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"You have water," he said, because somebody in the room needed to say something stupid and she was busy.

"I know." She shut the tap off, then turned it back on for a second just to watch it, then shut it off for real, and turned around with her wet hands held out like evidence. "I take back one third of everything I've said about this place."

"That much?"

"Don't get greedy."

She paid him for the pump at the kitchen table, cash out of an envelope from a drawer, counting it out with the care of a woman who knew the envelope's whole biography, and he took exactly the number on Earl's receipt and not one dollar more, and she watched him not take more, and something shifted in how she was weighing him, right where he could see it. Neither of them named it. He folded the receipt into his shirt pocket like the transaction it wasn't.

At the door, with the dark coming on and the truck waiting, she crossed her arms against the cold and leaned on the frame.

"Mason?"

"Ma'am."

She looked at him a second, the palest eyes in Texas working on something, some question loading itself behind them, and he stood there and let her aim it and honestly could not have said which answer he was hoping for.

"Nothing," she said. "Thank you. Both of you."

"The windmill's tomorrow," he said. "It's one hard blow from lying down in your tank and I already brought the wire."

"Of course you did." But the door didn't close for a beat longer than it needed to, and the porch light came on behind him when he was halfway to the truck, and stayed on until he was out past the gate, and he was thirty-one years old and grinning at a steering wheel about a porch light.

It was three seconds. He'd measured it without deciding to, the way you count a fence line, and it kept coming back the whole drive home in the order it happened. Her fingers under his on the wrench handle. The cold feel of them. The one long beat where neither of them pretended fast enough, and the exact sound of the yard in it, wind and nothing, and then her wiping her hand on her jeans like a woman putting the whole event away under tools.

Three seconds. A man doesn't reroute anything around three seconds.

He went back over it anyway, because it was dark and the road was empty and he was nothing if not thorough. Not Clay's play. He'd told her nothing that wasn't true and sold her nothing at all, and if his father asked tomorrow how it was going with the Merritt place, Mason would say the water's fixed and let the old man make of that whatever he liked. There was no Clay in this. He'd asked the question twice now and gotten the same no both times.

Which left the other thing, the one riding shotgun the whole way up the seam road, patient as Owen and twice as certain. Because if it wasn't for his father, then it was for himself, and Mason had spent thirty-one years being a man who wanted nothing badly enough to drive out for it two days running, and that man had apparently stayed home today.

Neighborly, he told himself, and turned in at the Wainwright gate under his mother's family name in iron, and neighborly lasted about as far as the cattle guard.

He'd brace her windmill tomorrow. That would square it. After that there'd be no reason in the world to keep driving down to the seam, and he'd go back to the long steady life he'd made his peace with, no harm done to anybody.

He made it most of a mile believing that.

CHAPTER FOUR

Soluno knew she was coming before she got there, which Lauren would eventually learn was the town's one great talent, but on the morning of her first real trip in, all she knew was that her supply list had outgrown what a person could improvise, and that Mason Royston was in her yard at nine with the engine running.

"I have a car," she said, from the porch.

"You have a rental with a muffler held on by hope, you told me yesterday you were down to a quarter can of primer and no brushes worth the name, and half your list is hardware I'm buying anyway." He leaned across and pushed the passenger door open, which was not the same thing as asking. "Two trucks to the same store is just burning money to make a point."

And here was the truth she was not going to be examining today: she wanted to get in that truck. Wanted forty minutes in a warm cab with that voice and those forearms and whatever he smelled like up close, wanted it low in her body the way you want things that are bad for the schedule, while every sensible cell she had left stood on that porch saying this is not what you're here for, you're here to paint and sell and go. He pushed the door open an inch wider and waited, patient as Sunday, watching her decide.

She got in. She told herself it was the muffler.

The cab of the truck was smaller than the county in every way that mattered. It smelled like work soap and hay and just him, the way her grandfather's house smelled like her grandfather, and she put that thought down fast and looked out the window at forty minutes of brown grass instead. He drove with one wrist over the wheel and his other hand on the shifter, six inches from her knee, and the hand did nothing at all, and she was aware of it the whole way in anyway, like a stove you've been told is on, and the worst part was that she'd wanted exactly this, and now she had it, all forty minutes of it, and it was worse and better than advertised. Neither of them mentioned the quiet. The radio played somebody's heartbreak at a volume pitched exactly to give them both something to not talk over.

"You always this chatty?" she said, around mile ten.

"Saving myself. You'll want me rested for Pearl's."

"Who's Pearl?"

He smiled at the road like the road had told him a joke. "You'll see."