Page 41 of Kid Gloves

The pen is in my hand. I don't remember picking it up. It's heavy, silver, provided — of course, they provide the pen, the pen is the one thing you must never bring yourself.

"Delaney."

Callie, sliding into the third chair uninvited, clinic coffee in hand, sixty seconds flat from whenever Loretta's network fired the flare. She doesn't look at Simms. She doesn't lower her voice, either. She was raised in an ER and courtesy is for the stable.

"I did this," she says. "Different table, different state, same pen. After the Springs went bad I signed away a practice I'd bled for, because a man with nice paper convinced me a clean exit was the same thing as a fresh start, and you know what I bought with the money? Eighteen months of being nobody anywhere. It doesn't starve the whispers, D. It confirms them, and then it exports you." She leans in, and her voice drops for the first time, just for me. "You're not signing because you're guilty. You're signing because leaving first feels safer than being left. Ask me how I know."

"Ma'am," Simms begins, "this is a private⁠—"

"I'm her vet," Callie says, not turning. "She's got a torn ligament in her judgment. Medical matter."

"The offer expires Monday⁠—"

"The offer," says Loretta, materializing with a pie nobody ordered and setting it down in the exact center of Simms's paperwork fan with a small ceramic thud, "can expire wherever it likes. This table's got a two-dessert minimum on Saturdays. House rule. Very old."

And it's while Simms is relocating his beautiful documents out from under a hot lattice-top — while the notary bites down on the first human expression she's had all lunch, while the whole diner watches over menus like it bought tickets, while I sit there with a provided pen and my pre-printed name and my grandmother's torn thirds somewhere in the walls of me — that Iron Creek's criminal element arrives.

Nobody ever establishes how she got out of the side yard. Add it to the file. The bell over the door doesn't ring so much as surrender, and Brisket walks into Loretta's like she has a reservation, past the register, down the aisle between the booths — patrons drawing their plates back like she's inspecting them, Deke standing up and then thinking better of every part of it — straight to the back table, where she reviews the situation with one amber sweep: the man, the notary, the pen, me.

Then she puts her front hooves on the table and eats the signature page.

Not the contract. The page. The one with my name printed under the blank, the one Simms had squared in front of me, apart from the stack, ready. One page, selected with the discrimination of a professional, gone in four bites, while the diner detonates around her and Simms makes a sound I will treasure until I die, a sort of executive bleat, and Loretta laughs her whole-body laugh with both hands on the counter, and the notary, God bless her forever, stamps nothing.

Brisket chews. Maintains eye contact with Simms the entire time. Swallows. Then she steps down off the table with the unhurried dignity of opposing counsel who has concluded her argument, positions herself at my hip, and stands there — square, planted, load-bearing — while the notary quietly caps her stamp like a woman who knows a ruling when she's witnessed one.

"My counsel," I say, and it comes out half a laugh with a crack straight through it, my hand in the wrecked wool at her neck, "advises against."

Simms recovers the way expensive men do, fast and thin. "We'll print another. Monday, Ms. Boone. The window⁠—"

"I heard you." I stand. My legs hold, which the record should reflect I wasn't sure of. I look down at the beautiful ruined fan of paper, the pen still warm in my fist, and I do the one brave thing I have left in the tank, which is smaller than no and bigger than yes: "I need the night."

"The offer is best considered⁠—"

"Mister Simms." Loretta, from the counter, in the voice she's used on forty years of drunks and one health inspector. "The lady said she needs the night. In this establishment, that concludes lunch."

I walk out with a goat and a to-go box I don't remember accepting, into the four o'clock light of a town that watched all of it and will have it county-wide by supper, and I'm halfway down the sidewalk before I register the weight in my fist.

The pen. Simms's pen, silver and heavy and provided, still locked in my grip from the moment Brisket's hooves hit the table. I stop in front of the pharmacy (geraniums still showing goat damage, we've marked this whole town like a crime spree) and I look at it a long time. The correct move is to walk it back inside and set it on his beautiful ruined paperwork. What I do instead is put it in my jacket pocket, deliberate as a vow I can't read yet, because some part of me that's smarter than the rest has decided we're keeping the pen, and that part won't say why, only that the why is coming.

Loretta finds me on her back porch at dusk, sets down two coffees, and lowers herself into the other rocker like punctuation.

"Ellie sat right there the night she tore up Judd Halloran's letter," she says, no preamble. Loretta's stories arrive pre-aimed. "Oh-nine. Drought had her down to nothing — she'd sold the horses, honey, the horses, and that letter would've cleared every debt she had. You know what she told me?" Loretta rocks once, sipping. "She said, 'Retta, that man's not buying land. Land's everywhere. He's buying the version of the story where he was right and we were fools to build here.' Tore it in thirds so the trash men would know it wasn't an accident." A pause, timed like her pies. "Then she went in and did her books till midnight and cried where nobody saw, because being right's not free, and don't let anybody romance you otherwise."

We rock a while. Brisket patrols the geranium perimeter. Somewhere in my jacket, a stolen pen weighs nine hundred pounds, and it's a familiar weight, it's exactly what the envelope used to weigh, except this time I'm the one who decides what gets signed with it.

The night. I bought one night.

Now I just have to figure out who I'm spending it deciding to be.

Chapter 18

Wade

The county tells me about the diner by suppertime Saturday, the way the county tells you anything you have no right to hear and every need to: sideways, in pieces, through Kowalski, who gets it from his mother, who has apparently started a second scrapbook.

A contract with her name pre-printed. A provided notary. A provided pen. Callie arriving like a medevac. Loretta deploying pie as area denial. The goat (the goat I have personally cited in nine federal-adjacent documents) eating the signature page and only the signature page, with discrimination, like she'd read the file.

And then the part Kowalski delivers looking at his boots, because the kid's learned enough this summer to know which facts are ordnance: "She told him she needs the night, sir. Simms said Monday. So it's — whatever's going to happen, it happens tomorrow."