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"Say what?"

"That I told you so."

"You told me so," I say. "In Jesse's truck, outside the feed store."

She grins at me over her shoulder. Royce hacked her hair off at the jaw in that cellar. Raven drove her to a salon in Fredericksburg to have it cut and styled right, and Delilah liked it short enough to keep it that way.

A dark sedan comes bumping down the cedar track from the house. Beckett must have pointed it down here.

I get down off the fence and walk to the round pen gate, between her and the car, and stop there. I do it every time a car I don't know comes down that track.

Torres parks beside my truck and walks over to the gate with a manila envelope. She stops beside me and doesn't come in.

Delilah swings down off the colt and leads him to the gate, and he snorts at the envelope and dances back to the end of the reins.

"You drove out from San Antonio to hand her a piece of paper?" I ask.

"I told her I'd see it through." Torres doesn't look at me. She looks at Delilah. "My investigation's closed. The cases are with the prosecutors now. The assistant U.S. attorney on the Hendricks case will call you when he needs you on the stand." She hands the envelope over the top board.

Delilah keeps the reins in her right hand and slides a stapled set of pages out with her left. The splint came off months ago, and the tips of those fingers are shiny with pink scar.

ORDER GRANTING CHANGE OF NAME OF AN ADULT. DELILAH RUTH KING TO DELILAH RUTH CALDER.

She reads it twice. Her chin shakes, and she clamps her jaw until it stops.

When she looks up, Torres is already back in the sedan with the door shut. She turns around by the barn and heads up the track without a wave or a look back.

"She never says goodbye," Delilah says.

"She never says hello either."

Delilah hooks the reins over her arm, folds the order back into the envelope, and buttons it inside her coat against her shirt. She presses her hand flat over it a moment before she takes up the reins again.

"Supper's at six," she says. "Raven's bringing a pot roast."

"I know. Jesse called twice to make sure I'd be there."

"After supper." She steps back up into the saddle and turns the colt so she's facing me across the gate. "I want to wear your collar tonight. I picked it out myself. I had the saddle maker on Main cut one from plain harness leather, and it's up in my room. I didn't want anything from the Farrier."

I want her so bad, so fast, that my hands close on the top board of the gate.

"Bring it to my room," I tell her. "After everybody's gone."

"Yes, Knox."

She says it without a second's pause. She turns the colt and trots him back along the fence.

I go catch the cowman's other colt out of the side pen. I rub a saddle blanket over his back and legs until he quits flinching at it. The old man is paying for two, and my hands need something to do until supper.

Jesse and Raven drive out from their cabin just before six. Raven comes up the back steps carrying a covered roasting pan in both hands, and Delilah takes it from her at the kitchen door. She sets it on the stove and lifts the lid to look.

"Jesse says you can ride anything with hair on it," Raven tells her.

"Jesse's right."

Raven grins like that's the answer she bet on. Hector comes in behind them with a pecan pie from the bakery on Main. The swelling's long gone from his eye.

The long table Bo bought the year he came home from prison is gone from the dining room. In its place sits a big round oak table I found at an estate sale and spent my nights sanding and oiling out in the equipment shed. A round table doesn't have a head. Nobody has to sit where Bo sat.