Page 70

"Calf," Giana said, from the rail, into the quiet. "Ninety-five. Somebody get him."

Levi went and got him.

She went to her truck because it was the only thing on the place that was hers.

It was parked in the row along the fence with fifty others, a hundred feet from the pen. She stood at the driver's door with her back to it, her gloves in her hand, and didn't get in. Behind her the pen had started again. Dean had said something, the wheel had turned over, and she could hear Knox, Remi, the calves, none of them louder than they had to be.

He came across the lot. She watched him come. He had his hat in his left hand and his right hand hanging open with blood across two knuckles. He'd come out of the pen past John and past Dean's horse without stopping for either of them, straight to her truck, and stopped four feet off.

The whole branding was watching. Too far to hear. Close enough to see.

"Liv."

"Owen."

"I hit him."

"I saw you hit him. Everybody saw you hit him. Your uncle's standing at that gate with a coffee cup."

"I know where he's standing."

"Dean's going to take it out of your hide."

"Dean can have what's left."

"What did he say to you?"

"It doesn't matter what he said."

"It mattered enough to hit him in front of his daddy."

"It did." He looked at his hand. He looked at her. There was nothing left on his face, nothing put away and nothing held, and she'd waited half her life to see that face on him and here it was in a lot with a bloody hand. "I love you."

She didn't move.

He'd said it. Four feet off, low, with a hundred people at the pen too far to hear a word, and not one person on that place would ever be able to say what Owen Royston told her at her truck.

"I have since I was seventeen. The library. Three days a week at that table with your chin in your hand reading my working upside down, and I'd go home after and sit in my truck in the yard." He stopped. "I didn't say it. I'm saying it now."

"Why now?"

"Because I hit him."

"That's not why."

"No." He put the hat against his leg. "That summer. The last Saturday in July, the creek, everybody down there. I'd driven out to ask you to the harvest dance. I'd had it in my head five months and it took eleven words. I'd counted them." He looked at the ground. "I was on my own tailgate working up to it, and Brody came across the grass with a beer in each hand and got up there with me, and he said he loved you. He said it before I got my mouth open, Liv."

A beat.

"He asked me to keep it quiet. That's all he asked me for. Not Mason, not anybody, swear it, and swear it again, and I swore it twice."

"So, you just went along with it?"

"Yes."

She waited on him to argue it. He didn't.

"A man doesn't take a thing off his own blood," Owen said. "That's what I had in my head on that tailgate with him lying in my truck bed. Four days later he sat down across from you at that table with me right there and asked you to the dance, and you looked at me, and I said nothing. I've said nothing since."