Page 49 of Forbidden Protector

There's a truck in the yard I don't recognize.

Montana plates, dust to the rocker panels, an equipment box on the roof. Holt's standing loose-shouldered by the porch rail, a man about his age crouched at the truck bed working a booster seat loose, and a boy already halfway across the yard at a dead run toward the porch.

"Uncle Holt!"

Holt catches him without seeming to try and swings him half around. For one second I am looking at a crayon drawing come off a refrigerator door and stand up on its own two legs. Same black hat, if you squint. Same tall stick figure with a hand the size of a tire.

I park and get out slow, still cataloguing.

His jaw isn't set. His shoulders have dropped an inch. When the man from the truck bed closes the distance between them he doesn't stop at six feet like everyone else in this county does. He walks straight in and gets an arm around Holt's neck, and Holt lets him, actually lets him, one hand coming up to grip the man's shoulder, easy, like you'd greet a brother.

"John Thompsen," Holt says, when he finally turns toward me, and there's nothing guarded left in his voice. "Spotter. I've mentioned him."

"Once," I say. "The refrigerator mentioned him more than you did."

That gets a look from John, quick and assessing. The same up-and-down read I gave Holt in the truck from the airport, except friendlier. And a great deal more amused.

"Ma'am," he says, coming toward me with his hand out. "Whatever he's told you about me is classified, and whatever he hasn't told you about himself is worse."

"I'm getting that impression."

"You've got no idea." He shakes my hand, firm, easy, a man who has clearly decided within four seconds that I'm worth being charming at. "Once you get him going he's like a faucet with the handle broke off. Man went six hours on an overwatch one time and I had to beg him to stop talking just so I could hear the wind."

"Holt Blackwater talked for six hours?"

"Ma'am, Holt Blackwater does not stop talking. You've just never once given him a reason to start."

Miles is already on his knees in the mud with both arms around Gus's neck, tail going so hard his whole back end moves with it.

"He remembers me," Miles says, delighted, muffled against fur.

"Everybody remembers you," John says. "You're loud."

I watch Holt watch the two of them in the mud.

Not in the truck, not in the barn, not even in the line shack with his stitches half-done have I seen his face go unguarded like this on its own, nobody asking him to hold anything, nobody watching him do it but me.

He catches me watching and doesn't look away. He doesn't cover it, just holds my eyes a second too long across the yard with a boy hanging off his dog and his best friend grinning beside him.

I look away first this time.

"Custody hearing finally closed," John says to me, quieter, watching his son. "Two years. She fought me on every weekend, every holiday, every single Christmas, and Holt was on the phone with me more nights than not, talking me down or talking me through the filing." He shakes his head. "Man drove to Butte twice during it. Didn't say why he was coming. Just showed up."

"He didn't tell me any of that."

"He wouldn't." John looks at me, and whatever he sees in my face he decides is worth being honest about. "That's not modesty, ma'am. That's just him. He'll bleed for you quietly and let you think it was nothing."

I already know that. I stitched his arm myself in that line shack and he called it superficial before I'd even threaded the needle.

"We're headed up to Lake Louise. Powder week, for spring break." John claps Holt on the shoulder again. "Told him we'd swing through on the way, since he apparently forgot what day it was."

"I didn't forget."

"You forgot. You've had a look on you since I pulled in like a man doing math he doesn't want to finish." John's eyes go from Holt to me and back, slow. He puts whatever he just decided away for later use.

Holt doesn't deny it. I catch the muscle at his jaw and know exactly what math he's been running, because I've been running the same one, in the truck with Maren, on the drive back down 89, every single day since a line shack.

"There's a flag on my west fence," Holt says, changing the subject, same as he changes everything he doesn't want examined too closely. "Orange tape, tied high, on the survey line."