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Jesse stops in the doorway with his hand on the frame and looks at it. "Where's the old one?"

"Burned it," I say. "Bo's chair went on the pile first."

Beckett sets the bowl of potatoes down in the middle, where everybody can reach it. "About time."

We all pull out our chairs and sit down together.

There's no fight money on my desk anymore and no ring in the cedar. Every cow on the place is on Beckett's books, and Beckett's books are clean.

Halfway through the roast, Delilah starts humming, low, like she doesn't know she's doing it. It's "Amazing Grace." Across the table, Jesse sets his fork down. Our mother hummed that one at the stove every night we were boys, with Bo in the next room.

Delilah stops when she sees him looking. "Sorry."

"Don't be," Jesse says. "Mama used to hum that one."

"You still play it Sundays?" Raven asks her.

"Every Sunday at the fellowship. The interim preacher likes the old ones."

Nobody says another word about that church. Delilah told me the board voted Elias King out as pastor the Wednesday after she spoke, and the parsonage was empty by the end of that month. She says he hasn't set foot in the fellowship since, and she hasn't asked anybody where he went.

Raven tells Hector about the cabin she and Jesse live in now, and the creek that floods the low road every spring.

Beckett tells Hector how many calves he sold at the Kerrville sale barn last fall, and that every one of them went on paper.

"He makes me sign for the feed now," I say. "Every sack."

"Somebody has to," Beckett says.

Jesse forgets his plate and watches Raven laugh at something Hector says. Nobody ever laughed at Bo's table. The courts never come up.

A few weeks after the raid, I sat on a wooden bench in a hallway of the federal courthouse in San Antonio while Delilah testified to the grand jury. They kept her most of a morning. When the doors opened, she walked straight down that hallway toward me and never once looked at a door she passed.

On everything Torres put in front of it, that grand jury indicted Whitlock, Dutch, Gil Strackbein, Wendell Ochs, Curtis Lindner, and Harold Fenske. Later it added Stanley Rusk, once Torres had his bank records. Torres told me that much and not one word more. Every one of them is waiting on trial.

The week before Thanksgiving, I stood up in county court, with that young prosecutor at the other table, and pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor gambling charge. I got probation and a fine big enough that Beckett swore when he saw it, and I paid the fine the same afternoon. Ozzie took the same plea the week after me.

In December the U.S. Attorney's office declined to charge me for what I did to Dutch, and so did the district attorney. My lawyer says nobody wanted to walk a jury through that cellar, with a hostage, the shot Dutch fired into the rock wall, and half a federal team who all saw it a little different. Nobody told me I was right to keep hitting Dutch after he was down, because I wasn't.

Torres's report stays in the file. I want it there, so the record shows exactly what I did.

Jesse and Raven leave after the pie with the empty roasting pan. Raven kisses Delilah on the cheek in the yard and climbs in. Jesse stops at the driver's door with his hand on the handle and looks at me over the hood.

"You're not him," he says, low. "You never were."

"I know."

He nods once and gets in. Beckett goes to check the heifers, and Hector goes down to the horse barn to see to Sadie.

I walk down behind his taillights and chain the main gate, like I do before bed now. Back inside, I wash the last of the plates at my kitchen sink.

I haven't hit anything today. I haven't hit anything since that night at the winery. I still check before I go to her. I look at my knuckles and feel for the hot, shaky charge that used to stay in my arms after I hit something, and there isn't any. My hands are steady.

She knocks on my bedroom door late, after the house has gone quiet. She's slept behind that door since she moved her things into my house. She knocks anyway, two raps, the way I knocked on the guest house door the night she came home.

I open the door and don't move out of it. She's still in the boots and jeans she rode in and a long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs buttoned tight at her wrists. She has a flat paper sack from the saddle shop in one hand.

"Tell me why you're here," I say.