Page 31 of Devoured

Dean was in the office when she got back, which she'd known he would be, and there was no putting it off now and she didn't try to.

She came in with the folder and didn't sit. He looked up from John's desk — he'd taken to working at John's desk, and the wrongness of him there, big and dark and out of place behind his father's old blotter, was its own small daily ache nobody named — and whatever he saw in her face made him set the pen down.

"What?" he said.

"You need to see this. Sit with me a second."

And that was the thing she hadn't planned for, the simple logistics of it: there was one set of papers and they both had to read it, and so she came around to his side of the desk instead of staying safe on the far side of it, and spread the copies in front of him, and leaned in over his shoulder to walk him through it, and the office got very small.

He'd come in from the heat. She could smell it on him — sun and horse and the particular clean of a man who worked outdoors, no cologne, nothing bought, just him — and she was close enough now that when he shifted to take the first page she felt the warmth come off his arm, and she made herself keep her voice level and her finger on the page and her mind on the only thing in this room that was safe to think about, which was the work.

"Here." She put the boring folder down first. "Henderson. Fence and easement, supposedly. But the fence letters stop here." She turned the page; her shoulder was nearly against his; he had gone very still, the way he went still, she'd started to learn the difference between his kinds of still and this was the dangerous one. "And this starts. It's a mineral conveyance. The Hendersons sold the rights under their place." She traced it down. "To this holding company. Which is this one. Which is…" she put the last page down, the way she'd put it down for Nathan, the name at the bottom of the well "Burchall."

She felt him read it more than she saw it. Felt the stillness change. Felt, where her shoulder was almost touching his, the breath he took.

"Surface stays theirs," she went on, quieter now because the room had got quiet and loud at the same time. "They keep the ranch. But what's underneath is Burchall's now, and it's to the north, and Nathan says one sale's legal and nobody's business, but a pattern of them, bought quiet through shells along a boundary…" She stopped. He'd turned his head.

He'd turned his head and she was right there, closer than she'd been since the cabinet, close enough to see the dark stubble along his jaw and the amber of his eyes gone almost black in the low office light, and for a second neither of them said anything about Burchall or holding companies or the north. For a second it was just the two of them leaning over the same square foot of desk, her hand still flat on the page, his shoulder a half-inch from hers, the want sitting in the room with them like the passenger she'd driven home with all week, and she watched him not move, watched the muscle go in his jaw, watched Dean Royston hold himself exactly where he was by main force, and understood that he was doing the same arithmetic she was and getting the same answer and refusing it the same way.

She straightened up. Put an inch of air back. Made herself finish the sentence, because the sentence was the lifeline. "…a pattern is worth knowing the size of. He said you'd want to find out if it's only the Hendersons."

Dean looked back down at the page. It took him a second. When he spoke his voice had gone rougher than the work warranted.

"You went to Nathan first."

"I wanted to be sure before I brought it to you." She said it plainly. "I didn't want to put that…" she almost said that look on your face, and caught it "…I didn't want to bring you a fire that turned out to be nothing. So I checked. It's not nothing."

He was quiet. He turned the conveyance over in his hands, those big scarred hands, reading it again like the words might rearrange into better news, and they wouldn't, and he knew they wouldn't.

"...Lara," he said.

That was all. Just her name, low and worn.

It went through her like a hand at the small of her back. She felt it climb the back of her neck and settle warm and low, felt her breath go shallow for the length of a heartbeat before she got it back under her, and she kept her face still by main force and her eyes on the page and hated, a little, how easily one man saying two syllables could undo a morning's worth of composure.

Because it was nothing at all like Ms. Baxter. She'd stopped pretending she couldn't hear the difference. Ms. Baxter was the one he reached for when he wanted distance. Lara was the one that got away from him. He'd let it get away from him three times now, and she'd started keeping count, which was its own kind of trouble.

"I'll keep going through the rest," she said, because somebody had to be sensible and it clearly wasn't going to be the way he was looking at her. "If it's anywhere else, it'll be in there. John filed by neighbor and grudge, near as I can tell, so it'll take me a few days."

"By grudge," Dean said, and almost smiled.

"There's a whole drawer that's just people who wronged him at the 1991 county fair."

And that did it, got something out of him, not the smile but the breath of one, his head dropping, a man too tired and too rattled and too far gone to keep the wall up at full height in the middle of his own bad news. "That'd be the Pruitts," he said. "Don't get him started on the Pruitts."

"I won't." She gathered the copies. The moment was passing and she was letting it, on purpose, the both of them stepping back from the same ledge. "I'll have you something by the end of the week."

She was at the cabinet, the filing cabinet, the safe one, when Chase came through.

He came in the way the brothers all came in, without knocking, a Royston in a Royston building, with a part for the truck in one hand and a question already in his mouth that died when he saw the two of them: Dean at the desk, Lara at the cabinet, the boundary map open between them and their heads not six feet apart over the wreckage of a quiet morning. Chase stopped. He looked at his brother. He looked at Lara. He looked at the map, and the folder, and the particular crackle in the air of a room two people have just stepped back from, and a slow grin started at one corner of his mouth.

"Don't," Dean said, without looking up.

"Didn't say a word." Chase got what he came for off the shelf. He was the steady one, Lara had worked out, the brother who showed up, who'd been carrying the ranch alongside Dean since they were both too young for it, while Jett ran off to the mine and Brody ran off to the other side of the planet. He had a kindness in him the others covered with noise. "Mornin', Lara. Knox call you about the auction barn yet? He's been ringing everybody in the county twice. Man cannot make a decision about a stock trailer to save his life." He hefted the part. "Anyway. Y'all look busy." The grin again, aimed at his brother. "Real busy."

"Chase."

"Going." But at the door he paused, and looked back, and the grin had gone gentle. "Glad it's you in here with him," he said to Lara, and that one wasn't about the paperwork, and all three of them knew it, and was gone, the screen door doing its work behind him, and Dean sat at his father's desk with his ears very slightly red and said nothing at all.