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Lara stood in the office window with her hand on the frame and watched the dust come up off the track behind them, and reminded herself, the way she had reminded herself all week, that her job was the office. The cattle and the fences and the bleeding men were not her department. They had hands for that. They had Mack for that, and Wade, and the brothers, and a whole working machine that had been built before she was born and would still be running when she was dead.

The radio crackled.

"It's bad," said Mack to nobody, which meant the radio was open on his end and he'd forgotten. "Tell Helen to get the kit."

Lara was out of the office before her hand had finished closing the door.

It wasn't her department, but the kit was in the office.

She had sorted it her second week, because everything in the office had to be sorted eventually if the office was going to make sense to anyone other than a dead man's habits. The kit was the size of a small toolbox, scuffed red, heavy as a curse. It had a list of contents taped inside the lid in handwriting that wasn't Helen's. The list had been amended over the years in two other hands she didn't yet know. Sutures. Heavy gauze. A tourniquet she had never wanted to think about. A bottle of something brown that, she was fairly sure, was not for the patient.

She had the kit out on the kitchen counter when Helen came in from the hall.

"Mack said get the kit."

"I heard him." Helen didn't ask which kit. She didn't ask how Lara knew. She was already in motion the way she'd been the morning of the stroke, that brisk economy that had nothing to do with calm and everything to do with thirty years of being the woman who held the floor when a Royston was bleeding. "It's Colby. He went over a fence wrong."

"How bad?"

"Bad enough they're not putting him in the bed of a truck. Wade's coming back to swap for the flat one with the mattress in it." Helen rummaged in a drawer for a phone, came up with one Lara had never seen before, a flip-phone, the old kind, the kind that lived in a kitchen for emergencies and not for anything else. "Doc Santos. I've got her on the speed-dial. We'll meet them at the road."

"I'll drive."

"Honey, I can…"

"I know you can. But that boy's going to need a you between here and the clinic, and there's a hundred people in this county who could drive a truck and only one who's been the woman holding the floor when a Royston's bleeding for thirty years." She held Helen's eyes. "It's not the harder job. You're the one doing the harder job. Let me do the easy one."

Helen looked at her. Whatever she saw seemed to take about half a second to settle.

"All right," she said. "Get your keys."

Elena met them at the highway in scrubs and a pickup of her own.

It happened fast and not fast at the same time. Lara, who had never once in her life been useful in a medical situation, found that her usefulness here was a narrow strip, she was the woman who held the door, the woman who kept her phone hand-free with the GPS on, the woman who said yes when Helen asked her if she could find such-and-such, and yes when Elena asked her something in the same tone. Colby was twenty years old and the color of paper and conscious enough to apologize, which was somehow the worst part. Wade had his belt off and a hand on the boy's leg like a man holding a piece of his own. Dean was up in the truck bed with them, sleeves pushed up, looking like he was at war with the world and winning by sheer stubbornness.

Chase was on the road behind them in his own truck, headlights on. She didn't have to look to know.

Elena's eyes met Lara's once, across the boy, and the look said he'll live, and Lara, who had only known her landlord a few weeks, took that look and put it under her ribs like a stone she could hold.

They got him to Elena's. Elena took him from there. Wade went with him into the clinic. Lara stood in the gravel of the parking lot with Helen and watched the door swing shut, and breathed.

"Well," said Helen, after a minute.

"Yeah," said Lara.

Helen looked over at her with the long sidelong look of a woman taking stock.

"You drove like a person who was scared," she said. "Not like a person who panicked. There's a difference. I notice."

It was, Lara thought, probably the highest compliment she'd been paid since arriving in West Texas.

"Thanks, Helen."

"Mm." Helen patted her once on the shoulder. "Now let's go find the men."

Dean caught her on the way back to her truck.

He was coming out of the clinic with his hat in his hand again, the dust still on him, and there was a thing his shoulders were doing that she'd learned to read at distance, the half-inch of held tension that meant the morning had cost him more than he was going to say. He stopped her by saying her name. Just that.