Eileen's cell phone buzzed and she flinched, turned it over in her hand. It was a Wyoming number. She let it ring twice more, then accepted the call.

"So."

Infinitesimally, her shoulders began to relax. "Hello, Connally."

"Where are you?"

"Motel."

"Which one?"

"There's more than one?"

A dry chuckle. "Meet me out at the four way stop. If you came in on the east side of town, you came through it."

"I remember."

"Good." He hung up. Music's gut churned. She hadn't been expecting that storm. She ducked across the parking lot, slid into the cab of the old Lariat. In another life, the truck had been two-tone blue. The upholstery was thin gray at best and holey at the edges. It coughed twice before the engine caught. Eileen added 'reliable transportation' to her list of needs and pointed the pickup east.

Branch was parked in the middle of the fourway with his hazard lights on, leaning against the trunk of his car. The rain water sat in quick-drying puddles on the pavement, seeping into the cracked tar. The wind was up enough to make him want his coat again, but he'd shucked it in the car and he could already see her coming.

She rolled up behind him and put the truck in park. Eileen stepped down from the cab more quickly than she had intended and fell hard. The pop that accompanied her left ankle wasn't anything to the jolt that ran across her hip structure.

Connally was at her in seconds or less, pulling her to her feet, pushing her hair back out of her eyes, looking her in the face, folding her up against him. Neither one of them could look at the other just then. Branch swallowed hard.

"Dammit Music." He rasped it.

"Dear God don't cry," she said, her own face turned in against his chest.

"Shut up. It's allergies."

He stood her back from him, hands on her arms. He peered. "For real."

"S'true." The bones in her face were sharp in the last of the storm light.

"That's a good Southern accent."

"Because it's the real one."

He measured. She measured.

"Come on. You don't weigh enough."

"And you're pushy. Why the hole in your head?"

"Ruby tells me it's fashionable."

He shoved her back toward the truck and she hissed with the pain. He winced. "Where are we going?"

"Food. Drink. Clean this cut and wrap that ankle. You need a better place than Jim's to stay."

They followed the road east to where the blacktop turned to dirt and kept moving south. Branch's house was tucked back in the hill. High enough up that he could see anything coming north or going south. Deep enough in the fold of the hill that you weren't going to see the place unless you were looking for it. The road up to it was cut out with dynamite and patience. If she was going to build a fort, this is where Eileen would have built it.

She pulled in behind him and leaned on both the vehicles on her way up the drive. "How long have you had this place?"

"Since I got back. There's been a house and outbuildings here since before the Civil War. The Butterfield stage line ran through here for a while, and then mail coaches up through the early 1900's. This was a way station up until they quit running the stage and then Elliot Quamsley bought the ground and started running cattle. His kids ran cattle and their kids got in over their heads gambling in Vegas and bankrupted the whole thing and it came up for auction and that's how I got it."

"It's a good spot."

He turned at the top of the porch steps. "You haven't seen the view yet."

"I don't want to see the view. I want to eat." She was about halfway up the body of his car, fighting with the steep of the ground and her own lack of balance.

"You're leavin' hand prints on my paint job," he remarked, thumping back down the steps. He slung her arm around his shoulder and they eased forward. After a beat he said, "You know they make canes."

"Yeah. I don't want one."

"You know they make prosthetics."

"I don't want a prosthesis, Branch." She raked her hair back from her face. "I want a steak."

He half smiled at that. "Well your ungrateful ass gets to peel the potatoes then."

She grinned at him.

They laid waste to Branch's small kitchen. It was too dark to eat outside by the time they had the steaks thawed and cooked, but the mashed potatoes and ("How did you get these out HERE?" she had asked) green beans complimented everything. They leaned back from the table, satisfied with their handiwork.

"Ankle."

"Forehead."

The bathroom literally proved too small for both of them at the same time. Music sat on a rolling chair in his bedroom with the kit on her lap and handed him the necessary tools. He dragged her chair –with her on it- back into the kitchen under the lights so he could see what he was doing with the ACE bandage. He grabbed one of the kitchen stools and plopped down with his back against the cabinets while she eased her left boot off.

This was the good foot. The scar tissue was pliable and all the bones were in place. She had all five of her toes and she could move them all but the littlest one. She proved it, scrunching them together and turning them loose a couple of times. He hesitated for a moment.

"Don't baby it. The skin's fine." Her hair was back in her face.

He pulled the foot up in his lap and took her word for it. She flexed her foot downward when he was done, scrunched her toes once more, and looked down at her booted right foot. Contemplation was evident.

"You stayin' here tonight? If you are, you might as well pull that one off too."

She looked up, chagrin and laughter behind her hair. The only lights on in the house were the kitchen lights, so when dry lightning chained across the sky it was enough to pull their attention back out to the front porch.

Branch chunked his own boots over in a corner and snagged that handle of Jack he'd been saving on his way out to the porch. Lena knew enough to get the glasses.

Neither one of them really wanted to talk about the reality of the situation just yet anyway.

She had come out on the porch barefoot, and that was a big deal. At this point, a shoe was all the support she was going to allow herself so the limp looked huge. Right now, though, in the morning light on his couch, you couldn't tell anything. The right boot was already on and her left sock was not cooperating with her. He watched from the kitchen as he flipped the eggs. She started cussing presently, and he couldn't help the laugh.

She jerked around and glared at him from behind her hair. "What?"

He shook his head. "Nothin'."

"My ass." She limped into the kitchen and he jerked a thumb toward the coffee maker. "What, Connally?"

"You are the only person that I know who puts on one sock and one shoe at a time."

She laughed. He'd always been careful of her pride. In the beginning, she believed that she was entitled to that consideration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Time had proven that. She poured herself a cup of coffee and stretched. Connally was a good cook.

"You know what would be good with these eggs?"

"Huh?" over his shoulder.

"Impala."

He half turned and snickered at her. "That was a good day."

"I learned to believe in your cooking that day."

"You should have never doubted my cooking in the first place." He laughed and dropped an egg on her tin plate. "You know what I learned to believe in that day?"

"Do tell." She had a pair of forks in hand and tossed him one.

"Your real hair color."

She looked up at him from behind it. He reached out and gave one rough strand a tug on his way to pull the napkins out of the drawer. The awkward. The memory that went with the statement.

She winced. "Me an' my big mouth."

He looked up, sharp. "You're coming out from under that shit, Music. F'I have to drag you out by your hair."

She didn't know what to say.

They had breakfast out on the porch because Branch ALWAYS ate outside when he could. So did she. Connally hadn't been lying about the view. The country dropped off from Branch's castle and swept outward like it was in a hurry to get to the far blue mountains to their north. 0700 was a pale time here, the sky looking like it had been bleached out just a little bit. What would have been scarlet was a tender crimson. What would have been green looked like frost. The wind was stirring around outside of the fold of the hill and every once in a while it would venture inward and brush across the face of the house.

"Branch?"

"Hmmwhaa?" A mouthful of sausage wasn't much impediment.

"How come you're running for sheriff?"

He sat his fork down and took his time swallowing. That pale light made it so his hair looked gray. The confusion was evident in his eyes, but she waited. The cords he'd tied around that line of thought came unwound slowly.

The wind kicked up and dragged her hair back from her face. He could see the red in the roots.

"Because I can't quit now."

She nodded. He needed to make something out of himself and this was the only way. Like he wasn't enough already by himself. She understood, and went back to her breakfast. He shook his head.

She looked back up on him. "You know that place across the hill from here?"

He sat up. The fact that it was for sale went unspoken. "Yeah. That fifty acre plot. With the heated barn."

"I'm closing on it this afternoon."

He sat up a little straighter and grinned. "Aw yeah?"

"Yes. It's paid for."

The grin got a little bit bigger. "For real."

"S'true."

"How come?"

She swallowed and raised her coffee mug momentarily. "Because there are only six people on this planet that I trust. One of them's me. Four of them are gone on. That leaves your sorry ass. I….I have no option."

Branch leaned back. Her quick change aside, the thoughts she'd pushed him into aside, she was here again. And he was going to get to watch her learn how to walk in the world again instead of pretending she was a piece of the dark. He was going to help her do it.

"You mean I'm going to have to move your gimp carcass into a nine thousand square foot house?"

"Well…not yet….."

"You didn't get any furniture, did you?"

"No…."

He rolled his eyes.

She threw her toast crust at him.

Branch got a call shortly thereafter from Ruby and Eileen looked down the driveway with some consternation.

"I don't waaaant a cane!" He mocked her.

"Beat you with it if I had one," she glared.

He eased his hat down on his head, careful of the bandage, and swaggered down to her truck door. He popped it open and held it for her while she took an inordinate amount of time coming down the driveway. On purpose.

He shook his head, and then winced when his hat band rubbed across the bandage.

"You never did tell me what happened to your noggin." She'd made it into the cab and had threaded the key into the starter.

"I encountered a four by four post."

She cackled. "On your own?"

"There was a meth-addled teenager on the other end of it."

The snicker turned into a giggle and her bright smile dug its way out from under her hair.

"Get outta here. You're blockin' my driveway."

"You realize he wasn't asking about her appearance." Vic said it out of the blue three days later, while she and Walt were outbound to Herschel's. Break in. Routine.

"Who?" He cut an eye toward her.

"Branch. When he was asking us to describe that Music woman."

Walt turned this over in his mind. "Can I assume"—he wopped the Bronco into a pot-hole in the road and they both winced—"can I assume that you have some kind of idea why?"

"He asked about the permanent stuff, Walt. Her limp, which hand she used…..."

"So?"

"So we know based on that that he hasn't seen her since he got home. And that she has a habit of changing her appearance on a regular basis."

"And?" Walt was quizzical again. Moretti sometimes got the inkling that he just did it to piss her off, but it drove her crazy.

"So…military exposure, changes her appearance, lies about her name to people she trusts…"

"Branch said that WAS her real name."

"Because a field officer in the Central Intelligence Agency is going to tell an Army sergeant the truth."

"You wanna know something Vic?"

"Shoot."

"I'm not really worried about her."

"Walt, she drug into our office like she owned the place and…"

"That's what you saw?"

Vic shot him a look.

"You wanna know what I saw?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"I saw a scared woman looking for an old friend. And if she wasn't lying, then it took her some nerve to use that name again."

Vic shut up. Walt didn't say anything for another twenty minutes or so. Right before they reached Herschel's drive he turned to her. "How come she rubs you so wrong?"

"I just have a feeling."

"Oh."

They worked through the material at Herschel's—he was cranky, all three of them knew who it probably was and it pained Walt. Vic shook her head. Herschel's mouth twitched when they didn't come out and say it. But Walt was as judicious with his caution as he was with his marksmanship. Two decades previous, Herschel had had that judicious nature to thank for his freedom, and he remembered it now and kept his mouth closed.