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And underneath all of it, working up through me slower, was the other thing. The bigger thing.

Biscuit had been a ghost since October. Five months of sleeping in the barn on his old coat that none of us could stand to move, five months of reporting to whichever brother was working and doing her job with her heart someplace we couldn't follow — grieving, wordless and total and without one ounce of self-pity, which was more than any of the rest of us in that family had managed. She hadn't chosen anybody. Not me, not Wyatt, not even Cash, who'd tried everything up to and including bacon. She'd stayed his, faithful to a man five months in the ground, and the three of us had let her, because none of us knew how to tell a dog what we couldn't say to each other.

And she'd taken one look at a mud-drowned woman climbing out of a Ford and come back to life.

I didn't have anywhere to put that. It went down somewhere under the sternum, next to where the locked doors had landed, and it sat there being heavier than both.

The sting, when it filed itself, was almost businesslike. She wasn't afraid of animals — she was the best thing with animals I'd seen since Doc was young, near as I could tell from one porch. She wasn't even afraid of strangers, exactly. She was afraid of me. Of the size and the shoulders and the hands, of the specific shape I take up in a doorway — and that was before anybody in town had even gotten to her. She'd arrived pre-loaded. Some other man somewhere had already taught her to be scared.

It was smart of her. That was the hell of it. It was exactly the right way for a small scared woman to read a man my size, and I'd have told her so myself if telling her wouldn't have required talking, and looming, and being the thing she'd have to be brave about.

Biscuit had melted into a sit against Josie's shins by now, boneless as a feed sack, receiving her ear-work with her eyes shut like it was owed to her.

"Traitor," I told her, deadpan, across the dark.

One thump of the tail on the frozen ground. Filed, acknowledged, overruled.

Josie glanced up at the sound of my voice, and I watched it happen — the warmth banking itself down like a stove door swinging to, not out, just shuttered, the coat going back on over the voice. She didn't stand, and she didn't stop petting, but her shoulders came up an inch, and her eyes made it as far as my collarbone before they found the dog again.

"Is she—" A breath. "Does she need to come in with you, or—"

"Looks like Biscuit's decided," I said. "Argue with her if you want. I never win."

I touched my hat to the pair of them and crossed the bridge alone, boots hollow on Dad's planks, the creek muttering under its rotten ice, and behind me the porch light lay gold on a woman and a dog who'd both had a long five months, and I did not look back, and it took more doing than the truck had.

***

I came up to the house wearing half the county turnoff, and Cash was on me before I got my boots off.

"Whoa. Whoa-ho." He was at the stove with a wooden spoon in his hand and a dish towel over his shoulder, which meant Wyatt had gotten to him about pulling weight and supper was Cash's turn, which meant supper was going to be chili out of last week's beef because that was the entire cookbook Cash carried. He pointed the spoon at me like a prosecutor. "You look like the mud won."

"Mud lost." I stripped my coat and the ruined shirt on the porch, washed to the elbows at the mudroom sink, and pulled a clean flannel off the hook. Behind me I could hear him vibrating.

"The truck's brown to the mirrors, Boo. Both trucks. There are two trucks and one of them is a Ford I've never seen in my life, parked down by the footbridge like it lives here. Talk. Use your words. I know you have at least ten left today, I've been counting."

Wyatt came down at six on the nose, changed out of the banker clothes into ordinary ones, which loosened something in the room a half turn. We sat at the three places we sat, orbiting the empty chair at the head the way we'd orbit it until the house fell down, and Cash put the chili on the table and looked at me the way Biscuit looks at a gopher hole.

I buttered a piece of bread. "Truck stuck at the county turn. Pulled her out. She's settled. Seems capable."

Silence. Cash held up his fingers and counted on them, lips moving.

"Twelve words," he announced. "Twelve words, and buried in there like a tick — her. It's a her. The tech is a her, she drowned her truck in the turnoff, and you—" he leveled the spoon again "—you had an entire adventure and you were going to give us twelve words."

"Thirteen," Wyatt said, ladling chili.

"How stuck?" Cash demanded.

"Past the axles."

"Did she gun it?"

"Some."

"Everybody guns it." Cash said it with real sympathy, the sympathy of a man who had personally fed two vehicles to that same hole. "That hole's a liar. It looks like a road right up until it's a lake. Okay — how'd you get her out? Strap?"

"Strap. And a shoulder."

Cash's eyebrows went up. Wyatt's spoon paused a quarter second on its way to his mouth, which for Wyatt was the same as dropping it. They both knew what and a shoulder meant when the strap alone hadn't done it, and neither of them said anything about it, because we don't, but Cash filed it with visible delight for future retelling.