was an item on her own list, and she’d filed herself under capacity.

I studied my half of the page. She’d translated the chaos of a county denial into a sequence of steps that a man with a tape measure and a broken truck could follow.

She folded her half and tucked it into the clipboard.

“One more thing,” she said.

She set the clipboard on the table. Her hands went flat on the surface, fingers spread. “The motel in Ennis. Plus the drive, plus gas, plus the time I lose commuting — it’s six hundred and eighty dollars minimum. Probably more.”

She said the number the way Dena Fry had said the fees. Gently. Finally.

“The event needs that money.”

I looked at her.

She’d cut her own bed.