“HEY, YOU, GET!” he calls, heading toward her. Significantly handicapped by the depth of the snow, he waves his arms. One of the cow’s posse looks over her shoulder with absolute unconcern as Robbie approaches, and then swings her head back around, unbothered, to watch her friend try to crack open the doors on the building. Miraculously, busting through the steel frame seems to be within the cow’s powers. She digs in with her hind legs, tail whipping back and forth like a rudder, and the metal groans.

“God fucking damn it!” Robbie roars, staggering through the snow. Whether it’s the volume or the profanity, this call finally gets the entire trio’s attention, though the instigator needs a solid second to unwedge her head from between the doors. Then, she springs around in a one-eighty, her belly swaying. She’s definitely the same cow he saw in the road. He knows her by the band of white around her belly. A belly that’s suspiciously large, too, like she’s about to drop a calf. But surely not—surely, not even Ed would have a pregnant cow running loose on winter pasture where no one could check her.

“Go home,” he tells the trio firmly. But in the back of his head, the same soft-heartedness that keeps him from poisoning mice is making him wonder if Ed’s nephew is as much of a deadbeat as Ed, and if that’s true, whether or not he actually put out anything for the cattle in the midst of all this snow.

He’s not sure, which is why he winds up spending the next hour filling a feeder in the empty corral with hay, dragging out a stock tank to fill, finding a de-icer, discovering something chewed through its wires, then rewiring it on the workbench, and finally filling the tank with water that won’t freeze, all under the watchful eye of the belted cow.

Then he calls Ed, gets his voice mail as usual, and tells him that when he’s back in town, he can come pick up his strays.

By the time Robbie climbs back up the steps to the hayloft, he’s soaking wet, freezing cold, and exhausted. Still, he hesitates at the door.

“Just do what you told Danny you would,” he mutters sternly to himself. The three black cats appear from various invisible portals to other realms to crowd around his ankles, eager to go inside. “Just take care of him.”

With that, he goes inside, braced to face Lance with strictly brotherly care.

And he immediately relaxes—because, instead of climbing the walls, or having disappeared again without explanation or a trace, Lance is curled on his side in the middle of Robbie’s bed, fast asleep.

Robbie slowly removes his boots, and then his hat, gloves, and coat. He walks sock-footed across the loft, slow and careful so the floor won’t creak.

Asleep, Lance looks younger, except there’s stubble on his jaw, so fine and soft it’s silvery in the sunset light slanting brilliantly through the window. There are shadows beneath his eyes like purple thumbprints. He’s wearing some clothes of Johnny’s that he must have found in the dresser, and his hair is damp against the pillow.