He was quiet for a moment. That's a bookkeeper's answer. I'm a bookkeeper. No, he said. You're not.
He pushed his chair back. The drive leaves at first light. Get some sleep. He left the kitchen. She heard him on the stairs.
Heard him stop on the landing. Heard, though she might have imagined it, the briefest pause before his footsteps continued. She sat for a moment longer. Then she stacked the papers, blew out the lamp, and went to bed. She lay in the dark, and she thought about the day after tomorrow, about a room full of wealthy buyers and six steers, and a number she needed them to reach.
And she thought about what happened if they didn't reach it. She thought about it with the cold clarity of someone who has looked at bad outcomes before and learned to assess them without flinching. If the auction fell short, they would still have the normal market for the remaining herd. They would cut costs wherever they could cut them. She would go back through the ledger with a finer eye and find every inefficiency she hadn't found yet.
Warren would have to make a hard conversation with the lender in Missoula. But hard conversations could be survived. It would not be good. It would not break them. But the auction working would be better.
She needed it to work. She needed people she'd never met to look at six cattle and see what she saw in them. The long winter's worth of careful conditioning, the good bone structure, the quiet, steady health of animals that had been managed by people who, whatever else they were arguing about, agreed that the animals mattered. She closed her eyes. The drive left at first light the way Calder had said it would.
The sky was that particular pre-dawn blue that exists for about 20 minutes before the sun argues it away, and the snow on the ground was hardcrusted and loud underfoot. The six steers moved well in the cold, which experienced cattle people apparently knew would happen cold mornings made for manageable animals. None of the heat season sluggishness. EMTT was at the front. Calder rode the right flank.
Tessa took the rear as agreed, watching the back of the group for the signs of a straggler, a slowing gate, a turning head, the small signals that an animal was considering a different direction. The split-eared steer led the column without being placed there. He simply moved to the front and stayed there, and the others followed him, which was exactly what Tessa had hoped for when she'd watched him walk into the barn ahead of the others four nights ago. Warren stood at the ranch gate and watched them go. She looked back once at the gate post at Warren's figure in the early light.