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“Sounds like a producer’s headache,” Earl said. “Love the kid. Grew up watching him. But I wouldn’t lend him my truck. Or my horse trailer for that matter.”

“Why not?” I asked.

The table went quiet.

The pencil man looked up for the first time. Earl’s expression worked through something that wanted to be offense and landed on reluctant amusement.

“Borrowed it in 2019,” he said. “Returned it in 2021.”

“Two years.”

“He was using it.”

“For two years.”

“Cash doesn’t drive that hard a bargain,” the snorting man said. “Earl just doesn’t drive that hard a argument.”

“My trailer,” Earl said. “My timeline.”

The table broke into low laughter, the kind that came from shared history and shared meals and years of sitting in the same chairs in the same diner in the same town where everybody knew which seat was whose.

Marnie appeared at my booth. She refilled my coffee — I hadn’t finished the first cup — and set her hand on the table for a moment, lightly, the way someone rested a hand on a porch rail.

“He’s a charmer,” she said. “And he’s got a big heart. Cash Calloway can be trusted in every way that matters.”

She picked up the pot and moved to the four-top, where she refilled four cups without stopping and left without being asked for anything else.

I sat with my second cup of coffee I hadn’t ordered and the word trusted sitting on the table between the mug and my clipboard.

I’d worked with a charming man before.

He’d been the site lead in Denver. Funny, warm, liked by everyone, the sort of man who could make a problem sound handled just by describing it kindly. I’d raised the same section twice. Both times he’d told me he’d walked it himself and I was working too hard and I ought to eat something.

I was on hour sixty and I let it go.

That was the whole of it. A likeable man told me it was fine and I stopped looking, and I have not stopped looking since.

I’d sworn I wouldn’t take another job where the smile came first and the structure came later.

And now I was sitting in a diner in a town I didn’t know, drinking coffee I hadn’t paid for, wearing boots I’d have to throw away, holding two pages of notes about a rodeo with no certificate, no producer, and a site plan drawn on a napkin — because a man with dimples and a belt buckle had stood in a field and talked about his father while I held a clipboard and forgot to say no.

I chewed the inside of my cheek.

That was not going to happen again.

I picked up my pen. Opened the notes to a fresh page. Wrote: CONDITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT — DO NOT COMMIT UNTIL CERTIFICATE + BUDGET CONFIRMED.

The capital letters looked firm. They looked like the kind of thing a woman who’d learned her lesson wrote before she forgot it.

Earl was still watching me from the corner table. Not unkindly. The look of a man who’d watched a lot of people drive into town and could tell the ones who’d drive out from the ones who’d stay.

“You heading back to the ranch?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” I said.

He turned back to his table. “She’s going back.”

I checked my watch.