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Neither of us moves for a while. I stay inside her. Every time she shudders, she squeezes me, and a sound comes out of both of us.

I ease out of her. When she tries to stretch her right leg out, the muscle along the inside of her thigh seizes, and she sucks in a breath through her teeth.

I've watched bull riders limp out of the arena with a groin pulled that same way. I roll her onto her back, take her leg in both hands, and straighten it slowly. I work my thumb into the knotted muscle on the inside of her thigh until it lets go. She lies there with her eyes closed and lets me.

I get the water glass off the nightstand and hold it while she drinks. After that I pull the quilt over both of us and draw her against my chest. I rub her forearms from her elbows down to the edge of the scars and no farther.

When she finally speaks, she doesn't lift her head to look at me.

"This doesn't fix anything."

"I know."

"I'm still going up that hill."

"I know."

She doesn't say she forgives me, and I don't ask her to. She falls asleep against my chest with one hand fisted in the quilt. I lie awake with my arm over her and the pistol on the nightstand within reach until the window goes gray.

At first light I open the gun safe and take out the green ledger. When Delilah comes into the kitchen, it's lying on the table beside her coffee, open to Ozzie's line.

E. King. Marker sold to C. Whitlock. K.H.

She reads it standing up, twice, before she looks at me.

"That's Ozzie's handwriting," I tell her. "My initials. It's the same sale that's on the back of that card. You should have had it the first week you were here."

"Torres will want it," she says.

"It puts my ring in front of a judge."

She closes the book and keeps her hand on the cover. "Give it to her anyway."

"I will."

Torres pulls into my yard before noon, after driving all night again. I put the green ledger in her hands, and she doesn't ask me a single question about it.

After that Torres wires Delilah in my bedroom, with Raven in the room and me in the hall. When they come out, the wire is taped under Delilah's breastbone. The battery pack rides at the small of her back, under a loose flannel shirt of mine with the cuffs pulled down. The revolver stays locked in my gun safe. Torres won't let her carry it up there, and Delilah doesn't argue.

With the sun still above the hills, I'm crouched in the cedar at the turnout west of Whitlock's service gate, with Torres's earpiece in and my pistol on my hip. Torres said no rifle. She never mentioned the pistol. If she finds it, she can have my hide for it afterward.

Torres's van sits out of sight down the ranch road behind me, with Torres, Raven, and her entry team inside it. I hold the binoculars on Whitlock's front gate.

Audrey's car pulls onto the shoulder by the limestone pillars. Delilah gets out, and Audrey drives on down the highway.

Delilah stands alone on the shoulder looking up the long caliche drive at the building on the hill. The low sun lies gold across the vine rows.

She knows where I am, and she doesn't look this way. She walks to the steel gate, and it swings open in front of her.

She goes through and starts up the drive by herself. Partway up, where the equipment shed stands under its pole light, a heavy man steps out with a cigar in his teeth. It's Dutch, or a man built just like him.

Her footsteps grind on the caliche in my ear. Her voice comes through steady and close, the way she sounds lying against my chest.

"Hector," she says. "Where's Hector?"

Behind her, at the foot of the drive, the steel gate swings shut. Through the binoculars, I watch it latch.

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