Page 15 of Devoured

Helen looked at her for a moment. Whatever she saw seemed to settle something she'd been carrying.

"...Thank you," she said, and the two words cost her something, and meant something, and Lara understood she'd just been let further into this house than the job had ever entitled her to go.

"So let me make sure I have the sequence," Elena said.

They were on the floor of Elena's living room with their backs against the couch and a bottle of red between them, which had become, in the space of a single week, a thing they did, the easy shorthand of two women who'd found each other at the end of the same map. "The nanny quits. You, who were hired to do accounting, get a six-year-old dressed, feed both children, run them to school, get ambushed by Pearl and force-fed pie, drive home, and spend the afternoon pushing a swing."

"That's the sequence."

"And at no point did you say, 'this is not my job.'"

"I said it several times. Out loud. To multiple people." Lara turned her wineglass in her hand. "It had no effect on anything." She tipped her head back against the couch cushion. "And the maddening thing is it's true, technically. I run the office. That's the job. The books, the bills, the phone, the paperwork that's been drowning that man since his father got sick. And somewhere in the last week I've apparently also taken on the kids and half the household, which is nobody's plan and nowhere in any agreement, it just keeps being three-thirty and there being children who need feeding and me being the one standing there."

"And the ranch?"

"God, no. I don't touch the ranch." Lara almost laughed. "I'm an accountant from Boston, Elena. I have never been near a cow on purpose in my life and I intend to keep it that way. The cattle and the fences and the early mornings are very much Dean's department, and the hands', and they can have it. I balance the ledgers and I cut the apples." She heard herself and grimaced. "Which, when I say it out loud, is a much bigger job than the one I applied for."

Elena nodded slowly, like a woman confirming a diagnosis she'd suspected on intake. "And how is he?"

Lara didn't pretend not to know who he was. That ship had sailed somewhere around day two.

"Cold," she said. "Mostly." She watched the wine catch the lamplight. "And then not. That's the trouble with him. He'll be cold for a day and a half and you'll have him all figured out, and then he'll look at you across a kitchen for one second like… " She stopped. Started again. "He caught me laughing with Levi this morning. And the look on his face before he hid it. I keep…" She shook her head. "I keep catching the wrong version of him. It would be a lot easier if he'd just stay the porch one."

"Mm," said Elena.

"Don't mm me. You sound like Pearl."

"I'm just noticing," Elena said mildly, "that you've told me a great deal about his moods, and nothing at all about the fact that you've clearly got a thing for him."

"I do not have a thing."

Elena looked at her. Said nothing. Topped up the wine, which was its own kind of cross-examination.

Lara held out for about four seconds.

"Fine." She set her glass down. "Fine. He's… okay. You want the honest version? The man is built like the side of a barn and twice as well-maintained, and yesterday I watched him swing up onto a horse and forgot how to operate my own face. He wears these jeans…" She gestured, helplessly, at the general concept of the jeans. "Elena, I have lived in Boston. I have been to actual gyms full of men who do nothing all day but maintain themselves at great expense. And I have never in my life seen a better ass in a pair of Wranglers than that rude, miserable, impossible man's, and the worst part, the genuinely unfair part, is that he isn't even trying. He doesn't know. He'd be appalled."

Elena had started laughing somewhere around side of a barn and was now most of the way gone.

"It's not funny," Lara said, which made it worse.

"It's a little funny."

"He called my shoes a problem. He accused me of being a gold-digger. He has the personality of a locked gate." Lara picked the wine back up. "And I would still like it on the record, for the historians, that the man fills out a pair of jeans like it's a personal favor to the women of this county, and that I resent it deeply, and that none of this means anything."

"None of it," Elena agreed, wiping her eyes, "means anything."

"Glad we're clear."

Elena let the laughter settle, refilled both their glasses one more time, and asked the real question, gently, the way she asked everything.

"You going back to Boston?"

It was a fair question. It was the question, really, the one underneath all the others, the one Lara had been carrying since the airport with the half-written text to her sister she never sent. Okay I'm actually doing this, don't say I told you so. Three months ago the whole point of this place had been that it was somewhere to land until she figured out where to actually go. Somewhere temporary. The far edge of the map, where nothing could happen to her because there was nothing here.

She thought about a small boy deciding Brenda was a good egg. About a sharp girl who'd let her get her name right. About an overwhelmed woman saying thank you like it was a key to a door. About a man breaking eye contact first across a dusty yard.

"No," she said, and was a little surprised to hear how certain it came out. "I'm not going home to Boston yet."