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By the time she climbed the stairs to the garage apartment that evening, Burchall wasn't the thing sitting on her chest anyway. Elena texted up through the floor the way she did — wine? one word, the whole of their friendship in it — and they ended up on Elena's little back step with a bottle between them and the day going gold and then violet over the flat country, the heat finally breaking the way it did out here all at once, like the land exhaling.

"You're quiet," Elena said. Elena, who was thirty and Texas-born and brilliant and just as marooned out here as Lara was, two women in temporary housing living temporary lives that had somehow started keeping them. "And you're doing the thing with your wine where you don't drink it. What?"

Lara looked at her glass. Looked out at the dark coming on.

"I think I'm in trouble, Elena."

Elena didn't laugh, which was why Lara could say things to her. She just turned her head, and waited, and then asked it carefully, the way you'd ask anything to a friend standing near an edge. "With Dean? Or with Soluno?"

And Lara opened her mouth to say Dean, because that was the answer, that was obviously the answer, the man and his hands and his Lara and the office shrinking to a square foot of desk — and found that it wasn't the whole answer, that the whole answer was bigger and worse and warmer than one man, that it was the diner waving her in and Nathan saying good at this and Helen's five pounds and the sky doing exactly this, right now, over a place she'd come to precisely because she didn't expect to feel anything about it.

"...Both," she said.

Elena nodded slowly, like a doctor confirming what the chart already said. "Yeah," she said. "I figured both." And she topped off Lara's glass, the one she wasn't drinking, and didn't say anything else, which was its own kindness, and they sat and watched the stars come up over the basin, the cold clean enormous spill of them you never got in a city, and Lara thought: I came here to stop wanting things. And look.

She walked back across the yard to her own stairs under that sky.

Forty steps, no more, gravel and the smell of cooling dirt and somewhere a screen door and somebody's radio low, and she should have been thinking about Burchall and holding companies and the days of digging ahead of her, and she wasn't. She was thinking about the way he'd said her name. She was thinking about the half-inch of air between his shoulder and hers and how it had felt like the most charged half-inch of space she'd ever stood in, more than any actual touch she'd had in years, which was a humiliating thing to know about yourself and she knew it anyway. She was thinking about the warmth that had come off his arm and the breath he'd taken when she leaned in, and how her body had decided something it hadn't run past her first.

The new part wasn't the wanting. She'd been wanting since the porch, since the awful shoes barb, since the first day, and she'd spent every day since arguing it down, he's arrogant, he insulted you, he's your boss, near enough, you came here to be done with exactly this. The arguments had been good. The arguments had held the line for weeks.

What was new tonight, walking under all those stars, was that she'd stopped making them.

She climbed the stairs. She lay down in the dark with the window open and the basin breathing in. She did not tell herself she'd be fine. She did not tell herself anything. She'd run out of things to tell herself somewhere around the half-inch of air over John Royston's desk, and the quiet that was left, now that the arguing had stopped, was almost restful.

Her phone lit at midnight.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The bar was in Odessa, forty-some minutes the wrong direction from everything Dean cared about, which was the entire point of it.

Not Soluno. Never Soluno. Soluno was Pearl knowing his coffee order and Harvey knowing his father and a hundred people who'd known his kids since before they could walk, and a man did not do what Dean drove out to do in a town like that. But it wasn't only the distance — distance was the easy part, and distance alone wouldn't have been enough. Out here a Royston could drive an hour in any direction and still end up shaking hands with somebody who ran cattle with his daddy, somebody from the auction or the co-op or church, because the ranching world was one long table and everybody sat somewhere at it. A small town two counties over was just Soluno with different faces; somebody always knew somebody. So he didn't go to a small town. He drove to the city, to Odessa, where there were enough strangers that a man could be nothing but one more face at a bar — no name that meant a thing, no daddy anybody had run cattle with, no kids anybody had watched grow. A crowd you could disappear into was safer than any amount of empty road.

That was the arrangement. Four years now, when he wanted a woman, he'd dealt with it somewhere far enough away to be nobody — a city bar he didn't drink at, because drink made a careful man careless. A different place most times. Never a regular. Never a face that would learn his. And never anyone looking for more than he was. Women who wanted the same thing he did and no more of it, a night and no strings, both of them clear on that going in. No real names, no numbers, nobody in it the next day. Nothing that could ever find its way back to a white clapboard house where two kids slept who'd already buried one parent and weren't going to be handed a string of strangers in place of the one they lost.

It had worked. That was the thing he'd have told you, if you could have gotten him to say a word about it, which you couldn't. It had worked. It scratched the animal itch and kept the rest of him clean and let him go home empty and quiet and fit to be a father in the morning. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't proud, but it was contained, and containment was the whole of how Dean Royston had stayed standing for four years.

He parked at the dark edge of the lot, the way he always did, nose-out for leaving. He cut the engine.

And he sat there.

Fifteen minutes, it would turn out later, though he wasn't counting at the time. Fifteen minutes with the engine ticking as it cooled and the sign buzzing pink over the door and a couple going in laughing and a man coming out alone, and Dean's hands on the wheel at ten and two like he was still driving, like the truck might decide the thing for him if he kept hold of it long enough.

Because he couldn't make his hand go to the door.

He tried to put his mind where it was supposed to go — the dim and the noise inside, the simple uncomplicated transaction of it, the only kind of touch he'd allowed himself since he was twenty-nine. He'd never once had trouble before. You wanted a thing, you drove to where it was, you handled it, you drove home. Clean mechanical logic, like any other chore a body required.

He couldn't bring himself to move.

His mind kept going home instead, to his own kitchen four hours ago, Lara at the table with Giana's math sheet between them, the two dark heads and the one light one bent over a column of long division. Giana, who did not let people in, leaning into her side to see the page better. Leaning in like it was nothing, like Lara had always been in the room. It kept going to the cabinet a week back, her hand under his and not pulling away, and what would have happened if he'd turned his palm up instead of taking it back, pulled, and found out what sound she made. To the dimple. To the dumb ordinary way she'd said yes about something in the office that afternoon, just yes, and how it had gone through him like a hand down his spine.

He sat in a gravel lot with a buzzing sign throwing pink across the hood and understood, with a cold clarity worse than any guilt, that he could walk in there tonight and find the most willing woman in the place and it would do nothing. Worse than nothing. Because somewhere in the last six weeks his body had gone and picked, the way it wasn't supposed to be able to anymore, and what it had picked wasn't in this parking lot and never would be. Dragging a stranger into the truck instead would just be the loudest way of lying to himself about a thing he could no longer afford not to know.

It wasn't nobility. He wanted to be clear with himself about that. He hadn't risen above one single thing. It was more like a machine throwing a part, the system that had held him up for four years simply quitting, here, tonight, no ceremony, no permission asked. The arrangement had stopped clearing the want. Somewhere back down the road it had started feeding it instead, every anonymous nothing only sharpening the outline of the one thing he wasn't letting himself have.

He put both hands back on the wheel. He looked at the pink door one more time.

Then he reached down and put the truck in reverse, and backed out of the lot, and pointed it home.