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The horse barn had exactly the thing. Ainsley's gray mare had been kicking her stall door for a month, the way that mare kicked everything, and the bottom hinge had finally torn its screws half out of the frame. The door sagged, banged, wouldn't latch square, and somebody had wired it shut as a promissory note. Knox had been threatening to fix it since before Thanksgiving.

Mason took the whole door off.

It was more than the hinge needed and exactly what he needed, and he worked in the cold barn quiet with his coat off and his sleeves rolled, chiseling out the stripped screw holes, gluing in dowels, redrilling. He skinned two knuckles on the frame wrenching the old hinge off and didn't slow down for it. The swollen bottom edge had been drinking rain off the aisle floor for years. He planed it down in long angry strokes that got less angry the longer they went, which was the entire reason he was doing it, and the mare watched him over the neighboring stall bar with an expression of complete unearned innocence.

"Don't," Mason told her.

He didn't hear Knox come in. He looked up from the second hinge and his brother was just there, leaning on the aisle rail eating something out of a wax paper bag, watching work he had no plans to join, and Owen was two stalls down with a bucket, doctoring the mare's neighbor, having arrived at some point with the same lack of announcement. That was the barn for you. Broken things drew Roystons like water drew cattle.

"Dad?" Knox said, eventually, to the door.

"Dad," Mason said, to the hinge.

Knox nodded slowly, chewing, requiring no further briefing on that subject, and when Mason wrestled the door back up onto its pins Knox was somehow already there, steadying it with one boot and his shoulder, not helping, exactly, just standing where standing was useful, which was a thing a brother could do without either party admitting anything had occurred.

"Heard you said something to him this morning," Owen said, from inside the neighbor's stall. Not a question. The county inside a family moved faster than the county outside it.

"Yeah."

"He said the mine's eating ground and he's done nodding at it," Knox reported, around the last of whatever was in the bag. "Irene had the study door in her sightline the whole time. It's better than television up at that house."

Owen came out of the stall wiping his hands on a rag, and looked at the door hanging square for the first time in a season, and was quiet a moment, and Mason let him be, because Owen's silences always finished somewhere.

"Been wanting to say it for years," he said, at last, plain, to the middle distance. "Never once found the day."

"Say what?" Knox looked between his brothers, quick to bristle, like always when family was the subject. "That mine paid for everything we've got. You two want to talk like Uncle John, go do it on his porch."

"Nobody's sounding like anybody," Owen said, mild. "A man can love the horse and still count what it eats."

Knox chewed on that and on nothing, out of bag, and didn't have a comeback, which for Knox was a kind of agreement, and Owen tested the door's swing with two fingers, watched it latch flush, and nodded at the work the way he'd nodded at the old pump they'd pulled out of Lauren's ground.

"Tell me sometime what it cost," he said. "The saying."

"I'll know after the wedding."

"That's about when a thing like that sends the bill," Owen agreed.

And then all three of them heard it at once: their mother's step at the far door.

The effect was instant and ancient. Knox discovered urgent business in the feed room. Owen picked up his bucket and got very busy with the horse. Mason, who had nowhere to go and a broom in reach, started sweeping wood shavings, and Stephanie Royston came down her barn aisle in her good coat with a mug of coffee, took in the scattering of her sons with the dry patience of thirty years, and set the mug on the rail beside Mason without being asked, because the house told her everything through its walls.

She stood a while in the cold, watching him sweep, looking at his skinned knuckles and the door standing square. Whatever speech she'd carried down from the house, she put it away.

"You fight like your father," she said instead. "At things. Instead of with people." She pulled her coat closed at the throat and turned for the house, and paused at the barn door without looking back. "The girl's good for you. I'd hate to see the land conversation cost anybody anything it shouldn't. Tell your father the door's fixed. He was fond of that door."

She was gone before he could decide which of the three sentences to be most afraid of, and from the feed room, after a respectful interval, Knox's head reappeared.

"You're her favorite this week," he said. "Enjoy the coffee."

He didn't plan the turn onto his uncle's road. The truck just took it, as a truck will when a man's been driving on empty questions all day, and he came up the Royston drive in the last of the light and found John on the porch with a mug of coffee, watching his land go dark the way other men watched television.

"Mason." No surprise in it anywhere. "Heard you and your daddy had words this morning."

"News travels."

"News gallops." John nodded at the rail, which was the invitation, and Mason leaned on it in the cold, in the exact spot he'd have picked anyway, and for a while neither of them said anything, because at Royston Ranch that was a whole way of visiting.

"Can I ask you something about my father?" Mason said, finally.