“What if they hadn’t helped?”

“Then I’d have called the sheriff,” I said. “Tomorrow. I told myself that on the drive over. I’d give them each a chance to do the right thing, and if they didn’t, I’d stop being polite.” I put a hand on his arm. “I’m not a saint. I’m just a woman who figured out which fight to pick.”

He stared at his boots for a long time. Then, quietly, so only I could hear it, he said, “Dad would have done it that way.”

“I think he would.”

“He’d have cut the hay, and then he’d have said, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and gone to get a drink of water.”

I laughed, and a tear slipped out, and I let it.

“That’s exactly what he’d have done,” I said.

I did not tell Ben the rest. I didn’t have the words yet.

That night, after the trucks had rumbled away and the yard was quiet, I went out to the stackyard alone with a flashlight. The wind had dropped. The stars were out, thousands of them, hard and white over the Sandhills, the way they get when there’s no moon and nothing for fifty miles to blot them out.

I walked the rows. I put my hand on the bales. They were cool and slightly damp with dew, and they smelled the way hay smells in September, sweet and green and a little like tobacco. Somewhere in the grass, a cricket was working through its last warm nights.

I had the notebook in my coat pocket. I took it out. I held the flashlight on the last page and read it for the fortieth time.

N80 down. Heavy. Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.

I’d read it as a bookkeeper’s note at first. A tally. Then I’d read it as a love letter, and then as an apology, and now, standing in the dark with the whole stack finally home, I read it as what it was. It was a man telling me, in the only language he trusted, that I would be all right.