Page 25 of Devoted

“What’d y’all do?”

“We built him a chair.”

“A chair?” Knox aske.

“A good chair. Our welder cried when it left.” Brody let that sit. “Seventh morning we carried a chair down to the bank and set it up facing the river, and he sat in it, and he looked at that water a long time, and then he stood up and said, ‘We will go the long way,’ and we went the long way. Four hundred miles.”

“I want a chair,” said Jett.

“You have a chair,” Knox said. “It’s called the mine office.”

“Sounds like Dean,” Chase said, to the fire.

“It sounds exactly like Dean,” Brody said.

“Tell the one about the payroll goat,” Remi said.

“There is no goat story.”

“Who told you about the goat?”

“Dean.”

“Of course Dean,” Brody said, and the whole ring of them went up, and he told it to everybody but he checked the punchlines on her the way he used to in the library, friendly, easy, nothing at all, and twice she felt Owen’s attention cross the fire like a draft under a door.

She hadn’t looked at him once, and she could have told you everything he’d done since one o’clock.

He’d hauled wood all afternoon. He’d fixed the hinge on Knox’s grill shelf without being asked, run two coolers up from the creek, stood at the edge of every knot of talk with a beer going warm in his hand, and watched all four hours of it and joined none of it.

The sun went down all at once, like it does in February. The crowd pulled in around the fire. And Olivia handed her bowl to Lauren and walked up the creek in the last of the light, past the trucks, around the bend where the cottonwoods stood thickest, because she had sold her daddy’s last horse that afternoon with a handshake and a joke about hoof care, and she needed two minutes with her face to herself.

The water ran quiet over the rocks. She stood at the edge of it and let the cold come up off it at her, and she did not cry, because she’d gotten too good at not crying for it to work anymore.

“You left your coat.”

She hadn’t heard him come. He was six feet off, holding her coat in one hand, the firelight from around the bend barely reaching him, and she had no idea how long he’d watched her stand there with her arms crossed against the dark.

“It’s not that cold.”

“It’s cold.” He came and put it around her shoulders, behind her, both hands, and then he didn’t take his hands off it, and neither of them moved.

The party noise came around the bend small and far away, the music, Knox litigating. His hands were on her shoulders through the coat, just resting there, heavier than the coat, and Olivia stood very still, facing the water, and heard him breathe.

“Ainsley told me about Duke,” he said, low. “She’ll do right by him.”

“I know she will.”

“He’s a good horse.”

“You didn’t have to walk my coat up here.”

“I know it,” he said, and didn’t move his hands.

“Daddy always said he made that horse an apology for every other three-year-old he ever rode.”

“He was right,” Owen said. “I’ve seen the other three-year-olds.”

Her voice held. She was proud of it, distantly, the way you’re proud of a fence in a flood. “Last one he started. I used to think, long as I was feeding that horse, some of Daddy’s hands were still⁠—”