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Wyatt didn't lose sleep over numbers that behaved. Numbers that behaved got filed by nine p.m. with the rest of his life.

"Breakfast," I said, and rinsed the mug.

"See, ten words a day," Cash said, holding the office door for me like a bellhop. "You're at nineteen. Slow down, you'll strain something."

I turned off the hotplate and left the lamp burning over pen three, and we walked up the hill toward the house through air cold enough to burn, our breath trailing white behind us, the office window glowing yellow above the porch roof like something that had been awake all night and wasn't planning on explaining itself.

***

Our kitchen runs on a choreography nobody ever taught us. I cook, because I'm the one who can. Cash sets the table and eats half of everything in transit, which he calls quality control. Wyatt arrives when the food does, to the minute, like breakfast is an appointment he's graciously agreed to keep. We've been running the same pattern since we were boys tall enough to reach the stove, and the pattern has outlived a lot of things it probably shouldn't have.

I had the cast iron going by twenty past six, bacon first, then eggs in the grease the way Dad liked them and the rest of us learned to. The kitchen filled up with the smell of it, laid over the permanent smells of the house — woodsmoke, coffee, gun oil, leather — the way it has every morning of my life. Cash slouched against the counter in actual clothes now, hair still hopeless, working his way through a piece of bacon he'd lifted off the plate before I'd finished draining it.

"Quality control," he said when I looked at him.

The scarred oak table sat in the middle of it all, big enough for a crew of ten, and I set three plates at the three places we used. Not the head. The chair at the head of that table had been Dad's for forty years, and it had been empty for five months, and none of us had so much as pulled it out since October. We didn't talk about it. We just orbited around it, the way you learn not to step on the stair that creaks, until not sitting there stopped being a decision and became part of the house. The boot rack by the door still had its row in descending size, and the biggest pair was gone, and the eye still went to the gap. Grief, I'd learned, wasn't a feeling so much as a floor plan. You lived in it. You knew where all the furniture used to be.

Wyatt came down at six-thirty exactly, and he was dressed the way that always told me something before he said a word — clean shirt with a collar, good jeans, the boots he doesn't work in. My brother dresses like a man who might have to meet a banker on an hour's notice, and lately I'd started wondering how often the hour's notice was real.

"Coffee's fresh," Cash said. "Unlike you. You look like a foreclosure notice."

"Good morning to you, too." Wyatt poured his cup, sat, squared his fork and knife like he was chairing something. There were shadows under his eyes, and he'd shaved anyway. That was Wyatt — he'd bleed to death before he'd go unshaven.

"You want to tell us why the office light was on at five in the morning," Cash said, dropping into his chair, "or should we guess? I love guessing. Boone, guess."

"Eat," I said, and put the eggs down.

"He's up in the night playing large-animal hero, you're up romancing a calculator, and I'm the family disappointment because I sleep. I want that noted."

"It's noted." Wyatt took a swallow of coffee, and then he set the cup down in the particular way he sets things down when the meeting is starting. "Doc Whitmore called last night."

I kept eating. Cash didn't. Cash can smell news the way I can smell weather.

"He's overloaded," Wyatt said. "Half the valley's calving inside the same six weeks, he's the only vet from here to Ennis, and he's — " a small pause, choosing the word — "slowing down. He's seventy-one years old and he knows it, even if he'd shoot the man who said it to his face. So he's changing how he covers the season. He hired a tech this winter, out of Bozeman. Good references. Doc wants them stationed here. At Carrow Creek. Full-time through calving."

The kitchen went quiet for about the length of a heartbeat, and then Cash lit up like a struck match.

"We're getting a human?" he said. "A new human? A whole live human being, here, on purpose?"

"A veterinary technician," Wyatt said. "Living in the foreman's cabin. Doc covers the rest of the valley, the tech covers us and reports to him, and we get skilled hands on the place around the clock instead of praying he can make it out here in time when something goes sideways at two in the morning."

"No," I said.

Both of them looked at me. I'd known they would. I don't spend words often enough for anyone to ignore the ones I spend.

"Strangers on the place," I said. "During calving. Underfoot in my barn, don't know our cows, don't know our ground, and I'm supposed to work around them for six weeks."

That was the version I said out loud, and it was even true. The truer version I kept where I keep things. A stranger living a hundred yards from my barn meant a stranger in town on their day off, and Silver Bend doesn't let a new face get two weeks deep before somebody at the Bluebird or the feed store leans in, friendly as you please, and tells them about Big Boone Calloway and what he did to that man at the Rusty Spur. And then I'd have it in my own barn — the careful distance, the flinch dressed up as politeness, somebody watching my hands. I'd rather do the work of five men than work next to that. People do fine around me exactly as long as they don't get close, and I've built my whole life on keeping the math simple.

"Noted," Wyatt said, which is what he says when he's about to run you over. "Here's mine. Two hundred and eleven bred cows and heifers. Three of us. That's seventy head apiece, around the clock, for six weeks, assuming nobody gets sick, hurt, or stupid." He looked at Cash. "Odds?"

"Historically poor," Cash said cheerfully.

"And this morning," Wyatt went on, level as a fence rail, "my brother pulled a true breech out of a first-calf heifer alone in the dark, because waking anyone up would apparently have violated his religion."

I looked at Cash. Cash looked at the ceiling and whistled a little.

"It went fine," I said.