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"Ms. Baxter." He had a good voice for a lawyer, unhurried, the voice of a man who'd never once been the most rushed person in a room. "Sit. I'd offer you coffee but I'd be doing you a disservice. To what do I owe it? John all right?"

"John's all right. Better. They've got him walking." She sat, and she put the folder on his desk, and she found that now she was here her hands wanted to apologize for it before her mouth could. She didn't let them. She'd spent five years apologizing for being right in rooms full of men who weren't. "This isn't about John's health. It's about the ranch. I found something in the files and I don't know what I'm looking at, and you're the one who'd know, and I'd rather be sure before I take it to Dean."

That got a flick of the eyes, not surprise exactly, a recalibration, a man revising upward. "Show me."

So she showed him. She laid it out the way she'd laid things out for partners who made ten times her salary and half her sense: here's the boring folder, here's where the fence letters stop, here's the conveyance, here's the holding company, here's the second holding company, and here, she put the last page down, is the name at the bottom of the well when you stop falling.

Nathan put his glasses on.

She watched his face while he read, because faces were the other thing she was good at, and she watched the unhurried go out of it. He read it once fast and once slow. He set the first page down very precisely on the second, squaring the edges, a man buying himself a breath.

"Where did you find this," he said. Not a question, quite.

"Filed under the wrong tab. Fence and easement." She paused. "Whoever sent it didn't tab it wrong by accident. You don't bury a mineral conveyance in a fence folder unless you'd just as soon nobody read it closely for a while."

He looked at her over the glasses. "Does Dean know you're here?"

"Not yet."

A beat. Out on Main a truck went by, and somewhere below them the pharmacy bell rang, and Nathan Greene looked at the woman the family lawyer had recommended for a filing job and recalculated her a second time.

"You're good at this, Ms. Baxter," he said.

And Lara's chest did something she wasn't prepared for.

It was a small sentence. He probably meant it small. But she sat in the worn leather chair in the gold-ghost office and felt it go through her like warmth into cold hands, because she could not, sitting right there and reaching for it, remember the last time a man in a position to know had told her she was good at the thing she was actually good at, without a but coming along behind it to take it back. Good at this, but you don't push hard enough. Good with the numbers, but you let people walk on you. Good, sweetheart, but. Five years of buts. Maybe more. And here was a sixty-year-old country lawyer with bad coffee handing it to her clean, no charge, no string, just the plain fact of it set down on the desk between them like he was surprised she didn't already know.

"Thank you," she said, and was annoyed to hear it come out a half-step rough.

If he noticed, he had the grace not to. He took the glasses off. "All right. Here's what you're looking at, and here's what you're not." And he told her, that a severed-rights sale was, on its own, legal and done and not a thing the Roystons could undo; that one neighbor selling what was under his own dirt was his right and nobody's business; but that the pattern of it, a corporate buyer assembling rights parcel by parcel along a boundary corridor, quietly, through shells, was a different animal. "And that I can do something about. Or start to." He was already moving, pulling a legal pad over, uncapping a pen, the unhurried gone out of him and something older and harder come up in its place, the man who'd defended this family's ground for thirty years getting back to work. "I'll pull the title histories on the parcels north of the Royston line, all of them, see how far this goes and whether the Hendersons are the only ones. I've got a man in Midland who can run the shell companies back to whoever's really signing the checks. If it's Burchall behind all of it the way it's Burchall behind this, I'll have it in black and white."

He made a copy of her copy on the machine in the corner, kept the original of the conveyance, and slid her set back across the desk.

"Here's your part." He looked at her over the top of the page. "You go back out there and you tell Dean. Today. All of it — the fence folder, the shells, the ring of it. He runs that ranch and it's his fight, and he hears this from you before he hears a word of it from me, you understand? I'll call him myself once I've got the title work, but the first time anybody says the word Burchall to that man about this, it should be the person who found it." A beat, and the warmth came back into him. "You were right to be sure before you scared him. That's not timidity, whatever you've been told. That's doing it right." He waved her toward the door. "But you're sure now. So go." He almost smiled. "I'll look in on John this week, wherever they've still got him. And tell Dean I said he's lucky. He'll know what about."

She stopped at Pearl's on the way out of town because she needed a minute before the drive back to the thing she now had to do, and because she'd learned that a cup of Pearl's coffee was worth four of anything Nathan Greene was suffering through.

The diner was mid-morning empty, the breakfast rush gone, two old men at the counter arguing about rain that hadn't come. Pearl was at the register. And before Lara had got all the way through the door, before she'd done a single thing to earn it, Pearl looked up and waved her in. The flat of her hand, get in here, the wave you gave somebody who belonged to the place, no menu, no table for one, none of the small machinery of being a stranger somewhere.

"Sit anywhere, honey, I'll bring it," Pearl said, already reaching for a cup, and then, pitched back over her shoulder toward the pass-through window where the kitchen was: "Marge. The Royston girl's in."

And from the back, warm and unhurried and floating out over the griddle: "Tell her I've got pie when she wants it, and tell her she looks tired, and tell her Dean Royston works good people half to death and somebody ought to say so."

"You heard her," Pearl said, setting the coffee down, supremely unbothered, a woman who'd been finishing her sister's sentences for sixty years. Then she put a hip against the booth and looked at Lara with two sharp old eyes that missed absolutely nothing in this town and never had. "You are looking tired, though. He feeding you out there? Helen feeding you?"

"Helen's feeding everyone. I've gained five pounds."

"Good. You were too thin when you came." Pearl said it like a verdict closed. And then, with the air of a woman commenting on the weather, polishing a spot on the table that didn't need it: "He bring you anywhere yet? Dean."

"He's my…" Lara started, and Pearl's eyebrow was already up, one gray eyebrow climbing toward a hairline that had seen every excuse Soluno had ever manufactured, and Lara felt her own face go warm and hated it. "I work for the family, Pearl."

"Mm," said Pearl, in the exact register the whole county had apparently been issued for use on the Roystons, and pushed off the booth. "Four years that man hasn't brought a soul through that door but those babies. You drink your coffee." And she went, leaving Lara mortified and, under it, in a place she wasn't going to look at any more than she'd looked at the rest of it this week. warmed, because he bring you anywhere yet was the kind of thing you only said to a woman you'd already decided about, and the whole town, apparently, had decided.

From the kitchen, Marge, comfortably, to no one: "She didn't say no."

"I heard," said Pearl.

Lara drank her coffee fast and left too much money on the table.