Chapter One
OKAY. SO HERE’S A THINGI know about myself: I’m not a woman who gets into strange trucks.
I want that on the record before I tell you what I did, which is get into a strange truck.
In my defense, it was a very large truck, and it belonged to a man named Loukas Karalis, and eighteen years ago Loukas Karalis stood up in a lecture hall full of people and announced that no one alive could ever love me. So really, getting into the truck was an act of tremendous personal growth. Most women would’ve set it on fire.
The ranch hand who came to fetch me couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He tipped his hat and called me ma’am and told me, going pink, that Mr. Karalis was expecting me for lunch and was, and I’m quoting this poor sunburned child word for word, “not real comfortable waiting.”
Not real comfortable waiting. As though waiting were a thing that happened to other people, as though Loukas Karalis had ever once stood on a platform in his life and watched a train pull out without him on it.
I should’ve said no. I had a whole speech ready, and it was a good speech.
I got in the truck.
Look, I’ll explain. You’re going to need context, otherwise this just sounds like I’ve got no spine, and I’ve got loads of spine, I’ve got an excellent spine, ask anyone.
Eighteen years ago I was twenty-one and idealistic and taking a business ethics class purely to fill a requirement, and a smug second-year named Loukas Karalis stood up and argued that marriage was a financial merger and anyone who married for love was, in his exact words, subsidizing their own poverty with feelings. I argued the opposite. For ninety minutes. The professor was delighted. I thought I’d won.
Then, while everyone was packing up, Loukas leaned across the aisle and told me, very pleasantly, that he finally understood why I’d never been seen with anyone, since no one alive could fall in love with a shrew.
So I told him I finally understood why all his girlfriends were rumored to be on retainer, the only way to keep a woman near him being to pay her by the hour.
And then we didn’t speak for eighteen years, which suited me fine. Great. Perfect. Couldn’t have planned it better.
I’ve thought about him approximately once a day for those eighteen years though, and speaking of things I keep to myself, that’s the real reason I got in the truck, and it’s nothing to do with old grudges.
It’s everything to do with the four red notices currently fanned out under a magnet shaped like a roadrunner. Electricity. Water. The feed supplier who’s stopped, very politely, returning my calls. And the big one, property tax, the number that wakes me at three in the morning and sits on my chest like something with talons.
I run a raptor sanctuary out in the Hill Country. Forty acres of recovering hawks and owls and one extravagantly resentful red kite named Sergeant, who’s hated me personally and by name for six years. There’s a flight enclosure with a north wall that won’t survive another winter. There’s an education program for school groups who pay nothing, on purpose, the entire point being that they pay nothing.
And there’s, under all of it, a low permanent hum of money-terror that I wear like a second, itchier skin.
In about six weeks, barring a miracle I can’t afford and can’t quite let myself imagine, I’m going to lose every bit of it.
So when the richest man in South Texas sends a truck to my gate, I do the math.
The math is humiliating. The math wins.
So I’m off to see the wizard. I mean the wicked. I mean an old college friend. Yes. Let’s go with that.
I brace myself on the long drive in for a glass tower, something cold and tall and pleased with itself, the architectural version of that lecture-hall smirk. What I get, when the truck crests a rise and the land opens up the way it does out here, all at once and bigger than seems strictly necessary, is a ranch.
A working one, and I know the difference. I’ve spent my whole adult life learning to read a piece of land the way other women read a room. This isn’t a rich man’s stage set with a rented longhorn for atmosphere. The fences are tight and honest. The stock tanks sit where the water actually wants to go.
Out past the barns a red-tailed hawk’s riding a thermal in slow professional circles, not wasting a single wingbeat, and I feelmyself go quiet inside the way I only ever go around the birds, and for one disloyal second I forget I’m here to grovel to a man I hate and just watch her ride.
Then I remember whose sky she’s riding over, and I go back to hating him, which is firmer ground anyway.
The house is long and low and built of pale local stone that looks like it grew up out of the ground instead of getting trucked in, and it’s got the absolute nerve to be beautiful. The nerve to make me want to walk its rooms and stay.
I price it on reflex, the way being broke turns you into a permanent appraiser who can’t look at a lovely thing anymore without running the meter.
The meter on this house sails straight past my entire operating budget without slowing down. A week of this place would re-roof my barn. A month would buy the back forty I’ve wanted for six years, where the harriers hunt come fall.
Stop it,Sensible Blythe says, and she’s right, this arithmetic only ever ends in the same place, which is wanting things, and I gave up wanting things a long time ago, for reasons I keep behind a locked door and don’t hand out to ranch hands or billionaires or anyone else.
And then the front door opens, and there he is, and eighteen years has done absolutely nothing to the man except, infuriatingly, improve the inventory.
