Dad Chose Three Husbands, but His Best Friend Crossed Them Out novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Table

Amos's POV

By midnight the Arvidson yard was asleep.

Thirty people lay in bedrolls in the barn, in horse trailers and in truck beds under the cottonwoods.

The only lights left were the porch lamp and the kitchen window.

I stood at that window with a cup of cold coffee and watched the dark.

Tomorrow seventy people would stand in this yard.

Half of them had known me since I was a hired boy with a bad haircut.

They would watch me hand the ranch girl a branding iron, forty-six years old, and every one of them would be thinking about the will.

I could hear it already.

The trustee. The best friend. The man who crossed out three names and kept the ranch warm for himself.

I had told her nobody sees.

I had said it for her sake, and I had said it a little for mine.

The stair creaked.

I didn't turn around.

"You're brooding," Karin said.

"I'm standing."

"You're standing like you're brooding."

She came across the kitchen in bare feet, in my shirt and nothing else.

Her braid was undone, and her hair fell to her waist.

I had never seen it down in the lamplight.

I put the cup in the sink.

"The whole county's in your yard," I said. "They're asleep thirty feet from where you're standing."

"I know. I counted trucks."

"Go back up," I said.

"No."

She stopped in front of me.

"Tell me what you're afraid of."

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