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"Someday," I say.

I mean it. Since I got out, I haven't let myself want anything that far ahead. I want this.

He takes my jaw in his hand and kisses me slow and hard.

Knox lifts his hat off the hook and goes out. Through the glass I watch the light on the keypad go red behind him. His truck heads down the drive toward the gate.

I put on my sneakers and walk out to the horse barn with the sun coming up at my back. I take the radio off the tack room shelf and clip it to my belt.

The whiteboard is still screwed to the gatepost of Sadie's pen, lettered in Hector's square capitals.

SADIE. 2 FLAKES AM. 2 FLAKES PM.

I pull her morning hay off the stack in thick slabs and drop it in her rack. She shoves her nose into it and eats like it's any other morning.

I feed the rest of the horses stall by stall and fill the water troughs. I don't stop, because every time I stop, I see that hat again.

I'm finishing the last stall when a car comes up the drive. It's too quiet to be Knox's truck. It stops somewhere up near the house, and a door shuts. I reach back and close my hand on the revolver.

The radio on my belt crackles.

"Treadmore's here," Beckett says over the radio. "Knox sent her up to wait for him. She says she wants to see you. I'm walking her down."

I key it. "I hear you."

She comes around the end of the barn with Beckett a step behind her, his rifle held low. She's in her mid-twenties, with dark hair pulled back tight and a canvas jacket. A white scar runs across the knuckles of her right hand, and she has a manila folder under her arm.

Beckett stops in the barn door and stays there. Audrey comes a few steps into the aisle. Her eyes move fast over my hands, my face, and the stalls behind me. I check every man who walks through a door the same way.

"You're Delilah King," she says.

"You're the woman who came to Knox's gate asking about his fights."

"Audrey Treadmore." She doesn't offer to shake hands, and I like her better for it. "Stanley Rusk paid me to find you and deliver you to his office."

"Knox told me."

"He told you I quit, then. I sent Rusk his money back and kept a copy of his file." She takes the folder out from under her arm. "Hollister's down at the gate with a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent, walking them through Mr. Saldaña's truck."

"And you came to find me."

"I'm going to go look for your ranch hand. But there's one page in this file you ought to see first."

She takes a step into the aisle. "Hollister told me days ago to bring it to his gate. I didn't. Not with this in it. I drove in this morning meaning to shove it under his nose, and then I saw him down there giving orders to a Texas Ranger." She shakes her head. "It's yours, not his. I've sat on it too long already. Somebody kept the truth from me once, and I paid for it."

She opens the folder and hands me a single sheet.

It's a photocopy. Somebody copied the front and the back of a small card side by side on one page.

The front is in my father's handwriting. I grew up reading it in the margins of his sermon notes, and on the notes he left on the kitchen counter when a deacons' meeting ran late.

Owed to the house. Fight wagers, Devil's Acre. E. King.

Under it is a sum bigger than my father made preaching in a year. This is the marker itself, the card he signed.

The back has one line on it, in a hand I don't know.

Sold to C. Whitlock.