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She wrote that down.

I looked at the gate. I’d walked through it twenty times. Pushed it, pulled it, propped it open with a rock. I had never once considered which direction it swung, because gates had always been gates and that had been enough for everybody in my family since the Homestead Act.

She was already moving.

The ground changed at the south end, where the field dipped toward the creek. I’d noticed the dip. I’d called it natural drainage, which was a phrase I’d heard Wyatt use and deployed with the confidence of a man who understood half of it.

She stopped where the grass turned from pale to dark.

“This stays wet,” she said.

“Drainage.”

“From where?”

“The creek, probably. Runoff.”

“Runoff doesn’t pool in a line.” She walked the edge of the dark grass, following it east. “This is a seep. You’ve got groundwater moving through here. Put an arena on top of it and you’ll have mud by noon, every time, regardless of weather.”

She wrote that down too.

Three things. She’d been here twenty minutes and found three things I’d missed in two weeks.

I leaned against the fence post and watched her work. My shoulder ached from the morning’s flag-pounding. I shifted my weight to the right side.

She pushed her hair behind her ear. Then she reached for something — her face changed, a small frown, her hand patting the empty space beside her.

“Looking for something?” I asked.

“My sunglasses.”

She said it flatly, already moving on, already back to the clipboard, already past the problem of the missing sunglasses and onto the next thing. I could see them. On top of her head, sitting in her hair, the arm hooked over her left ear, exactly where she’d put them and exactly where she’d forgotten them.

I didn’t say anything.

She’d find them, or she wouldn’t, and either way the sunglasses were not the thing she was working on right now. She’d started pacing again, her boots pressing into the dark grass that I now understood was wet for reasons I hadn’t known existed.

“Where’s your ambulance access?” she asked.

“We’ve got the main drive.”

She turned and looked at it. The gravel drive ran south to the county road, a quarter mile of straight, fenced, and narrow.

“Can a fire truck turn around up here?”

I pictured it. The drive, the yard, the barn, the bunkhouse, the pens. Everything arranged for cattle and tractors, not for vehicles that needed a turning circle and a clear path out.

“Sure,” I said. “But only if it can parallel park between the baler and the port-a-john.” I put more dimple into it than was strictly necessary. “We like to keep things exciting.”

She blinked, as if translating the sentence from a language she didn’t speak. “I’ll recommend setting up a turnaround at the north end.” She circled the note with her pen. “Otherwise you’ll be blocking emergency egress.”

The sun caught her smartwatch and flashed. She pushed her hair behind her ear again, the same ear, the same motion, and the sunglasses shifted and she caught them with one hand without looking, pulled them off her head, and put them on her face.

She still hadn’t laughed.

I’d been counting. Not consciously. Somewhere in the back of my head, a part of me that had been running the room since I was twelve years old had been waiting for the laugh. The snort. The eye roll. The reluctant grin. The payoff that came after the performance, the sound that told me I’d landed.

Nothing.