Page 65 of The Lonely Road

“The mother of the boy who had the horse called Ranger?”

She nods, her lips pursed.

Now!

Now is the time to probe, to earn my money from Jessup.

My heart thunders in my chest.

Robert Frost’s words move through my head, unbidden, the way things you memorized in school surface at the worst possible moments.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both.

I look at the two roads.

Jessup isn’t going to walk away just because I did. He’ll keep Trafton here or bring someone new, and whoever finishes this job won’t have my reluctance about collateral damage.

She loses her case. Clara Whitman loses her water. The Whitman kids lose their ranch.

And if I handed Jessup his money back without an airtight reason, he’ll burn me. Men like him talk to men like him. One refusal on my end becomes a reputation, and a reputation in my business is the whole business.

Road two: I stay.

I finish the job. I get Jessup what he needs—her strategy, her theory of the case—and watch from a professional distance while I dismantle everything she’s built.

She loses her case. Clara Whitman loses her water. The Whitman kids lose their ranch.

She may figure out eventually that I was involved. By then, I’ll be gone.

But I keep my business. My credibility. My carefully constructed life of hotel rooms and other people’s problems, and the self-sufficiency of a man who has never needed anything he couldn’t walk away from.

Either way, Taya loses. The only variable is whether I lose with her.

It’s a rationalization. I know that.

But I am a man with a flexible morality, and I have already spent more time on this than it deserves, because the answer is obvious and has been obvious, and the only reason I’m standing in her kitchen performing a philosophical exercise is that I don’t want to do what I know I’m going to do.

Finish the job.

Get out of Dodge.

That’s all there is.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

She shakes her head and then looks up at me. “It’s just how water rights work…if there is any discontinuation of the use of water, the other side has a case.”

“Has there been a discontinuation?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But?” I prompt.

“But opposing counsel might.” Pause. “I don’t think the judge will agree.” She looks out of her window at the mountains. “Sure, for a while, the neighbor used the water, but there are no records of it, and it was just neighbors helping neighbors. The usage didn’t change. She didn’t abandon the damn water, now did she?”

This I’ve already given to Jessup.

“No records whatsoever?”