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Then he did, stepping forward to check the runoff channel I’d dug that afternoon, and I stood in the dark with the flashlight and the wet ground and the place on my hand where his knuckles had been.

We ran the test twice more. The second run was faster — I knew the valve now, the resistance in the rebar handle, the point where it caught and needed a second push. He knew the hose, the three places it wanted to kink, the rut near the seventh flag that caught the canvas every time. We worked without talking, a rhythm built in four hours of failure and adjustment, and by the last run the water flowed clean from the tank to the tenth flag and the ground was dark and even and the timer on my smartwatch read fifty-three minutes from valve open to valve close.

Under the ninety I’d estimated.

I wrote the number on the clipboard. My hand was steady. My pulse was not.

Cash rolled the hose. He did it alone, walking it back toward the truck in a wide loop, feeding the canvas over his shoulder and under his arm, the way he’d probably rolled a thousand hoses and a thousand ropes and a thousand lariats in a life that had started on this ground and circled through every arena in the mountain west and come back here.

I held the flashlight and watched him and did not look away.

***

The coupling blew at the tank end.

I was walking back from the test grid with the clipboard when I heard the brass let go — a sharp, wet pop, like a cork pulled from a bottle by someone who hadn’t planned what came after. The cam-lock fitting separated from the discharge port and the hose whipped once, hard, and a four-inch column of water hit Cash square in the chest.

He staggered back a step. The hose swung wide, caught me across the hip and thigh, and the water — tank-cooled, creek-cold, fifteen hundred gallons of Montana groundwater under gravity feed — soaked through my jeans and up my flannel and into my boots in the time it took to understand what had happened.

I was wet.

Not damp. Not splashed. Wet from the waist down, the flannel plastered to my stomach where the hose had caught me, my hair — loose, because I’d pulled the elastic out hours ago — hanging in heavy ropes against my neck. The clipboard had taken the spray across its face, and my notes blurred, ink running blue down the page.

Cash grabbed the hose and killed the flow, crimping it against his thigh with both hands. Water still leaked from the separated fitting, pooling around his boots, but the column had stopped. He stood there holding the hose shut, his shirt soaked through to the skin, the flannel dark and heavy across his shoulders, his hat dripping from the brim.

And I laughed.

Not the controlled exhale I sometimes gave when a client made a joke I’d already heard. Not the polite sound I made in meetings when someone needed encouragement. This came from lower and louder and further back, from somewhere I hadn’t visited in a long time, and it came out whole — a sound that filled my chest and my throat and the space between us, and it kept going, and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t want to stop it, and that was the strangest part.

I heard myself and didn’t recognize the sound.

I stopped. Mid-laugh, my mouth open, my hands on the wet clipboard, my feet in two inches of water. I stood there and listened to the echo of it fading across the empty field, and I thought: that was me. That sound came from me. I made that noise. I laughed like that.

I couldn’t remember the last time.

Cash had gone still.

He was holding the crimped hose against his leg, water dripping from his hat brim in a steady stream, and he was looking at me. Not smiling. Not grinning. Not the dimples, not the performance, not the room-warming charm I’d spent two weeks building antibodies against. He was looking at me with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before — open, unguarded, the face of a man who had just heard something he hadn’t expected to hear and was still receiving it.

Then his eyes changed.

One degree. A shift in the green, visible even in the low light. The hose was still in his hands. The water was still leaking from the fitting. The tank was still half full. And he was looking at me with the face of a man who had just made a decision.

He released the crimp.

The hose surged. The fitting was still separated from the port, and the water came out in an uncontrolled arc — not the test grid’s measured flow but a wild, high spray that fanned across the space between us. He caught the end of the hose and swung it toward me.

The water hit me in the shoulder.

Cold. Shocking. The kind of cold that bypassed thought and went straight to sound.

I shrieked.

Not a dignified sound. A shriek — high, involuntary, the noise of a woman who had just taken fifteen hundred gallons of creek water to the chest at eleven o’clock at night in a hayfield in Montana.

He was laughing. Not the room laugh. The real one, the one I’d heard once before when I’d suggested naming the rodeo after his father — sudden and loud and uncontrolled, the kind that came out before the mouth could shape it.

I laughed too, louder this time, matching his.