We have to decide when to take action. Some people decide never to take action at all. Some people look back on a jumble of uncertain floundering and cast the right frame around it so that they can remember doing the right thing when it counted. I’ll try not to revise. Each day, I needed to call home, but each day I walked past the motel office and I never once went inside. I didn’t know what the hell to do about the pipeline, but I knew Lily would tell me I should pack up and leave. And when it came down to it, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared to pack up and leave. Not yet.

Why should I? If the pipeline was time-sensitive, well then so was the ninety-day review. So was my mission of making money fast. And anyway, one look at that map and it was clear that they’d already put the line through everyone else’s homes, so who was I to protest? I wasn’t going to give up a decent job, my one good chance to get Perley back, just to stage a futile fight against the company, which I probably wouldn’t win. Like I said, I Googled it, goddammit. Alone in that trailer all day, I Googled it and I found out that people all over the continent were fighting these pipelines, Indians were, white people were, hell, even Hollywood celebrities were. But they weren’t winning.

And now here Marie and Lawrence were, asking me to do them a favor, to go against protocol when they still barely gave me the time of day, treated me like I was their own personal General fucking Custer or some shit, wouldn’t even tell me where Jay was or when he was coming back.

If I couldn’t win against the pipeline, I wanted to win something. I had a strategy. If I kept my job, I could win my family back. Wait and see.

So Marie climbed into the excavator, Lawrence grabbed a shovel, and I went into my private trailer and called Shane. I told him, We’re shorthanded over here. But I’m just letting you know. Don’t worry about us. We’ll make do until Jay comes back. We don’t need anyone else.

By lunchtime, the new guy was there.

Cameron. Long blond hair, tattoos crawling up his neck, handsome like a ferret. The three of us just stared up from our bologna while he introduced himself. “This must be a mistake,” I said. “We don’t need anyone else.”

“No mistake,” he said, gray eyes flickering past me to rest on Marie. He gave her a long appraising look, but she just scowled back. He said, “Never fear, Tiger Lily. Let me show you what I can do with this baby.” Then he strode right past where we were eating to swing himself up into the cab of the excavator.