Page 5

***

I was back by four with the light already leaning long across the yard, and I unloaded straight into the barn — iodine on the shelf above the sink, calf bottles stacked in the office, the new chains oiled and hung on the nail by pen three next to the old set, because a chain you have to hunt for at four in the morning is no chain at all. I checked 62 while I was in there. The calf was flat out in the straw sleeping, like something dropped from a height, and her mother stood over her chewing cud with the smugness of a heifer who's decided she invented motherhood. Her bag looked better than it had at dawn. I stowed the milk replacer anyway. Trust is fine. A backup plan is better.

There was an hour of daylight left and three hours of work waiting in it, and instead I took the ten minutes I couldn't spare and walked down to the foreman's cabin.

Wyatt's orders, technically. Somebody should see to the cabin. But Wyatt's version of seeing to it would have been unlocking the door and calling it seen to, and Cash's version would have involved a welcome banner and probably a smoke alarm going off, so it was going to be my version, which meant it was going to be done right.

The cabin sits across the creek from the main yard, down where the cottonwoods start, and you get to it over a footbridge Dad built the summer I was nine. The creek was running under a skin of rotten ice, water talking low underneath it, the sound of March — winter's grip breaking one plank at a time. My boots rang hollow on the bridge and my breath was starting to show again; the afternoon warmth was already leaking out of the valley, the way it does this time of year, sun or no sun. Whoever was driving out from Bozeman was going to arrive with the temperature falling through the twenties and full dark twenty minutes behind them.

The cabin had been shut up since fall, and it smelled like it — cold dust and mouse and old woodsmoke, the smell of a house that's been holding its breath. Cold gets into a closed building and sets up like concrete. I propped the door and both windows for the few minutes I worked, letting it trade stale for fresh, and started at the stove.

Woodstove, older than me, sound as the day it was cast. I opened the flue and checked the draw with a lit match held in the throat — the flame leaned and pulled the way it should, no nest in the pipe, no creosote plug. Then I laid the fire. There's a way to do that, too. Dry pine shavings from my coat pocket, then kindling split thin as your finger stood in a loose cone around it, then three splits of larch angled to catch, everything spaced so the flame can breathe. I laid it so that all anyone would have to do — cold, tired, forty minutes of dark road behind them, standing in a strange house that didn't want them yet — was open the stove door and touch a match to it. I left the matchbox on the stove shelf where a reaching hand would find it, and a wax fire-starter beside it in case their hands were too cold to be patient.

The woodbox inside held maybe two days. Not enough. I went back across the bridge to the splitting shed and carried wood until the porch rack held a week of it, split small — stove-lengths a person could handle one-armed, not the knotty rounds I burn in my own place. Six trips. My shoulders felt every one of them on top of the morning's pull, and I didn't mind. Work you can feel is work you did.

The front door had been sticking since summer, dragging its bottom corner and wanting a shoulder against it, and a door that has to be shoved open is a door that greets you wrong. I had a screwdriver in my coat and I reset the top hinge, snugged the screws into fresh bites of wood, and swung it a few times until it moved the way a door should — easy, quiet, asking nothing. I ran the taps until the water came clear and let the lines fill so the pump wouldn't startle anyone banging air at midnight. Checked the little propane heater in the bathroom. Put the spare blankets from the closet shelf down onto the foot of the bed where they'd be seen, because a stranger won't go digging through closets their first night, they'll just be cold and not say anything. I know how people are about asking. I come from a long line of it.

The last thing I did was turn on the porch light.

It was a small thing, one yellow bulb in a tin shade, and I stood there a second after I flipped the switch, feeling foolish about it and doing it anyway. Whoever they were, they'd come up the drive at dusk to a ranch they'd never seen, past a dark barn and a big dark house, following directions to a cabin across a creek in a county where they knew nobody. First sight of a place tells you what to expect from it. The least Carrow Creek could do was be a lit window in the cold.

I stepped out and pulled the door shut behind me — it closed like silk now — and stood on the little porch a minute with my breath fogging.

The light was going amber over the corrals, the last of it lying flat across the valley, and the snow on the Madison Range had turned rose-gold the way it does for about four minutes on a clear evening before it all goes blue. Down in the creek bottom, the willows were showing that first rust-red they get before the leaves, sap moving, spring coming up from the water like it always does. The cows in the near pasture were drifting toward the feed ground. Somewhere up the hill, Cash was hollering something at a horse and the horse was ignoring him. Everything I could see was mine to take care of, and I stood there and made myself the same promise I'd been making since breakfast.

Whoever climbed out of that truck tonight, I'd keep it simple. Keep my distance and keep them useful. Civil, helpful, gone — I'd teach them the cows and the ground, hand off the two a.m. checks, and stay on my side of the creek. People do better around Carrow Creek if they never get close enough to hear the stories, and I do better if I never have to watch a face change while it's looking at me. Two weeks of clean slate and then the valley would do what the valley does, and it would go easier on everyone if there was nothing there when the story landed. No ground to lose. That was the whole plan, and it was a good plan, and I'd run it before.

I walked back over the footbridge alone, boots hollow on the planks, the creek muttering under its ice, and headed down the path toward the barn. It wasn't until I was halfway there that the thought came up out of nowhere and I let it: I have spent my whole life making things warm and safe for other living creatures, and I have never once stood inside any of it. I built the fire. Somebody else always gets to be the one it keeps.

I put the thought back where it came from and went in to check my cows.

Chapter 2

Josie

The log truck came around the curve like it had a grudge, and for one whole second my life was a coin in the air.

It blew past on the left with maybe three feet to spare, throwing a wall of slush and wind that hit the Ford broadside and shoved us — actually shoved us, two tons of truck skating sideways on a wet highway like a shopping cart. My hands did the work before my brain caught up. Off the gas. Steer into it, not away. Don't touch the brake, don't you dare touch the brake. The tires found pavement again with a shudder I felt in my teeth, and the truck straightened out, and behind me in the bed everything I owned in the world slid six inches under its blue tarp and thumped against the wheel well.

"We're fine," I announced, to no one, in a voice that would have convinced exactly nobody. "That was fine."

My heart disagreed. My heart was doing its favorite trick, the one where it climbed into my throat and set up a drum circle, and I did what I always did — I gave it a job. Mirrors. Rearview, side, side. Gas gauge: half a tank, forty miles to go, fine. Speedometer: fifty-five in a fifty-five, because a woman driving a truck with a lien on it does not give anyone a reason to pull her over. Road behind: empty except for a hay truck a half mile back, and I checked its shape anyway, the way I checked every truck's shape — the grille, the stance, the color. Not black. Not lifted. Not detailed to a showroom shine on a Tuesday. Not his.

The hay truck turned off at a ranch gate and my shoulders came down half an inch, and I hated that they'd been up. Six months and two hundred miles and my body still ran the same program at every set of headlights. Hypervigilance, the pamphlet had called it, like it was a diagnosis and not just what was left of me. I preferred to think of it as being an excellent driver.

Everything I owned made a list short enough to be funny if you said it fast. Two duffel bags. One box of vet tech textbooks with my name written inside the covers in a handwriting I barely recognized anymore — the handwriting of a girl who underlined things and believed in flash cards. One milk crate holding a cast iron skillet, a wooden spoon, two mugs, and a can opener, which is either the saddest kitchen in Montana or the most efficient, depending on your attitude, and I was working very hard on my attitude. All of it rode in the bed under a tarp I'd bungeed down myself in the parking lot of a Bozeman apartment building where my name appeared on nothing. Not the lease. Not the mailbox. Not the buzzer. Six months of living like a rumor, paying cash, giving out a burner number, and flinching every time a door slammed in the hallway, and the whole time the only piece of paper in the world with my legal name on it was the loan on the truck I was driving — and right under my name, his. Derek Kane, co-signer, in that big confident scrawl that took up more than its share of the line, the way he took up more than his share of everything.

His signature under mine. Like a hand resting on the back of my neck. Friendly, if you didn't know. Heavy, if you did.

Three hundred and forty dollars in an envelope in the glove box. One job, forty minutes ahead. That was the whole hand I was playing, and I'd pushed all of it into the middle of the table.

The radio had given up on the last Bozeman station somewhere around Norris, so I scanned. Static. A man hollering about Revelation with real enthusiasm. Static. The stock report — feeder cattle steady to two dollars higher, which, honestly, was the best news anyone on that dial had for me. Then a classic rock station playing the same six songs classic rock stations have played since before I was born, and I left it there.

"This is it," I told the dashboard. "This is the soundtrack of my fresh start. A song about a man who done somebody wrong, brought to you by a feed store."

The phone lay face-down on the passenger seat, and it had been off since Four Corners, and that was deliberate, and I was proud of it in the small stubborn way you're proud of not picking a scab. Off, it was just a dead black rectangle. On, it was a door, and Derek didn't knock on doors, he just stood on the other side of them being patient at you. The texts came in bursts, always had — weeks of nothing, then five in an hour, each one reasonable as a bank statement. Just want to know you're safe, Jojo. The truck payment's due the 15th, in case you forgot how dates work. You know I could find you if I wanted to. I just don't want to. Yet. He never wrote anything a lawyer could underline. That was his gift. Three years I'd lived inside sentences like that, each one technically innocent, all of them together a fence, and I'd been out six months and I still catalogued exits in every room I entered, so you tell me what the sentences were.

He never hit me.