Page 22 of Devoured

It was, she had to admit, beautiful work. The kind of work she would have admired in a person she didn't despise. The thing they were offering on page one — partnership, no obligation, mineral assessment — and the thing the schedule on page nineteen quietly defined them into were not the same offer. The first was a handshake. The second was a contract that severed the mineral rights from the surface and bought them outright, in perpetuity, for a price that wasn't named anywhere in the cover letter, with a surface-access clause that read so reasonable that a man who didn't have a forensic accountant's eye for buried definitions would sign it on a Tuesday and lose his grandfather's land to a Wednesday.

The Roystons did not have a forensic accountant.

The Roystons, until a few weeks ago, hadn't had anyone reading the mail.

She set the cover letter on top of the schedule on top of her notepad, in the exact order she'd want to walk Dean through them, and she sat in the chair with both dogs on her feet and watched the light change in the office window, and she found, in the small clean place inside her chest where her work lived, that she was furious — on this family's behalf — in a way she had never once in her whole life been furious on her own.

Mason came by at four.

She knew it was him before she saw him, the truck sounded right, and the voice on the porch calling out for Chase was the easy unhurried one she remembered from the kitchen the day John collapsed, the only voice that had bothered to learn her name in the first five minutes of meeting her. The dogs heaved themselves up and went bounding through the screen door to him, which they didn't do for strangers, and she found that she was glad of it. Mason had earned dogs.

She came out onto the porch.

"Mason."

"Lara." He turned with the easy unhurried smile he'd come into the kitchen with the first time, the one that had changed the temperature of a room she hadn't known how to be in yet. "You look like you've been here longer than you have."

"I feel like it."

"Good. That's the goal." He came up the step. "I've been meaning to come check on you all. Helen tells me you've about saved this place."

"Helen exaggerates."

"Helen's never exaggerated a day in her life." He set a hitch down on the porch boards, a heavy iron thing that clanked. "Returning this to Chase. Borrowed it before any of this, been a guilty conscience about it since. How's Uncle John?"

"Better. Home next week, the doctor thinks."

"Good. That's good." He nodded once. Something passed across his face that she didn't recognize, a quiet thing, and then it was gone. "Chase about?"

"East pasture. There was a fence thing this morning. Colby got hurt."

"He all right?"

"Going to be."

"Lord. This place." Mason said it with the affection of a man who had been saying this place about Royston Ranch his whole life. He looked at her for a beat longer than the conversation required. "You doing all right? Honest answer."

It surprised her a little — the directness of it, the gentleness underneath it. She thought about the answer she'd give Pearl, and the one she'd give Helen, and decided on the one she'd give a man who'd ruffled her daughter's hair and brought her home on the worst day.

"Most days," she said.

"That'll do." He nodded again, the same once-nod. "Tell Chase I came by. And tell Dean —" he caught himself, the smallest hesitation, "— actually, never mind. I'll catch him myself sometime."

He went back down the steps. The dogs went with him as far as the truck. He stopped with the door open, looked back at her on the porch, gave her a small nod that was both polite and somehow weighted, and got in and drove off.

She stood for a minute with the dogs coming back up the steps around her, and thought about the small never mind she had not quite been meant to hear, and filed it next to all the other things in this family she did not yet understand. Then she went back into the office, because the bay mare's bloodwork was on the desk and a man was coming back at six.

He came at five-forty.

"Vet's late," he said, and then he stopped halfway through the door, because the office had been arranged.

She had moved the desk lamp. She had cleared the small side table and pulled it next to the desk and set the Burchall documents on it in the order she wanted to walk him through them — the cover letter on top, the schedule of definitions next, her notepad with the relevant clauses tabbed, a second clean pad for him to write on. She'd put a cup of coffee at his elbow before he asked. She'd done it without thinking, which was its own thing she was not thinking about.

He looked at the table.

He looked at her.

"Lara," he said. Careful. "What is this."