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We spend the rest of Sunday on the plan. Audrey sits on my back steps with Delilah's left sneaker in her lap, sewing into the heel with a needle and dental floss. When she's done, she logs Torres into her tracking account from my kitchen table.

The San Antonio agent runs the number the text came from. It's a prepaid phone with no name on the account. Torres has the carrier watching for it to come back on.

All afternoon, the only thing Delilah talks to me about is the plan. She sits at my table with the agent and goes over the cellar again and again.

Ozzie texts back before supper.

Gil turned down a Tuesday load at the Kerrville sale barn. Told them he'd be up all Monday night.

That wouldn't get a judge to sign anything. I forward it to Torres anyway, so her Ranger knows which night to watch that crossing.

Beckett comes back from the west end at dusk. He found the power meter on a pole below the building, and from the fence he could hear a generator running somewhere behind that roll-up door.

At supper she eats standing at the counter with her back to me. At dark she takes a quilt off my couch and carries it out to the barn. The tack room light comes on and stays on.

Beckett parks his truck across the main gate and sits in it all night with his rifle. I sit on my back steps with my rifle across my knees, like I did the night she walked out of my bed. I don't leave the porch.

It's midnight when the horse barn door slides open.

She crosses the wet yard barefoot, in my shirt and her jeans. She stops on the step below mine, so close her knees nearly touch mine.

I stand up and lean the rifle against the post.

She studies my face. She steps up onto the porch and goes down on her knees on the boards in front of me. Her hands rest on her thighs, palms up, and the shirt cuffs cover the scars on her wrists. Her eyes stay up on mine, the way she wrote it on her paper.

I didn't ask her for this. She crossed that yard and chose it, with the marker copy still in my shirt pocket, because she wants this from me even now.

I check myself first. I've been angry all day, most of it at myself. I've sat on these steps since dark, and it's cooled. My hands are steady, and I haven't hit anything today. None of this morning comes out on her. I'm fit to touch her.

"Say it out loud," I tell her. "I don't touch you without your yes."

"Yes." Her voice is hoarse. "Take me to your room and do whatever you decide to do with me. Bandera's still mine. Everything on my paper still stands."

"Everything on your paper still stands," I say. "Inside it, you're mine tonight. You speak when I ask you something. When I give you an order, you say Yes, Knox, so I know you heard it. Say it."

"Yes, Knox."

"Get up. Walk ahead of me to my room. Kneel at the foot of my bed."

She gets up. I reach around her, pull my revolver out of the back of her jeans, and unclip the radio from her belt. The radio goes on the porch rail. She walks into my house ahead of me with her hands empty.

I carry the rifle and the revolver in and lock them in the safe in the hall, in front of the green ledger. I want to pull that ledger out and put it in her hands right now. She didn't cross that yard for the ledger. She crossed it to kneel. I shut the safe.

When I walk into my room, she's kneeling at the foot of the bed in the lamplight, waiting.

I sit down on the end of the bed in front of her with my boots planted on either side of her knees. My gun belt is still buckled on.

"Gun belt first," I tell her.

"Yes, Knox."

She works the buckle loose with both hands. The belt drops open across my thighs with the holster's weight dragging one end down. She doesn't touch the pistol. She holds the belt up to me across her open palms. I take it, holster and all, and lay it on the nightstand where I can reach it.

She watches it go down on the wood and swallows hard.

Tomorrow that pistol rides on my hip in the cedar by Whitlock's gate, whatever Torres says.

"Boots," I say.