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“This bed is too wide,” he said against my neck. “For one person.”

“It’s not for one person,” I said.

His arm tightened.

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

***

The wool blanket was warm. His arm was across my waist.

I lay against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, which had slowed from the urgent, unsteady rhythm of twenty minutes ago to something deep and even. His fingers moved in my hair — the same slow, repetitive motion from the bunkhouse floor, the one that had made the machinery in my head go quiet. It was quiet now. The producer was off shift. The logistics manager had clocked out. Whatever was left was the woman in the bed, against the man, in the dark.

“Priya.”

“Mm.”

“I want another go at that question.”

I opened my eyes. The ceiling was low, and the boards above me were dark with age. His voice had come from above my head, low, aimed at the top of my skull, and I heard in it the thing I’d heard in the bunkhouse when he’d said “I was joking” and then “I feel like you’re the first person who’s ever looked at me and seen the thing I actually am” — the sound of a man trying to put something down that he’d been carrying.

The question. On the floor. I’d asked it from the least defended place I had. He knew that. He’d been carrying the knowledge for two days, and now he was asking to set it down.

“Ask me again,” he said.

I turned in his arms. Faced him. His face was close in the dark — the green of his eyes caught in the dim light, two low points in the shadow of his jaw. His expression was the one without the grin, without the dimples, without any of the mechanisms. The open face. The one that cost him.

“How do you feel about me?” I asked.

The same words. The same small voice. But the floor was different now — I was in the bed he’d put here for me, against a chest I’d pressed my face into, and the small voice came from a place that had been opened and stayed open and didn’t need to knock this time because the door was already off its hinges.

He was quiet for a few seconds. His hand moved from my hair to my jaw. His thumb traced the line of it, the same slow path it had traced the night I’d said “goodnight, Daddy” and checked his face.

“I’m falling for you, Priya,” he said.

Five words. No joke after them. No deflection, no grin, no dimple deployed to soften the landing. He said them and then he stopped talking, and the stopping was the bravest thing I’d seen him do, because Cash Calloway without a follow-up was Cash Calloway without a net, and he was doing it on purpose, and I could feel the effort of it in the stillness of his hand and the evenness of his breathing and the way his jaw held tight against the impulse to fill the silence with something easier.

“I’m falling for you too, Daddy.”

His breath left him. A single exhale, the kind that came from a man who’d been holding without knowing he was holding. His forehead came down against mine. His eyes closed. I felt the release in his body — the shoulders dropping, the arm around my waist loosening and then tightening, the hand on my jaw sliding to the back of my neck and holding.

“Say that again,” he said.

“I’m falling for you too, Daddy.”

His mouth found mine. Slow, warm, peaceful.

I slept.

Not the three-hour version. Not the version where I lay in the dark and ran scenarios until the light came gray at the window. Not the version where my hand found the phone and the screen lit my face and the numbers glowed and the budget hole grew and the creek shrank and the morning arrived to find me still solving.

I slept the way I hadn’t slept since before Denver — all the way down, past the dreams, past the monitoring, past the part of me that kept one eye open and one ear trained on the door in case something went wrong while I wasn’t looking. That part of me was asleep too. It had put itself to bed alongside the rest, and the rest had followed it down, and the dark was warm and close and held me and I let it.

I dreamed.

I dreamed of the ranch in October. The cottonwoods yellow along the creek, the hayfields cut to stubble, the arena standing — panels up, chutes in place, the flatbed stage built, the barbecue pit dug, all of it real and finished and mine. I walked the perimeter with a clipboard, but the clipboard was lighter. Fewer pages. The pen was the good one, the dark ink, and I was writing a run of show, but the event wasn’t a rodeo. It was a harvest festival. Vendors in the hayfield, string lights on the panels, a band on the flatbed playing something with a fiddle in it. Tuck carrying hay bales. Wyatt at the gate with a clipboard of his own, and the two of us comparing lists and finding they matched.

I dreamed of December. The ranch drive lined with lights — not Big John’s old strings but new ones, hung by someone who’d figured out where the breaker box was and had opinions about bulb spacing. The main house open, the kitchen table set for forty, Josie and Boone carrying a quilted bench through the door. A Christmas party. The kind that had died with the father and was being rebuilt by the sons, and I was holding a clipboard and a roll of seating chart paper and Cash was beside me with a strand of lights tangled in his hat and I was laughing.