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“Wherever you want it.”

She laughs, the wet broken kind, and bends and kisses me carefully, and I get my good hand into her hair and hold her there.

When she sits back up, she’s all business again, which is how I know she means it.

“I won’t live behind a McCall gate,” she says. “Not the ranch, not the line camp, not a house that comes with your job.”

“I won’t ask you to. I don’t know what shape makes it safe for you. So I’m asking you to tell me.”

She takes my key ring out of my belongings bag. My truck key. The key to the rental. The empty place where the ranch keys used to be.

“We start at my house,” she says. “Near the clinic. My practice, my truck, my accounts, my records stay mine. Your job stays yours.”

“Doors?”

“Equal keys. Either of us can invite anyone in. Nobody comes in because one of us has a title somewhere.”

“Vehicles?”

“No trackers. No moved keys. No blocked driveways. No made-up emergencies. Either of us can leave, sleep somewhere else, call a lawyer, or end it without losing work or care or money or protection.”

I let every word stand before I answer.

“Yes.”

“You’re not signing anything tonight. We look at it after the anesthesia wears off, and we get separate lawyers.” She reaches into her pocket and opens her palm.

One silver key. New. Cut this afternoon.

She threads it onto my ring and closes my good hand around it.

“Stay,” she says.

I’ve made promises in rooms with armed men waiting outside for the answer. None of them ever carried the weight of this one small key, handed to me by the woman whose door I locked.

“Yes,” I say.

* * *

They let me go at seven forty-one. A county medical van takes us to her house, where soup and pills and sleep are the only plans either of us makes.

The first night, I sleep like a man who hasn’t in two weeks. I go under flat on my back with my arm strapped to my chest before she’s finished turning off the hall light.

Around two, I wake up and don’t know where I am. The ceiling is wrong and there’s a strap across my chest, and every part of me goes tight at once, and my good hand closes on the sheet.

“You’re at my house,” she says quietly, from right beside me. “The doors are unlocked. Your keys are on the nightstand. You’re safe.”

I turn my head on the pillow and find her in the dark. She’s sitting up against the headboard with a book open on her knees that she isn’t reading. She’s been watching me breathe. The tension goes out of me all at once.

“That’s my line,” I mumble.

“You can borrow it.”

Her hand settles on my good arm. The last thing I feel before I go under again is her fingers, lightly, keeping time with my breathing. Then they stop, like she’s lost count and decided to let it go.

* * *

Four days later, the surgeon says both holes are dry and the thigh has settled again. The restrictions stay, but I don’t need someone watching me every hour.