Page 56 of Desired

Starting today it was going to be loud, and worth whatever it was worth, and that part was no longer his to decide.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Owen Royston came up her drive at dusk, and Lauren watched his truck from the kitchen window and didn't have it in her to pretend she wasn't home.

She hadn't slept more than an hour at a stretch since Monday. She'd quit crying sometime Tuesday, not because it was done with her but because her body ran out, and what was left was worse, a flat gray nothing she moved around inside of, wrapping plates that didn't need wrapping yet, eating crackers standing up because sitting down to food felt like a meal, and meals were for people whose lives were still running. When the truck came over the cattle guard her first thought wasn't a thought at all, it was just his name, Owen, and her eyes went hot for the first time in a day, because he was the one she'd liked before she let herself like any of them, and she didn't have a wall left that was worth the name.

She opened the door because standing still cost more.

Owen got out alone, and somebody stayed in the cab, a big shape against the far window, and she was too hollowed out to wonder hard about it.

He stood at the bottom of the porch steps with his hat in his hands.

"I won't stay long," he said. "I've got some things that need saying, and they're not his, they're mine, and when they're said I'll go."

She let him in. She poured him coffee from the pot she'd wrapped that morning and unwrapped at four when the packing got loud in her own ears, and they sat at her grandfather's table with the boxes stacked around them like a city going up, and Owen turned his mug a quarter turn and laid it out, plain, in order, the way he did everything.

"I was in the kitchen in November when Dad gave the order. All four of us were. Go out there and be neighborly, get her easy with the idea of selling. Go woo her." He didn't dress it up and he didn't flinch off it. "What none of us knew, because none of us stayed to hear it, is that Mason told him no before he ever drove out to this place. We heard the order and left, and the no came after, and he never said one word about it to any of us, which is its own conversation, and not the one I came for." He looked at her across the table. "Second week you were here, I asked him straight. At your tailgate, right out there, the day we pulled your well. I asked him, is this Dad's play, and he looked me in the eye and said no. And I believed him, because I've known him since before I could walk and my brother doesn't lie." His jaw worked. "I believed him for a month. And then Dad raised one glass at a wedding, and I sat in a booth at Harvey's with the beer and the arithmetic, and I talked myself out of my own brother in one night, out loud, in public."

"I know," Lauren said. "I was standing behind the booth."

"I know you were." He held her eyes, and there it was, the thing that had been sitting on him since he'd come up her steps. "That's mine, what you heard. Not Mason's. Mine. I called the truth a lie with you five feet behind me, and I'll carry the sound of it, knowing now who was listening, for a good long while, and I'd rather carry it than have you carry the wrong version one more day. He said no in that kitchen. He said no at my tailgate. He's been saying no the whole time, quiet, to exactly the wrong audiences, and the only thing I know of that he never once did was run his father's play on you."

The kitchen was quiet. The tape gun sat on the counter. Out the dark window her gate stood plumb at the end of the drive where she couldn't see it and knew it was anyway.

"Why are you telling me this?" she said, finally. "What's it for?"

"It's not for anything. It's just true, and you got handed the other version first, and from my mouth." He stood, and took his hat off the chair, and stopped at the door the way he did. "For what it's worth. Wells and fences, any of us can do. But I've watched that man my whole life, and I never once saw him look at anything the way he looks at you, and I'm including everything either family owns." He settled the hat. "Thank you for the coffee. I poured it myself, so I'll thank myself kindly, and get out of your kitchen."

It surprised a sound out of her, half a laugh, ugly with everything underneath it, and Owen nodded once like a man satisfied with a repair holding, and put his hand on the door, and stopped.

"One more thing." He said it quieter, and he didn't dress this up either. "My dad's out there in the truck."

Everything in her went cold and hard at once.

"He wants to talk to you. He's been sitting out there the whole time I've been in here, waiting on your say-so, which I'd want you to know is not a thing I've ever seen him do." Owen held her eyes, steady, no push in it. "He'll leave if you don't want it. I'll drive him home and there'll be no hard feelings anywhere in the county. But if you love Mason in any small way, then I think you should hear him." He opened the door onto the cold. "It's yours to call."

She stood in her wrecked kitchen with the boxes stacked around her, and everything in her that was tired and gutted and done with Roystons said no, and she heard herself say, "All right."

Owen nodded once and went out, and she watched through the window as he crossed to the truck and said something at the driver's window, and the far door opened.

Clay Royston came across her yard, and in the middle of it he stopped, and looked around at the place, the mended fence line, the braced windmill, the straight-hanging gate, and took his hat off.

Clay Royston took his hat off in her yard, and somehow she knew, watching through the glass, that this was not a thing the man did.

She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and let him come to the bottom of the steps and no farther. Owen stayed by the truck in the cold, arms folded, a witness at his post.

"Lauren." No charm on it. He looked older than he'd looked at the wedding, presiding down that candlelit table like a man whose accounts were all in order. "I expect I'm the last person in this county you want standing in your yard, so I'll be quick, and then I'll be gone. I've come to tell you the truth, and I've been advised," something moved across his face, "by a woman whose judgment outranks mine, not to get creative with it."

"Then don't."

"The standing interest in your land was mine. It was always mine. I've wanted this parcel for two years, since before your grandfather passed, and when he did, I sent my son out here to get you comfortable with the idea of selling it to me. That was November. That was the order, and it was mine, and I gave it in my own kitchen like I was scheduling a feed run, because that is how I have done everything my whole life, and it has cost me more this week than every dollar I ever made." He said it level, plain, a man reading his own indictment aloud without skipping the hard counts. "And Mason told me no. That same morning, before he ever drove out here. He stood in my kitchen after his brothers left and told me he'd hang your gate because it needed hanging, and tell you the truth if you ever asked, and that if I wanted you worked I could come do it myself. And everything that boy did on this place after, every fence and pump and porch step of it, he did against my order. Not under it. I want that said plain, in your yard, by me, because I'm the reason you can't believe it from him."

The cold sat on the porch. Lauren stood with her arms crossed and her spine straight and did not help him, not one inch, because she'd earned the right to watch a Royston do a hard thing at full price.

"The interest is withdrawn. Formally, in writing, through Greene's office, as of eight this morning. Nobody with my name or my money will come at this land again while I'm above ground." He turned the hat in his hands, once, and she watched him hunt for the next part in unfamiliar country. "And I'm sorry. For the whole of it."

"No, you're not." It came out of her flat and even, two days of packing behind it. "You're embarrassed, Mr. Royston. It's not the same thing."