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As her eyes slowly adjusted to the bright wash of morning light streaming through the glass windows of the closed-in porch she was able to take in the view that had been obscured by darkness her last time visiting the Walker ranch. A couple hundred feet behind the house there squatted a low-slung, metal sided barn, the very one she had visited with Kyle Walker to pet a horse and be warned away from his son. Beyond she could see a flat expanse of green that appeared to roll solidly toward the horizon, crisscrossed with fencing and dotted with enormous bales of hay, straight out of a Monet painting.

"Wait," she said, "You grow hay?"

Cam snorted in derision and joined her at the window.

"Yes ma'am. That's how we keep our cattle fed."

"What about all that, you know, grass everywhere?" She pointed vaguely at the landscape before them. Whatever the exact acreage of their ranch—a number that would have been meaningless to her suburban self anyway—she knew it went on practically forever.

"Not enough," he said, shaking his head. "It's never enough."

She looked up at him to make her reply but was caught short by the bandage wrapped tightly around his right forearm. Her stomach flipped in alarm.

"Your arm," she said, "What happened to it?"

"Says he don't remember, but looks like he got sliced by glass." Kyle had come into the room to put food on the table and she quickly withdrew the hand she had placed on his son.

"Boy refuses to go get stitches so I cleaned it out best I could," the father continued, pulling a third chair over to the small breakfast table and motioning for them to sit down.

"You wouldn't go if it was you either," Cam said, taking his place at the table. He started piling bacon and scrambled eggs onto her plate as she sat down. She wanted to ask him when it had happened, but blushed at the thought because what she really wanted to know is if he had been hurt when he had held her and fucked her in the bathtub. She wondered how she could have missed such a thing.

"Cam," she said, then stopped. What could she say to him that his father hadn't already? She could thing of plenty of things she could say, actually, but not with Kyle there in the room with them. Suddenly her hand flew to her stomach and she felt ill.

"I have to ..." she mumbled and then flew from the porch and into the bathroom, where she threw up exactly nothing, since she hadn't eaten since before the storm the night before. After she was finished dry heaving she pulled herself up to the sink and splashed cold water onto her face, willing herself to calm down; it helped that nothing felt real, not the tornado, not the destruction of her house, not the fact that she had woken up in the Walker house and was sharing a meal with Kyle and Cam.

"Oh God," she groaned, remembering that, once again, she had slept with both of them within the space of 12 hours. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the bathroom mirror and took measured breaths until her heart gave her a break from its fluttering palpitations.

She breathed in one last gulp of air before returning to the breakfast table. They were talking quietly when she entered and she heard with relief that they weren't comparing notes on her treachery and deceit.

They were, however, talking about their house, and she realized with a start that Kyle had already been by her place that morning.

"A bunch of the windows are blown out, but the stuff in the bedroom is more or less intact," he said, then added when she joined them at the table: "I rescued what I could of the books, and your laptop is fine."

She nodded wordlessly, afraid she might be sick again if she spoke of the sadness inside her. She knew she had to thank him, but for now she pressed a hand to her forehead and rubbed it hard.

Cam took her hand away from her face and laid it on the table.

"Eat your breakfast Courtney."

She couldn't think of what else to do and, in spite of everything, she suddenly found she was hungry. So she picked up her fork and took a stab at her eggs.

"We can go out there later if there's more you want to pick up, but the roads are still being cleared up," Kyle said. "That was a bad one last night. I'm glad Cam was there with you when it happened."

Her face burned in embarrassment at everything that had to have been implied in the father's statement, but she managed another weak nod and swallowed some bacon. From the corner of her eye something red bloomed.

"Cam!" she cried, her utensils clattering to her plate. "Your arm! It's bleeding!"

A dark blood stain had seeped through the bandage around his forearm. He cocked his head to consider it critically.

"It's fine," he said, decisively.

"Son—" Kyle began, then stopped himself and shook his head. "You're a stubborn pain in the ass. That boy of mine would rather bleed out all over my eggs than admit he might need to get that damn thing looked at."

"Please," she said, laying a tentative hand on his arm. She felt shy, but her guilt at the thought of his injury sustained while trying to keep her safe the night before made it easier for her to speak up, to touch him in front of his father.

"Do it for me," she added, though it came out as a whisper really.

Cam looked at her, his eyes dark and unreadable. Then he smiled.

"Yes ma'am, I'll go right after breakfast and have it looked at."

She sighed in relief. One less thing to worry about.

"Where exactly are you going to get it looked at?" his dad asked suspiciously. "I know you ain't planning to go to the ER."

"I said I'd get it looked at didn't I?" Cam shot back at his father, then winked at her as he stood to clear his dishes.

"You're going to go see Henry, aren't you?" Kyle said, but Cam only whistled a mysterious tune and headed into the kitchen.

"Boy, you are as dumb as you hard headed!" he shouted back over his shoulder at his son, then turned back toward her. "Get's it from me, not gonna pretend otherwise, but damn it's irritating as hell."

"Who is Henry? Is he a doctor?" she asked. She finally recognized the tune Cam continued to whistle as he moved through the kitchen, washing things and putting them away. It was one of those sappy love songs that was forever parked at the top of the Country charts.

"He's our damn vet," Kyle said.

***

Later, after she had showered and changed into a set of the clothes Kyle had rescued from the house, she stepped outside and retraced her steps toward the barn from that night in June. It had only been a month and a half since then, but it felt like a year, or something more than that, a passing of time that couldn't be measured. Her mother dead, her last ties with back East cut, her decision made to buy a one way ticket back to this tiny Texas town on the edge of nothing and nowhere.

And a boundary crossed, one she had never been drawn to crossing in the past. But it was done, and she had a pee stick and hideous morning sickness symptoms to seal the deal. Though of course there was no way of truly knowing it was Cam's doing, that tiny spark of life that hung suspended in her womb. She wondered if it gripped on harder than the last one who had made its home in there. The one that had definitely belonged to Freddy.

A trio of horses poked their heads from their stalls and nickered their greetings to her as she entered the stable. Or was it a barn? What was the difference anyway? She recognized the one she had pet that night with Kyle's soothing guidance, and she approached it with a friendly nod of greeting.

"Long time no see," she murmured to the mare, and found the courage to run her palm down the smooth white mark that painted its nose.

"She likes you."

She had registered Kyle walking up behind her before he spoke, so for once in her life she managed not to startle in surprise around a Walker man.

She reached up to scratch the skin under the mare's forelock. The hair there felt dry and sandy.

"Well, it's nice to think someone around here does," she said, keeping her eyes on the horse, whose eyelids drooped in pleasure.

"I think you know that's not true Courtney." Kyle opened the stall door next to her and began brushing the dappled horse inside.

The temperature was mild, cool almost, as though the storm had broken through the suffocating heat that gripped this land throughout the summer. The scent of livestock and hay felt familiar somehow, comforting, though she had no idea why. She was pretty sure she hadn't been to a barn or a farm of any kind since a field trip in middle school, a misbegotten attempt at connecting a bunch of bored suburban kids to the lives they might have led had they been born a century earlier. Halfway through the day someone tried to milk a cow that was actually a bull and they were kicked out en masse and spent the rest of the school day hanging out in a nearby McDonalds.

Kyle had slipped reins over the horse—an appaloosa? The word popped into her head from God know where—and when he led it from its stall she saw he had also put blankets and a saddle on its back.

"Are you going for a ride somewhere?" she asked. "Do you have to check on your cattle?"

"I already did that first thing this morning," he replied, adjusting straps and buckles on the bridle and saddle. "Not too bad, only a few fence repairs. The worst of it hit up by your part of the county."

She was impressed. He had already been over his land and to her house, and been back to make breakfast by the time she had finally rolled out of bed. It was a way of life that felt completely alien to her.

He still hadn't told her where he was going, however, so she shrugged her shoulders and returned to caressing the mare. He didn't owe her any information. Actually, he didn't owe her anything, and already she felt like she was in too much debt to him and his son. She shuddered to think of the calls she needed to make to Melvin, the hotel she needed to reserve, the belongings she needed to gather and account for, what was left of them at least.

His large, rough hand covered hers and he pulled her around to face him.

"I'm going to check on people, and the roads are still too messed up to get through to them. Come with me Courtney."

She was so busy taking in the look in his eyes, the unshaven bristle on his jaw, and the heat of his skin on hers where he grasped her wrist, that it took a moment for his request to sink in.

"Wait what?" she gasped. "On a horse? I've never ridden one in my life."

He smiled at her, and led her toward the appaloosa.

"That's okay, I can ride for both of us." And before she could process what was happening he had put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the saddle. She grabbed the saddle horn and froze in place, terrified the horse would run away with her, or worse.

And then Kyle Walker was lifting himself onto the saddle behind her, and she felt his warm strong arms wrap around her and take the reins. Apparently she was going with him, whether she liked it or not.