Doug said nothing, merely raised his eyebrows.
“Caleb isn’t right for the corporate world. We both know it. You could get him a thousand jobs, and he would quit a thousand times. But this, I think he would enjoy.” I handed Doug a slip of handwritten paper, and he frowned at it. “This is an address,” he said.
“Look it up online.”
Doug pulled the listing up onto his computer, then whistled slowly. I saw the message in all red (SALE PENDING) and my heartshot into my throat. Doug was still staring at the first picture on the carousel, an aerial shot of the barn and the pastures beyond. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”
“You’re looking at a prime piece of Idaho land, which will eventually be your son’s cattle farm.”
Doug didn’t say anything, just clicked through the pictures. Finally he leaned back in his chair and looked at me. “You think my son is capable of running a cattle farm?”
“Of course not. We’ll hire people for that.”
“You’ll hire people.”
“Yes. We’ll start small and then expand. Local meats, fresh eggs, raw milk. Did you know how much people love raw milk?”
“I did, actually,” he said absently. “One of my interns wrote up a report on it.” He was tapping his finger absentmindedly on the desk, in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat.Tap tap taptap— “I have to say,” he said suddenly, “I have half a mind to encourage this just to watch it all fall apart.”
For a moment I forgot to breathe. I could practically see his little horror-show daydream playing out in the air between us in real time:Drop the dumbest son and his bitchy little wife out into the heartland and watch them as they claw and scratch and struggle to survive.If there was popcorn on the desk, he would’ve reached for a handful.
“It won’t go wrong,” I said. “It’s going to work.”
“And you want me to pay for it.”
“Yes. I do.”
“And if my eyesight isn’t failing me, you already put an offer on it that was accepted.”
My blood went cold. I tried to nod. My chin just barely moved.
“How much do you need?”
“Five million dollars. That covers the purchase amount and the first three years of operation.” My heart was a cricket in my throat. It felt breathtakingly unhinged to say that number aloud. My mother had never handed me more than a crisp twenty-dollar bill. But I knew that this was how men like Doug operated: you couldn’t blink. And anyways, thatwashow much it would cost toget the ranch up and running, according to a small handful of websites I’d scrolled through earlier that day.
“All right,” Doug said briskly. “I’ll give you the money.”
A strange liquid cocktail of euphoria and disappointment dripped through me. I’d done it, I’d secured the funds, but also—it seemed like I could maybe have asked for more.
“But in return, Natalie, you need to give me something else.”
There was a stilling in the room. My father-in-law was smiling at me in a strange way. It was a transparent look; the kind of look my husband hadn’t given me since our wedding day. The look a man gives a woman when he’s imagining her naked body. Considering what he will do with it. The warmth of it, the softness. Fingers molding skin like clay.
A hotness pooled in my stomach, spreading down my legs. “What do you want from me?”
What I had known from the very first moment I met him: Doug was a real man. Effortlessly masculine. He didn’t ask for power, or respect, or submission. He demanded it. He was the kind of man to climb up a mountain of dead bodies in the name of touching the sky. I hated him, I wanted him dead, and also: I sometimes imagined what it would feel like for a man like that to have me. Biblically, I mean. Which is another way of saying: If Doug had asked me what I thought he was going to ask me, I might have given it to him. I might even have liked it. Might even have asked, when everything was said and done, for more.
“I want you to have more babies with my son.”
The warm, liquid feeling in my stomach hardened and froze.
Doug was still looking at me, but his gaze had dropped from my face to my stomach. As if the force of his own imagination might be enough to impregnate me on its own. None of this felt erotic anymore. It felt cold and mechanical. Impossibly sterile. The only way this man wanted to enter me was through a scheduled procedure. Frigid silver tongs and a long bovine syringe.
“Amelia says you’re still breastfeeding,” he said. “It’s harder to get pregnant if you’re breastfeeding. You know that, right?”
Close your eyes, Natalie.Relax. You’re going to feel a small pinch in three, two, one … There we go. Nice and easy. Now, holdstill—
“That’s the deal. I’ll pay for this little farm fantasy, and in return you’ll give my son a big American family.”
