Page 36 of Kid Gloves

I keep that list in my head all week. It has nine names on it. I'd stake the ranch on eight of them, and the problem — the precise, unsleeping problem — is that I'd have staked it on all nine last spring.

I put Boyd on retainer without telling anyone, and tonight, closing up the office alone, I write it in the drawer file where the thick folder lives, the one labeled with no label:

Everything on this ranch runs through people I'd die for. The fire, the gate, the camera — they run through somebody too. Boyd works for me alone. Report to no one else. Not family. Not staff. Not Ray. Nobody, until it's faces instead of arithmetic.

I stand a long time at the window after. Across the yard her kitchen light's on, and her shape crosses it twice, three times, pacing the way she does when the narration's got nowhere to land, and every instinct I own says go over there. So I do, that much I've learned, and she opens the door before I knock, eyes rubbed red and jaw set, and says, "I don't want to talk about the fire," and I say, "Then we won't," and we don't.

We do the last puppy check together instead, side by side at the pen in the red light, and she counts them the way Jake described — twice, touching each one, a miser at her ledger, and somewhere around the second count her breathing evens out and her shoulder comes to rest against mine, and that's the whole conversation. The brindle female gets counted three times. "She moves," Delaney says, defensive, and I say, "Noted," and earn one broken-off laugh, the day's entire crop, and bank it.

Later, her kitchen, decaf neither of us drinks going cold between us, she looks at the junk drawer for a second (half a second, a flick, I catalog it the way I catalog everything and understand nothing) and says, "Wade. If this gets ugly. Uglier. The kind of ugly that has my name in it⁠—"

"Then it has your name in it standing next to mine." I say it before the sentence can finish becoming whatever it was becoming. "That's already decided. It's in the binder."

"Which tab?"

"All of them."

She laughs, finally, wetly, into her mug, and if I'd shut up thirty seconds less — if I'd let her finish the sentence she was building instead of paving it over with reassurance — this book would be shorter. File that under things I learn the price of later.

But lying in the dark with her grip locked on my arm like a strand of hot wire, I run the pattern one more time, because it won't quit running me. Somebody burned her barn with intent, waited eight weeks inside my perimeter's blind spots, and is tidy, patient, and better informed about this property than any stranger has a right to be.

The incident board outside is still blank tonight. First night since I hung it.

There's no incident number for this. Not yet. But it's coming, and when it comes, I intend to be the one holding the marker.

Chapter 15

Delaney

The interview room at the county annex has a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Oklahoma, and I know this because I spend ninety minutes not looking at the two people asking me questions.

Okafor runs it with the county investigator, a soft-spoken man named Pruett who apologizes before every question like a dentist. Standard scope, they keep saying. Timeline: covered. Access: covered — who had keys, who knew the barn, which is everyone, it's a barn in a county, barns here have the privacy of bus stops. Financials: covered, in the special voice people use when they've already read your bank statements and want to watch your face agree with them. The mortgage. The refinance in '23. The vet-year credit card. My life, laid out in the fluorescent light, looking exactly like what it is (a woman holding a ranch together with baling wire) and looking exactly like what it isn't, which is a reason.

I hold. I've been audited before. Poverty comes with rehearsals.

Then Pruett apologizes one more time, slides a photocopy across the table, and takes the floor out of the world.

"Can you walk us through your contact with the Halloran Group? Beginning with their offer letter of April fourteenth."

Navy-blue letterhead, embossed even in photocopy. My envelope. My junk drawer, xeroxed, in a government folder.

"I—" The room does a slow quarter-turn. "How do you have this?"

"So you're familiar with the document." Not an answer. Written down.

"It came in the mail three days after the fire. I never responded. I never — nobody knew about this letter." And there it is, arriving in my own mouth like ice cracking underfoot: nobody knew. Not Wade, not Callie, not Rosie, not the county grapevine that can clock a laminated menu insert inside an hour. Two parties on earth knew that letter existed — the woman who shoved it in a drawer, and the people who licked the stamp. "Who gave you this?"

"We can't discuss that."

"You don't have to." My laugh comes out with no floor under it. "You didn't get it from me, so you got it from Dallas. They mailed a woman a lifeline three days after her barn burned, and when she didn't grab it, they mailed it to you as a motive. That's — you have to see it. The same people twice. That's not evidence, that's plumbing."

Pruett writes something. Okafor watches me with those steady eyes and says, "Why didn't you disclose the offer, Ms. Boone? To the investigation. To your lender. To your—" a beat, delicate as a scalpel—"business partners."

And I sit under Oklahoma with my three rehearsed sentences from Thursday — the ones the state car interrupted, the ones still folded in my chest like a note passed too late, and I give the only true answer there is, which is also, in this room, the worst one:

"Because I thought about it." The words cost what they cost. "Not signing — keeping it. Keeping the door cracked. I've never once in my life had a way out that didn't cost me something, and for two months that ugly envelope was the first exit I ever got to refuse daily, on purpose. That's why I didn't show anybody. It was mine to keep saying no to." I look at the photocopy. Market conditions. We encourage a prompt response. "I understand exactly how that sounds in here."

"Thank you for your candor," Okafor says, and the tape keeps running, and Oklahoma stays on the ceiling, and somewhere outside this room the clock has already started on the worst version of the next conversation, the one where Wade Mercer learns about the letter from a folder instead of from me.