I scratch his ear with two fingers and stand up.
I'm back at the bunkhouse by five thirty.
Hadley is at the counter with her hair down.
Her hair is never down at this hour.
She sleeps with it braided down her back the way her mother taught her, and she pulls it up before she leaves the cabin every morning. But today she didn't.
Today she walked over here with her hair loose around her shoulders, her face bare, and a set to her jaw that says she didn't sleep last night either.
She turns when she hears me come in.
Her eyes find mine across the kitchen.
She doesn't look down.
I take three steps into the room and stop at the kitchen island.
The skin where the ring used to be is pale. A clean band of color two shades lighter than the rest of her hand, narrow and bright and impossible to miss.
Garrett's ring is still on the chain at her neck. I can see the line of it through the collar of her t-shirt. But her own gold band. The one she's worn for nine years on her left ring finger isn't in her pocket.
Isn't on the chain. Isn't on her finger.
It's somewhere I can't see, and the pale strip on her finger is telling me exactly where she put it last night and where she didn't put it back this morning.
"Mornin', Hadley."
"Mornin', Rogue." Her voice is rough. She’s been quiet for a long time.
She turns to the coffee pot, pours a mug, and brings it across the kitchen to set it on the counter beside my hand.
She doesn't let go.
Her fingers are still wrapped around the handle when mine close over the top of it.
For a half second the mug is between us both—her grip and mine, her thumb a hair's breadth from my knuckle, neither of us letting go.
I close my hand around the mug. Her thumb brushes my knuckle.
It's the briefest contact I've had with another human being in close to a decade.
It's over before either of us can pretend it didn't happen.
Her hand falls away and she steps back from the counter, turning to the biscuit dough on the cutting board behind her.
She starts rolling it out the way she does every morning, her back to me.
I'm standing at the kitchen island with the coffee in my hand and the place on my knuckle where her thumb touched me feeling like a brand.
I don't say a word.
She doesn't either.
* * *
The screen door bangs open at five forty-three.