Page 63 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

“She’s not stupid,” I say. “In fact, she’s the opposite, which may be part of the issue. She’s observant enough to find things quickly and stubborn enough not to back off once she has. That makes her useful.

“It also makes her vulnerable in ways I don’t think she fully appreciates yet, because there’s a difference between being able to identify a pattern and understanding what happens when you identify it in the wrong place, around the wrong people, before the structure around you has decided whether you belong.”

Reid goes very still, the kind of stillness he only bothers with when he’s stopped joking entirely. “You’re worried she doesn’t belong?”

I should say no. I should say that isn’t the issue.

Instead I hear myself answer, “I’m worried that everyone else will decide what she is before she gets the chance to be anything else.”

Riley is the first to speak. “That,” she says mildly, “sounds an awful lot like caring.”

I push back from the table. “I’m going home.”

Reid doesn’t stop me. He just watches me stand with the resigned expression of a man who knows exactly what comes next and has decided not to interfere with it until after the damage is done.

“That’s probably wise,” he says.

“It is.”

“It won’t stop you from doing anything stupid.”

“No,” I say, reaching for my jacket. “But it’ll at least let me do it in private.”

Carl laughs too hard at that, Margaret tells me not to brood and drive, Riley tells me to drink water before bed as if I’m twelve, and Reid, because he is, at his core, still my best friend even when he’s insufferable, just says, hushed enough that the others don’t catch it, “Whatever you think you’re going to do, decide whether you want the answer before you ask the question.”

I don’t respond, because if I do I’ll have to admit that I already know he’s right.

By the time I get back to Ironwood, the house has settled into its late night version of itself, which is muted but not actually silent.

Floorboards shift. Pipes murmur somewhere in the walls. The old bones of the place redistribute temperature and memory in small mechanical sounds I’ve known long enough that they no longer register as interruption.

It should calm me. Usually it does. Tonight it only intensifies the fact that I’m thinking too much and not cleanly enough.

I shouldn’t go upstairs.

That thought arrives with complete clarity as I close the front door behind me.

It remains complete and rational while I cross the hallway.

It remains complete and rational when I start up the stairs.

It remains complete and rational right up to the point where I find myself outside Annie’s room, staring at the light beneath her door and noticing, with an accuracy I do not enjoy, that I’ve already adjusted my watch twice in the last thirty seconds.

This is what alcohol does. Not in the crude sense people such as Carl mean when they talk about it, but in the more insidious way.

It softens the distance between thought and action, until the action can pass itself off as an extension of logic rather than what it actually is, which in this case appears to be compulsion dressed up as concern.

I knock once.

Then, after a pause long enough that I almost leave, the latch clicks.

She opens the door in a faded shirt and sleep shorts, blue hair loose over one shoulder. Her laptop’s open on the bed behind her.

She looks at me with the kind of surprise that confirms I haven’t, in fact, arrived under any reasonable pretext.

“Cody?”

“You’re still awake.”