The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 8
Her father was on the porch when she pulled in, which meant he had been waiting without wanting to look like he was waiting, which was a thing he had done her entire life and had never gotten subtle about.
She got out of the truck and sat on the porch steps and he sat in his chair and they looked at the cottonwoods along the creek for a moment the way they did when something needed approaching carefully.
“Raymond Whitehorse can do the job at forty-four thousand,” she said.
“Good.”
“Twenty-two each. I’ll let the council know.”
“Good,” he said again, in the tone that meant he was not thinking about Raymond Whitehorse.
She pulled a stem of dry grass from the edge of the porch and turned it in her fingers. A meadowlark was working the fence line across the road, the same three notes repeating, patient and indifferent.
“He knew,” she said. “From before the first morning. Pete told him I knew water law. He was waiting to see how we’d come at him.”
Her father was quiet for a moment. “And how did we come at him?”
“Sideways.” She looked at the cottonwoods. “He didn’t hold it against us.”
“No. I didn’t think he would.” He shifted in his chair. “That’s not what you want to talk about.”
She turned the grass stem in her fingers. Her father had done this her entire life, waited for her to find her own way to the thing she needed to say rather than pulling it out of her, which was either patience or wisdom or both and which she had never fully decided whether she appreciated.
“He told me about his wife,” she said.
“She left when he came back for his mother.”
She looked at him. “You knew that.”
“I know most things about my neighbors.” He said it without apology. “I needed to know what kind of situation I was sending you into.”
“And what kind of situation is it.”
He looked at the cottonwoods. “A man alone on twelve thousand acres with a bank note and no family and a water problem he was going to solve fairly regardless of whether we sent anyone to charm him into it.” A pause. “The kind of situation that requires careful thought.”
She was quiet.
“He’s a good man,” her father said. “I think his father knew that and didn’t know what to do with it.” He looked at her. “I also think you drove out there this morning for reasons that had nothing to do with willow stakes.”
“The willow stakes were legitimate.”
“I’m sure they were.” He folded his hands in his lap. “Alachooshe.”
She looked at him. He used her full name the way he used silence, to mark the weight of what came next.
“I sent you out there to read a man,” he said. “I didn’t send you out there to lose your footing.”
“I haven’t lost my footing.”
He looked at her with the look that had seen through every construction she’d ever built, the false pictures and the careful arrangements of true things that added up to something misleading. She had learned the technique from him and he had always been able to see it coming back.
“Not yet,” he said.
She put the grass stem down. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say what’s true.”
She looked at the meadowlark on the fence line, still working its three notes, still waiting for an answer that wasn’t coming. “I went out there this morning knowing it wasn’t about the contractor estimate. He knew it too. We talked.” She paused. “He’s straightforward in a way I wasn’t expecting. He says what he means and then he stops talking.”
“Your mother said that about me once.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the cottonwoods again with an expression she recognized as the one he wore when he was thinking about her mother, which was an expression he had worn her entire life and which had always told her more about love than anything he’d said directly.
“This is different,” she said.
“Is it.”
“He’s not Crow.”
“No.” He was quiet for a moment. “Wallace will have something to say.”
“Wallace has something to say about everything.”
“Thomas won’t object. He’s old enough to know that the creek doesn’t care about the fence line.” He shifted in his chair. “The harder question is what you want.”
She thought about the willow stakes in the dark soil and the mud on her hands and the way he’d said before this goes further like a man who had already decided something and was giving her the chance to decide it too.
“I want to figure that out without the whole council watching me do it,” she said.
Her father made the sound that was almost a laugh. “Then you’d better figure it out quickly. Thomas Many Guns knows everything that happens within forty miles of this building and he has never once kept anything to himself.”
She stood up and kissed his forehead the way she’d done since she was small and he reached up and put his hand on her arm briefly, the gesture that meant everything he didn’t say out loud, which was considerable.
She drove home and showered and ate lunch and tried to work on the federal water comment for two hours and produced four sentences she deleted and rewrote and deleted again.
At four o’clock her phone rang. She looked at the number, Branson Ranch, and picked up.
“Whitehorse called,” David said. “He can start the grade control structure in six weeks if we sign the contract by end of month.”
“That works.”
“He wants to walk the site first. Thursday or Friday.”
“Friday works for me. I can meet you there at seven.”
A pause. “You have a thing about seven o’clock.”
“You started it.”
“Fair.” Another pause, shorter. “My foreman’s going to a sale in Billings Friday. It’ll just be me.”
She looked out her window at the cottonwoods along the creek, the late afternoon light coming through the new leaves, the first real green of the season. “All right,” she said.
“I’ll have coffee.”
“You always have coffee.”
“It’s the only thing I’m reliably good at.”
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