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***

It came up at dinner.

I’d made chili — the recipe Dad taught me, which was less a recipe than a philosophy about cumin and the appropriate ratio of bean to beef, the ratio being “more beef.” She’d eaten two bowls, which was a record.

“You were good today,” she said.

“The chili?”

“The bulls.”

I looked at her across the table. The lamp threw warm light across her face, and she’d taken her hair down, and it fell across her shoulder in the way it did when she’d stopped monitoring herself for the evening.

“You told me you were a former rodeo rider,” she said. “You didn’t tell me you were a horseman.”

“Those are the same thing.”

“They absolutely are not. I’ve met rodeo riders. Most of them are athletes who happen to sit on animals. What you did today was read an animal’s body language, diagnose a behavioral problem in thirty seconds, and prescribe a solution that a man with thirty years of experience hadn’t considered. That’s not riding. That’s something else.”

I didn’t have a joke ready.

She’d said something that mattered, and she’d said it without softening it, and my whole operating system was built around softening things. She’d walked past the defense and I was standing there with nothing in my hands.

“Thank you,” I said.

She studied me.

“You’re not used to that,” she said.

“Used to what?”

“Being taken seriously. You’re doing the face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you don’t know where to put a compliment, so you go still.”

I reached for my water glass. Drank. Set it down.

“I’m good at bulls,” I said. “I’m good at horses. I’m good at reading stock and reading ground and reading weather. I grew up on a ranch with a father who put me on a horse before I could walk and expected me to know what the horse was thinking by the time I could talk.”

“I believe you.”

“Nobody in this valley asks me about any of that.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve been watching.”

“Watching what?”

“Which brother they go to. Which one Wyatt assigns the real work to. Which one the hands treat like a peer and which one they treat like entertainment.” She paused. “I’ve been watching you let them.”

The chili sat in my stomach. Still good. Heavier than it had been a minute ago.

“It’s easier,” I said.

“I know.”

“Being the funny one. It’s easier than fighting for the other thing.”