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Priya

Silver Bend had four blocks of Main Street and not one of them was hiding anything.

I parked between a feed store and a pickup truck older than my rental agreement and sat behind the wheel long enough to check my watch twice. Twelve-fourteen. The screen showed three unread emails from the Denver office, a calendar reminder I’d set for a client I’d already fired, and a step count so low it qualified as a medical event.

My boots were destroyed.

I’d bought them in Denver for exactly this kind of work — site visits, outdoor venues. Full-grain leather, reinforced toe, rated for uneven terrain. The woman at the store had said they’d last years. She had not accounted for Montana mud, creek seep, or the fact that I’d knelt in a hayfield for forty minutes trying to read a survey flag that kept leaning.

Brown leather, now gray. Cream linen shirt, now cream linen shirt with a green stain across the hip where I’d brushed against a fence post wet with something organic and suspicious. My hair had pushed behind my left ear so many times it had given up and stayed there.

I locked the car. The rental had Colorado plates and a dust pattern on the hood that said I’d been on gravel roads nobody had told the rental company about.

Main Street was quiet in the particular way of a place where quiet was the default and noise was the exception. Cottonwoods threw shade across the sidewalk in shifting bars. A false-front building with a neon sign reading THE BLUEBIRD stood at the near corner, its windows reflecting sky and the dark shapes of people eating lunch. A feed store with a loading dock and a bench outside. A white steeple above the roofline. A building with MADISON VALLEY COURIER painted on the glass in letters that had been gold once.

I was a city girl. Places like this weren’t exactly my comfort zone.

The Bluebird’s door had a bell on it, and it rang when I pushed through.

Inside: linoleum, booths along the windows, a counter with stools that had seen better decades, ceiling fans turning slow enough to be decorative. The air carried coffee, bacon grease, and something sweet baking in the back. A radio played low — country, naturally.

Three booths occupied. A man in a seed cap eating soup at the counter. Two women at a table by the window, forks moving in rhythm.

I took the corner booth at the back, set my clipboard on the table, and sat down on the edge of the seat. Not all the way. All the way meant settling. Settling meant stopping.

I hadn’t agreed to a single thing today.

The clipboard held two pages of notes in my handwriting, which was precise when I was awake and deteriorating when I wasn’t. For now, the pages were still precise. The handwriting would deteriorate later, if I took the job, which I hadn’t, because the job had no certificate, no producer, no budget, and no site plan — it had a napkin with a diagram drawn on it in smudged ink and held together with tape that had given up.

A woman appeared at the booth before I’d opened the menu.

She was late forties, small, quick, auburn hair pinned up with a clip that was losing its grip. Faded apron over a uniform. Laugh lines deeper than the frown lines. A scar at her hairline, thin, visible in the light from the window. She set a coffee mug on the table without asking, filled it from a pot she’d been carrying, and left.

No order taken. No greeting. Just coffee.

I looked at the mug. Steam rose from the surface.

She came back in ninety seconds with a plate. Slice of pie, dark filling, crimped crust. She set it beside the coffee with the practiced motion of someone who’d set ten thousand plates on ten thousand tables.

“I didn’t order that,” I said.

“You’ve been at the Calloway ranch this morning,” she said.

Not a question. A fact, delivered with the same even tone the auctioneer had used on Lot 14, except this was delivered over pie.

“I have,” I said.

“Mud dries different on this side of the creek.” She glanced at my boots. “Cream pie’s still warm. You want anything else, wave.”

She left.

I looked at the pie. I looked at the coffee. I looked at my boots, which had indeed dried to a different color on the right foot than the left, a mineral gray that said creek seep rather than topsoil.

I ate the pie.

It was good. The crust held together under the fork and the filling tasted like fruit and sugar and somebody who’d been making pies long enough to stop thinking about it. I ate it in small bites, scrolling through my notes with one thumb while the other hand worked the fork. Two pages of problems, each one numbered in the margin.

1. Gate — swings inward. Remove or rehang.