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“This is later.”

“This is later.”

“Say what you want, Priya.”

She looked at me. Her jaw worked once. The flannel was buttoned to the collar and her hair was pushed behind both ears and the shadows under her eyes were lighter than they’d been a week ago but still there, and I could see the effort it took her to keep her eyes on mine instead of dropping to the table.

“I want you to take me somewhere and not let me decide anything for an hour,” she said. “And I want to tell you about Denver. And I don’t want to have to get it right while I’m doing it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Say the rest.”

“I want you to use the rope. I want—” She stopped. Started again. “I watched you tie Nickel in the round pen last week and I thought about it for five days and I haven’t stopped thinking about it and I want to know what it feels like to be held by something that isn’t going to let me go until you decide I’m ready.”

The sentence landed in the room and sat there. The creek ran outside. The lamp hummed. I looked at her face and saw what it cost her to say it — the flush at her throat, the set of her jaw, the eyes that stayed on mine because she’d decided to stay and was not going to be talked out of it.

“Stand up,” I said.

She stood.

I walked past her to the door and held it open.

“Come with me,” I said.

She followed me across the yard. The afternoon sun sat high and white over the valley and the arena panels threw their shadows in clean lines across the dirt. We crossed the path to the horse barn. The big sliding door was half open, the shade inside cool and dark, and the air that came out smelled of cedar and neatsfoot oil and the dry mineral scent of old hay.

Nickel banged his bucket twice as we passed his stall. The sound was familiar — the background percussion of the barn, the noise he made when he wanted attention or hay or simply to announce that he existed and was dissatisfied with the quality of his existence.

The tack room was at the far end of the aisle. I opened the door. The room was narrow and deep, the walls lined with saddle racks and bridle hooks, the shelves holding cans and jars and the coiled shapes of ropes. A bench ran along one wall. The light came from a single window, high and small, the dust moving through it in slow columns.

I reached for the rope.

Not the lariat — the soft cotton one, the one I used for groundwork, the one that was gentle enough to sit against skin without marking. It was coiled on the shelf beside the saddle soap. I lifted it and the weight of it filled my hand — twelve feet, cotton, soft from use, the color of old rope, which was the color of everything in this barn.

“Sit on the bench,” I said.

She sat. The bench was narrow and her knees pressed together and her hands rested on her thighs and she looked up at me with the expression I’d seen once before — the night she’d said “goodnight, Daddy” in the dark.

“I’m going to tie your wrists,” I said. “Not tight. Not to hurt. To hold. You tell me if it’s too much. Yellow to slow down. Red to stop.”

“Okay.”

“Say it.”

“Yellow to slow down. Red to stop.”

“Good girl.”

I knelt in front of her. I took her left hand first — the good one — and wrapped the rope around her wrist. Two loops, snug, the cotton sitting against her skin without pressing into it. I tied the knot I’d tied a thousand times on a thousand horses, the knot that held without tightening, that stayed where you put it, that could be released with a single pull of the working end.

I took her right hand. The wrapped one. I eased the rope above the bandage, above the swelling, the loops sitting on her forearm where the joint wouldn’t bear the pressure. She watched me do it. Her eyes followed my hands.

I ran the rope between her wrists — a short bridge, six inches, enough to connect them without binding them. Her hands sat together in her lap, the rope bridging them, the weight of it resting on her thighs.

“Okay?” I asked.