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He stopped in front of me. Close. Close enough that I could smell the barn on his shirt — hay dust and leather and the faint mineral tang of the stock water trough.

“Let me see your hand,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“Let me see your hand, Priya.”

I took my right hand out of my pocket.

The wrap was clean — beige elastic against my skin, the figure-eight holding, the fingers curled loosely. The swelling was visible above and below the bandage, the joint thickened, the back of my hand carrying the faint flush of inflammation.

Cash took my wrist. Gently. His thumb and forefinger circling above the bandage, not squeezing, not testing. Holding.

He turned it. A quarter rotation. Palm up.

I flinched.

His eyes went to my face. Then back to the wrist.

He didn’t ask how. He didn’t ask when. He didn’t ask why I hadn’t told anyone, because the answers to all three questions were the same answer, and it was the answer he’d been watching me build for three days.

He set my hand down. Carefully. Placed it at my side the way he’d place a tool back on a shelf — with the awareness that it had been used wrong and the knowledge that the using was the problem.

“I’ll be at the bunkhouse at six,” he said.

Then he walked back the way he’d come, along the rail, through the gate, across the yard, and he didn’t look back, and I stood in the arena with my wrapped wrist and my clipboard and the knowledge that six o’clock was five hours away and the bunkhouse was where the agreement was and the agreement was what we’d signed and the agreement was what I’d broken, and he knew, and he hadn’t argued, and the not-arguing was worse than anything he could have said.

***

He’d cleared the table.

That was the first thing I saw when I walked in. No laptop, no haulage sheets, no water calculations, no coffee cups, no pens, no clipboard. The surface was bare wood, wiped clean, the lamp angled to light the center of it the way a desk was lit for signing documents.

Cash stood at the counter. Not leaning. Standing, his hands at his sides, his face the one I’d seen at the arena — the one without the grin, without the dimples, without any of the mechanisms that made Cash Calloway easy to be around.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat.

The chair was cold. The table was cold. The bunkhouse smelled of pine soap and the dust I’d carried in from the arena, and the creek ran thin outside, and the silence in the room had a texture I could feel against my skin — dense, expectant, the quiet of a space that had been prepared for something.

“Get the agreement,” he said.

My bag was in the back room. I’d left the door open this morning — the first morning I hadn’t closed it, the first morning I hadn’t tucked the bag behind the shelf where it was out of sight, because by this morning the agreement had stopped being a document I consulted and had become the thing I was failing to live up to, and I couldn’t look at it and I couldn’t forget it and I’d stopped trying to do either.

I went to the back room. The bag sat on the floor beside the bed frame, the zipper open, the inside pocket where I kept the agreement visible. I pulled the two sheets out. They were soft at the folds from being opened and refolded. My handwriting and his, two directions, two pens, the words we’d written across from each other on a morning that felt like it had happened to a different woman.

I brought them to the table.

Cash took them from me. He didn’t look at them immediately. He set them on the bare wood, smoothed the folds with his palm, and sat across from me.

Then he read.

“Phone off at nine. No work after nine. In bed by ten.” His voice was level. Not hard. Not soft. The voice of a man reading a contract aloud, the way a man read a contract when the contract mattered and the other party had stopped honoring it. “Meals sitting down. Water at night whether you ask for it or not.”

He looked up.

“How many of those have you broken?”