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We were a team. The word was accurate. The word was also a door he was trying to open from his side, and the door was the same door I’d closed three days ago when I’d said “Cash” instead of the other word, and the closing had been deliberate and the lock had been deliberate and the key was in my pocket and I was not going to take it out.

“This is my job,” I said. “I was hired to produce an event. I should have focused on it better from the start.”

The sentence came out in the producer’s register. Flat, precise, the actionable thing first and the pleasantry after, if there was a pleasantry, which there wasn’t. The sentence was a report. A status update. The kind of thing I’d say on a call with a vendor or a county clerk or a client who’d asked me a question I’d already answered and was tired of answering.

His jaw moved. The small lateral motion I’d catalogued — the one that came when he was holding something back, the one that cost him, the one I’d learned to read because I’d spent weeks watching his face from across a table and a floor and a bed.

“From the start,” he repeated.

“From the start.”

“You mean from me.”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t answer it because the answer was yes and the answer was also no and the answer was more complicated than yes or no and the complication was the thing I couldn’t afford, and the thing I couldn’t afford had a name and a voice and a face without a grin and a hand that had held a rope and a mouth that had said “good girl” and a chest I’d pressed my face into in the dark.

“I mean the event is in fourteen days,” I said. “And I have four vendors to replace and a stock contractor to confirm and a budget to balance and a newspaper article with my name in the second paragraph sitting on every counter in the county. And the work is the thing I can do. So I’m doing the work.”

“And us?”

The word “us” was the word I’d been avoiding all day. All week. Since the arena. Since the sound. Since the chute and the word “yeah” and the boy in the dirt and the voice on the radio that said “suspected clavicle fracture, right side, midshaft” and the voice was mine and the voice was the producer’s voice and the producer’s voice was the one that kept the ceiling from collapsing and the ceiling was the thing I needed and the ceiling did not include the word “us.”

“I can’t think about that right now. Not until the fifteenth,” I said. “Right now, there’s a job. And I’m going to finish it.”

The words left my mouth and entered the room and the room held them.

Cash looked at me. Then he stood. Slowly. The chair didn’t scrape. His boots didn’t sound on the floor.

He walked to the door. Stopped. His hand found the frame.

“Goodnight, Priya,” he said.

Not the other word. My name. Just my name. He said it the way he’d said it the first week — the professional address, the contractor’s name, the word you used for the person you were working with.

He left. The door closed. The latch caught, quiet, precise.

I sat at the table with the clipboard and the phone and the contingency list and the empty room and the sound of the creek running thin outside, and I did not cry, because crying would have been a crack, and the crack would have been the door, and the door was closed, and I was the one who’d closed it, and the closing was the only thing I’d done right all day.

I picked up the pen. Opened the clipboard to a fresh page. Wrote “Priorities” at the top in my left hand, the letters slanted and small and precise, and started the list.

Chapter 15

Cash

The stakes were eight feet apart. I drove them with the mallet while she called the line — “left a foot, two inches forward, hold” — and the rhythm was clean and fast and the closest thing to easy we’d had since the bull test.

She’d been at the arena since six. I’d found her there when I came down from the barn with the mallet and the string line, already on her knees at the south vendor row, pulling the twine taut between the first two stakes and sighting down it with one eye closed. Her hat was off. Her hair was pushed behind both ears and the sun had found the part and turned it copper. She didn’t look up when I crossed the arena. She said “morning” without turning around and I said “morning” back and we’d been working since.

As we worked, the sun climbed. The clay dried underfoot and the dust came up with each step and settled on my boots and her boots and the clipboard page where she was marking the stall numbers in her left-hand writing — slanted, careful, the letters getting smaller as the wrist tired, which it always did by mid-morning, which was why the tape checks had stopped, which was why she was sighting by eye now and trusting the eye she’d been trusting for weeks of arena work.

She was right to trust it. The line was straight. I’d walked it twice.

At stall twenty-six, she said something that wasn’t a measurement.

“If you angle that one fifteen degrees northeast, the afternoon shade from the cottonwoods covers stalls twenty-six through thirty-one.”

I looked at the cottonwoods. She was right. The shadow line would move across those stalls by two o’clock and the vendors in them would have shade for the whole afternoon, which meant the soap woman and the leatherworker and the woman with the goat-milk products wouldn’t be standing in the sun for six hours, which meant they’d stay, which meant the vendor row would hold.

“I didn’t think about shade,” I said.