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She lifts her head off my chest and looks at me.

“Anywhere,” I say. “If you wanted. You wouldn’t owe me the gas.”

She puts her head back down. Her hand spreads on my ribs.

“Go to sleep, Cole,” she says, but her voice has gone soft in a way I haven’t heard before, and I lie awake listening to it echo.

At eleven fifty-eight, her phone rings. The lab.

She answers with her name and license number and recites the sample number from memory. She listens without putting it on speaker. She writes with the blue grease pencil on the back of the discharge envelope. She repeats back the exact wording and asks for the signed report and for Dr. Cho to be notified right away.

Then she hangs up and looks at me.

“The nitrate’s confirmed,” she says. “In the tank water and in the cows. Not in the hydrant.”

“You were right.”

“There’s more.” She looks at the envelope. “Two of the cows tested positive for clenbuterol.”

Chapter 13

Sofia

Iwake at five with a man in my bed for the first time in two years, and for about four seconds I forget to be careful.

The room is gray. Cole is asleep on his back with his bad leg up on the pillows and his left arm flung out across the mattress toward me, not touching, just reaching, palm open. His face is different asleep. Younger. The line he keeps between his eyebrows is gone. There’s a nick on his jaw from shaving and a bruise coming up yellow-green along his forearm.

I lie there and look at his open hand on my sheet.

I don’t mean to do it. I slide my own hand across the sheet and put it in his.

His fingers close around mine in his sleep. Just close, and stay, like a reflex he didn’t know he had. His breathing doesn’t change.

I lie there with my hand in his and my heart making a fool of itself.

Then I remember the lab call, and clenbuterol, and the fact that my name is on four forged certificates, and I get up.

The signed report is in my portal by five forty-six. Nitrate in the black tank and in the cows that crashed. None in the hydrant. The ranch’s own water was never the source.

The clenbuterol is worse in a quieter way. It builds muscle and makes cattle look heavier and sounder than they are, and there is no lawful way to give it to anything headed for somebody’s dinner table. It didn’t cause the crash. The nitrate did that. But somebody doped those cows before they ever reached the tank, and then somebody poisoned the tank and hung a sign calling it a lung infection.

One problem that would hide another.

The floor creaks down the hall. Cole comes into the kitchen on crutches in the sleep pants I gave him and a black T-shirt from the bag Garrett left with the deputy. He’s pale under his tan. His right foot touches down only long enough to balance.

“Pain?” I ask.

“Five standing. Three before I stood up.”

“Numb?”

“No.”

He stops on the far side of the table instead of coming around to look over my shoulder. He always stops on the far side of things now. I don’t know when I started noticing.

I tell him the results in plain words. He listens without interrupting.

“You were right,” he says.