SHE LAID JACK DOWN in the bassinet next to their bed, still messy and unmade from the morning, and searched for her phone. She wanted to call Chris and find out how the signs had turned out. He was supposed to pick them up and start putting them around town, and she’d written down for him a list of places she thought would be good. Places where they’d be easily seen, but then again, pretty much everything was easily seen out in the Big Bend and around Murfee itself. Sometimes you could go miles in any direction with only the farthest horizon bounded by mountains. Bethel Turner had been at it for a couple of weeks—his signs were everywhere—and he’d bought out not one but two billboards on I-67 and I-90. Vianey Ruiz had called Mel and said she saw one out on Texas 118 as well. But Chris had been slow to follow suit. In fact, he’d dragged his feet throughout this whole reelection. He’d always blown hot and cold about being the Big Bend County sheriff—a position that had been thrust on him at a time when he didn’t feel he had a choice—and that was even truer now that he did have one. Ben Harper’s and Buck Emmett’s deaths at the hands of the Earls still haunted him, but Jack’s birth had affected him just as powerfully. Chris had never been easy to read, had a natural tendency to melancholy and brooding that could overwhelm him, and they’d both dealt with some of the worst of it in the weeks running up to this reelection. So much so that he’d left most of the planning and what fund-raising he’d agreed to do in her hands, and he hadn’t even started thinking about the debate that was scheduled at Big Bend Central—a debate that was now a week away. He wouldn’t say it exactly, but it was as if he wanted to lose. She’d lived through a mood like this with him once before, after he was injured at Baylor and the broken promise of a football career had brought him limping back home to Murfee, bringing her along with him. Although they’d both resented being here at first, that was then, and this was now.

And now was a whole hell of a lot different. For Chris, for her, and for their new baby.