Run payroll for Friday.
Pay the feed store invoice.
Update the cattle inventory after the four head we lost in last week's storm.
Approve a vendor request for new fencing wire.
Sign off on the bunkhouse grocery order that Hadley submitted yesterday—she came in three hundred dollars under budget and I make a note to ask her how, even though Iknowhow.
She buys the cheaper cut of meat and stretches it with cornmeal and beans the way her mother taught her.
I close the QuickBooks file.
I sit there for a second with my hands on the keyboard.
Then I do the thing I do every morning when I've finished the legitimate work and the cabin's still quiet.
I pull upherfile.
It's on the left monitor where it ought to be, because she's a ranch employee, because I'm the man who manages the ranch's books, because there's a reason for it to be there if anybody ever walks into my cabin and asks.
Nobody ever walks into my cabin. But the reason exists, and I made sure of it the day she signed the paperwork.
Hadley Marie Cross.
Twenty-eight years old.
Born in Garrison, Texas.
Married to Garrett James Cross at nineteen.
One son, Nash Garrett Cross, age six.
Husband deceased twenty-two months ago. Cause of death: lung cancer.
I scroll through the addresses she's lived at since the house in Garrison was sold.
The motel on Highway 59. The studio apartment in Tyler that she got evicted from in February.
Three different short-term rentals in the spring.
The Walmart parking lot where she slept in a Ford Ranger for two nights in April—that one I had to add myself, after she told me at the interview, because she didn't list it on the application.
I scroll past her employment history.
The diner. The gas station. The grocery. The other diner.
I scroll past her emergency contact.
Garrett's mother. Address in Garrison.
Then I scroll to the bottom of the file.
To the section nobody else would look at.
To the section I made.
The obituary I pulled from theGarrison Gazettethe day she signed the paperwork, two months ago. Garrett James Cross, twenty-eight, beloved son and husband, survived by his wife Hadley and his son Nash. Pallbearers listed at the end of the announcement.