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“Tell your producer I said hello,” he said. “Heard she’s got the permits moving.”

“She does.”

“Good.” He opened the truck door. “Carrow Creek’s good people.” He drove away. His taillights found the ranch road and carried his opinion into the dark.

Wyatt stood in the yard. He hadn’t gone inside. He was looking at the cottonwoods, at the path to the creek, at the place where the sound was wrong.

“How bad?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

Three words. No qualifiers, no numbers, no contract language. The plainest sentence Wyatt had spoken in months, and the most frightening, because my brother always knew, and when he didn’t know, the not-knowing was the answer.

He went inside. The kitchen light went on. I stood in the yard and listened to the creek run thin through the dark, and I didn’t understand what was coming, and I wouldn’t for a while, and by then it would be closer, and the water would be lower, and the sound it made would be smaller still.

I went back to the bunkhouse.

Through the wall, her breathing.

I lay down and listened to both — the woman asleep and the creek awake, one steady, one failing — and I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t plan, and I didn’t joke, and the dark held me the way it held everything in this valley: patiently, completely, without saying what came next.

Chapter 10

Priya

The hydrologist’s email arrived ten minutes before my bedtime.

I’d seen the preview notification when I picked the phone up to set it on the shelf. The subject line read: “Carrow Creek — Flow Assessment & August Projection”. The sender was a firm in Bozeman I’d contracted through Wyatt’s account, a two-person operation that charged by the hour and delivered in plain language, which was the only reason I’d hired them.

I put the phone on the shelf. Facedown. Nine o’clock.

I got into bed.

The sheet was cold against my arms and the pillow held the shape of last night’s sleep, a shallow depression I fit into without deciding to. Through the wall, Cash’s mattress creaked once — the sound of a man turning over, settling, the small rearrangement of weight that preceded stillness.

The creek ran outside. Thin. I’d been hearing it for days, the way the sound had narrowed, the water finding a smaller channel over smaller stones, and each night the note it made was higher, thinner, more of a question than a statement. Tonight it sounded further away than it had yesterday.

I closed my eyes.

The email was on the shelf.

The figures were in the email.

I knew what they said without reading them. Not the numbers — I couldn’t know those — but the shape of the answer, the way you could feel a budget break before you ran the calculation, the way a structure sounded different when it was carrying weight it wasn’t built for. The creek had dropped two fingers since Tuesday. Earl Hansen measured it off a root. Two fingers in a week. In July. August was six weeks away, and August was the month that mattered, and the creek was already running at a volume that made the sound thin and high and wrong.

I turned onto my side. The sheet pulled between my knees. I straightened it. Laid my hand flat on the mattress.

The phone sat on the shelf twelve feet from my bed.

The agreement said phone off at nine. The agreement said no work after nine. The agreement said in bed by ten, and I was in bed, and I was not working. I was lying in the dark with my hand on a mattress and my eyes open and the email on the shelf.

Cash breathed through the wall. Steady. The sound of a man who had decided to trust a piece of paper and the woman who’d signed it.

I got up.

My feet found the floor. The boards were cold, the kind of cold that came up through the soles and into the ankles, and I stood beside the bed in the dark and listened to my own breathing and the creek and the nothing from the other room.