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“The dog —”

“The dog’s seen worse.” He put his mouth back. “Let me hear it.”

She let him hear it. In daylight, in his father’s kitchen, on the table where the old man had told her how the house ran, with the window open and the yard empty, and it went out the window and there was nobody for a mile to hear it but a windmill, and he stayed with her through it and came up with his face wet and grinning, and she looked down at him from the table with her hair everywhere and said, “You’re pleased with yourself.”

“I’m home five days early and you’re on a table. I’m allowed.”

“Get the —”

“Truck.”

“You’ve got one in the truck.”

“I’ve had one in the truck since July, I’m not a fool.” He went and got it. He came back in through the screen door in his jeans and nothing else and she was sitting on the edge of the table with her knees together and her arms around herself and her face flushed to the collarbone, watching him come across the kitchen, and it was the fridge the other way around, him with nothing on and her the one looking, and she knew it, and she said, “What makes you think I’m interested,” and he said, “The table,” and she laughed so hard she had to hold on to it.

Then he was in her. Standing, with her on the edge of the table and her legs around him and her hands on his shoulders, fast, the way twelve nights wanted it, and she wasn’t quiet, and neither was he, and the table knocked the wall and the dog left the room. She went first. She went with her forehead on his shoulder and her teeth in it after, and he went about four strokes later with his face in her neck and the quiet name in his mouth, out loud, in daylight, and she said, “I know,” into his hair.

They stayed there. Her on the table and him standing between her knees with his arms around her and his breath going slow, and the windmill outside, and the clock over the door saying two-twenty.

“We’ve got an hour,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Lara’s going to come in that door at three-thirty and this table’s going to have to look like a table.”

“It’ll look like a table.”

“And you’re going to have to tell me why you’re home five days early, Brody, because it wasn’t the boat.”

He looked at her. Then he looked at the folder, which was on the counter where he’d dropped it coming in, and back at her, and got his jeans up.

“It wasn’t the boat,” he said. “I’ve got to go to town.”

Greene’s office was over the pharmacy and had been for thirty years, and Nathan Greene was sixty-some and had a face that had spent all of them reading the fine print on behalf of one family, and he looked at the folder Brody put on his desk at four o’clock and didn’t touch it.

“Where did you get this?”

“Odessa. A client’s office. I was standing over a well field for Burchall and the client had a map on the wall, and it wasn’t a map of his well field.”

“You took it off the wall?”

“I took a photograph of it. Then I asked the man’s secretary for the file that went with it, and she gave it to me, because I’ve got a Burchall card and Burchall’s name is on the file.” He sat down. “I’m not proud of it, Nathan. I’m not sorry either.”

Greene put his glasses on. He opened the folder. He read the first page, and the second, and he didn’t say anything for a long time, and Brody sat there and looked at the window with the pharmacy sign in it and thought about a table.

“Tell me what I’m looking at,” Greene said. “In words a man who does wills can follow.”

So Brody told him, plain, the way he’d have told the old man if the old man had ever asked.

There was a strip of ground north of both ranches. Two miles wide, eleven long, between the Royston north fence and the Hardwick place, and nobody had thought about it in fifty years because it was scrub and nobody ran cattle on it. The surface belonged to three families who didn’t live in the county anymore. The minerals under it didn’t belong to them; they’d been sold off separate, sixty years ago, the way people did then, and had gone through four hands since. The last of those hands was a company in Delaware. Greene’s man in Midland had run that company back to Burchall Resources in the spring, and it was the same shell company Lara had found the shape of in the paperwork a year ago, and Greene had been holding a file on it ever since.

“I’ve got that file,” Greene said.

“I know you’ve got it. Here’s what it didn’t have.” Brody turned a page in the folder. “Burchall optioned that corridor in March. All of it. Eleven miles of mineral rights on paper, for money, with a date on it. March. That’s the month they sent me home, Nathan.”

“Say that slower.”

“March. They sent me to Midland with a desk and no window in the same month they put an option on eleven miles of ground between my father’s fence and the Hardwicks’, and I’ve been sitting on that desk since April thinking they were trying to get rid of me.”