Chapter 20: The Night Before

Ward's POV

The night before the sale I couldn't sleep, so I sat on the foreman's cot with the stove ticking and cleaned a halter that was already clean.

At eleven the door opened without a knock.

Lulu stood there in my slicker and nothing underneath it, with the red ledger against her chest.

"You said Darrell can't have it," she said. "I want you to hold it first."

"Why?"

"Because it's got your handwriting in it."

She came in and sat beside me on the cot.

She opened the ledger to the last page I'd filled, the one that began with her name and ended with the line about the last foal.

"I'm not going to read it," she said. "I read it. I want you to watch me take it out."

She tore the page along the binding, slowly, and held it in the lamplight.

Then she opened the stove door with her boot and put it in.

The paper curled and went brown and caught.

I watched my own handwriting burn.

I felt the weight of it come off me, something I had carried since a lawyer's office in Billings.

"There," she said. "You can't leave after the last foal. There's no page for it."

I closed the stove door.

I didn't trust my voice, so I said nothing.

She looked at me and her mouth went soft.

"Come here," she said.

I got up from the cot and dropped to my knees on the floorboards in front of her.

She opened the slicker.

Her skin was flushed from the walk across the yard, and the lamp lit the freckles on her shoulders.

I put both hands on her knees and spread them.

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