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"Feed on your truck?"

"Half a sack."

"Cut it and lead. I'll push. They'll walk home the way they came." He looked at Lauren, and made the mistake of looking at her properly, flushed and wind-wrecked and gripping the broom in both hands, mud up one leg to the knee where the tank scum had gotten a piece of her already, and his voice came out shorter than he'd sent it. "You're on the gap in the garden fence. Stand in it and look big."

"Look big."

"Arms out. You're a wall. Don't be a door."

It went, all considered, fine. Jace rattled the feed sack off his tailgate and sang out and the cows remembered they were owned, and the whole parade formed up behind his truck like it had been rehearsed, and Mason came along behind on foot, pushing the stragglers, and Lauren stood in the garden gap with the broom and her arms out, being a wall. One heifer tested her. Lauren hollered something that had no words in it at all, pure Denver road rage, and the heifer thought better of the whole project, and Lauren looked so purely astonished at her own success that Mason, forty feet back with a cow leaning on his shoulder, laughed out loud for the first time that morning.

Jace caught that too. Jace, that morning, caught everything.

He proved it at the fence line. They walked the herd through the gap onto Wainwright grass, and while Mason cut wire off the spool for the splice, Jace came back through and made straight for Lauren, took the broom out of her hands like it was a formality, and draped an arm over her shoulders, turning her to survey the pasture with him, a tour guide at the top of a view.

"Look at that," he said. "Not a head lost. You held your gap, Merritt. First roundup's in the books."

"I yelled at one heifer and it worked. That's my whole skill set."

"That's the whole job. Yelling at the right animal at the right moment." The arm stayed where it was, easy, brotherly, entirely for show, and the show had an audience of one and the audience knew it, and knowing it did not help one bit. Mason drove a staple into the corner post with one blow harder than the staple needed, and Jace didn't even have the grace to hide the delight. "Marry me, Merritt. I'm serious. Best-looking of the four of us, and you'd never deal with a cow again as long as you live."

"Your cows are the reason I'm holding a broom."

"And I came and defended your house anyway. That's husband material, right there."

"I'll keep the broom."

"Oh, my heart." Jace put a hand flat over it, grinning the whole time, a man dying and loving every minute of it. "Beat out by a broom. That's a first, I want you to know."

She laughed, easy and out loud, and Mason heard it land exactly where his brother had aimed it, and the stretcher slipped half an inch and cost him a knuckle. That was Jace all over. The oldest, the one who ran the place, steady as a post when it counted, and a menace on the sly to his younger three when it didn't, and this morning it didn't, and he knew it.

Jace released her shoulders, ambled over to where Mason was working like the wire had insulted him, and stood watching with his thumbs in his pockets, radiating the joy of a man who has found money in the road. "You want a hand with that, brother, or is the fence helping you work through something?"

"The fence is fine."

"The fence is getting the treatment of its life." Jace let it sit exactly one beat. "You know they've got him in the auction Saturday," he said, to Lauren, conversational, over his shoulder.

"The what?"

"Oh, she doesn't know." Pure joy now, a man who'd won the whole morning. "Saturday, at the picnic. There's an auction."

"An auction of what?"

"Attendance is the only way to do it justice." He touched his hat brim to her and headed for his truck, walking backward the first few steps, unwilling to miss any of it. "I'd get there early. Front's better than back. Mason, always a pleasure, tell the fence I said get well soon."

He was still grinning when he pulled out, and Mason watched the truck rattle over the cattle guard and knew, with the certainty of thirty-one years of brothers, exactly where that grin was headed. It was headed to Owen. It would find Owen by ten, unpacked and displayed, Mason's whole morning translated into the one story Jace believed he'd been watching, and there wasn't a thing Mason could call after the truck that wouldn't grow the story a size.

He hadn't minded another man's arm around a woman one time in his life. He'd stood at weddings and watched exes dance with the men they'd married instead and felt nothing. Ten minutes ago his own brother had put one arm around one paint-flecked shoulder as a joke aimed entirely at him, and something had turned over in Mason's gut with its teeth out, and it hadn't fully lain back down yet. There was no precedent for it. He didn't care for it. It appeared to be his now, like everything else that had arrived in his life since a gate.

"So what's the auction?" Lauren asked.

"Volunteer fire department fundraiser."

"That's who it's for. What's being auctioned? Jace said they've got you in it."

"They do."

"In it how? What are you, a lot number?"