Page 35 of Captive

He does. He comes with my name in his mouth and his forehead pressed to mine, and he doesn’t look away once.

Afterward, I use the towel and hand it to him. He fastens his jeans and gathers my clothes off the floor and sets them within my reach instead of dressing me or asking me to stay undressed for him.

* * *

We check the cow together at ten twenty-four. She objects to the thermometer with enough force that I call it encouraging.

Back at the cabin, he stops on the porch.

“You can sleep,” he says. “I’ll take the one-thirty check.”

“Wake me if anything changes.”

“I will.”

“Tonight doesn’t change my report.”

“It shouldn’t.”

“And it doesn’t give you this room.”

“I know. It’s yours.”

He picks up his bedroll and walks back to the shed. I stand in the doorway and watch him go, and I think about calling him back, and I don’t, and I’m not sure which of us that decision is for.

Then I go back down the hall to the bedroom.

I could sleep in the truck. I could sleep on the kitchen floor with the front door open. Nobody would blame me for never lying down on that bed again.

I stand in the doorway and look at it. The narrow mattress. The wool blanket I slept on top of in my clothes for four nights because getting under it felt like agreeing to something. The window that opens six inches and not one more.

I take off my boots. I put the brass key on the windowsill where I can see it from the pillow. I leave the door standing wide open to the hall, and I get under the blanket for the first time, and I lie there on my back and look at the six-inch gap and the stars through it.

It’s enough. It turns out six inches is plenty when you’re the one who decides it’s a window and not a wall.

I’m almost asleep when I hear the county radio crackle out in the shed, and Cole’s voice go sharp.

He’s at the open bedroom door thirty seconds later, and he stops in the hall, and he knocks on the frame, and he says my name first.

“That was the county,” he says. “Somebody broke into your clinic.”

Chapter 10

Cole

Garrett takes my authority away before the sun clears the brush.

He drives out from Fort Worth through the night and does it at the line camp, in front of his lawyer, Owen Pierce, and a state technician with a camera running. Sofia is already on the road to meet the county at her clinic. The decision doesn’t depend on whether she’s watching me accept it.

“Until an outside review decides what happens to you,” Garrett says, “you have no field authority. No crews, no gates, no evidence, no animals, no security decisions. Your credentials end now.”

“Understood.”

I take the access device off my belt and set it on the truck hood. He disables my profile from his phone. Then he calls every supervisor on the ranch, one at a time, on a recorded line, and tells them my word doesn’t move anything anymore.

Nobody asks me if I agree.

For nineteen years, the work has been the closest thing I’ve had to an address. Calvin gave me a bunk, then responsibility, then keys. Russell taught me that an ugly job done without witnesses proved I deserved to keep all three.