"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he said.
She went back to her list.
He went back to his receipts.
The afternoon settled around them.
Ordinary and imperfect.
And theirs.
Spring came the way it always did in Wyoming.
Late and reluctant.
And then suddenly, all at once.
The snow giving way to mud.
That was its own kind of inconvenient miracle.
The light changed.
The temperature changed.
The horses got restless.
The cattle moved differently.
And the whole landscape went from the white stillness of winter to the brown, churned-up business of everything thawing at once.
Gideon took the fence line first thing, as he always did in spring, checking for the damage winter had done.
The post that had shifted in the freeze-thaw cycle.
The wire that had stressed under the weight of ice.
Ethan came with him, as he had all winter.
But this time he came on horseback.
Not Birch.
That was coming, but not yet.
He came on the rangy gelding called Spencer, who was patient and sure-footed and had been waiting all winter for someone to actually ride him regularly.
Ethan sat a horse, Gideon had noticed, the way people did when they took to it naturally.
Not perfectly.
He still overcorrected on turns, and his posting trot needed work.
But with an ease in the body that couldn't be taught.
Only discovered.
He rode beside Gideon on the spring fence check, with mud on his boots and the early morning light coming sideways across the plains and an expression on his face that was, as far as Gideon could read it, something close to content.
"Post shifted at the northeast corner," Ethan said, spotting it before Gideon had to point.
"It has."
"We'll need to reset it before we string new wire."
"We will."
Ethan wrote it in the small notebook he'd started keeping.
Which had been Caleb's idea.
Which Ethan had resisted for two weeks before adopting completely.
The notebook now contained fence assessments, weather observations, notes on cattle behavior in various conditions, and, Gideon had seen once accidentally and had not mentioned, a rough sketch of Birch done from memory with considerable accuracy.
Riding back toward the ranch in the midmorning, the buildings coming into view across the flat land with the mountains behind them, Ethan said, "I want to learn the accounting side."
Gideon looked at him.
"The ranch finances," Ethan said. "How you track expenses, what the margins look like, how you decide what to sell and when."
He was looking at the ranch ahead of them, not at Gideon.
"Not because I'm... I'm not trying to..."
He stopped.
Started again.
Which was rare for Ethan, who usually had his sentences ready.