The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 9
He made eggs the way he did everything else, without fuss, moving around the kitchen like a man who had been cooking for himself long enough that it had stopped requiring thought. The kitchen was large and old-fashioned, the kind that had been built when ranches fed crews rather than just families, a long counter and a gas range with eight burners and a table that sat ten and currently had two chairs pulled up to one end.
She sat at the table and watched him crack eggs one-handed into a bowl, four of them, without looking.
“How do you take them,” he said.
“However you’re making them.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “That’s not an answer.”
“Scrambled is fine.”
He turned back to the stove. The kitchen smelled like coffee and the particular dry warmth of a wood-heated house in the morning. Through the window above the sink she could see the barn and the near pasture and the gray horse in the paddock, standing in the sun with his eyes half closed.
“How long have you had him,” she said.
“The gray? Eight years. Bought him as a four-year-old from a ranch up near Roundup.” He pushed the eggs around the pan. “He was difficult when I got him. Previous owner had heavy hands.”
“You can’t tell now.”
“No.” He plated the eggs and brought them to the table with toast and set a fork down in front of her. “Took about a year. Mostly just not doing the thing that had been done to him.”
She looked at the plate. The eggs were good, herbs from somewhere, not just salt and pepper. “You cook.”
“I live alone. The alternative is worse.”
She ate and he sat across from her and ate and the kitchen was quiet except for the range ticking as it cooled and the gray moving in the paddock outside. It was the first time they had been at a table together and it was different from the creek bank and the fence line in a way she was aware of without being able to name precisely. More ordinary. More like a thing that could become habitual.
“The ranch house,” she said. “How old?”
“Main structure is 1912. My grandfather built it. Added the kitchen in the forties, the back bedroom in the sixties.” He looked around the kitchen with the expression of a man who had looked at the same walls his entire life. “It needs work. I’ve been getting to it in order of urgency.”
“What’s the current urgency?”
“The back porch roof. And the well pump. And about four hundred yards of irrigation pipe that’s been leaking since 2021.” He drank his coffee. “The list is longer than the year.”
“The bank note.”
“Yes.” He said it without weight, just fact. “Eighteen months to clear it. Running enough head to do it means the water allocation matters. Which is why I had Carl out in February.”
“You’d have come to us regardless.”
“Yes. But the invoice made it harder. People remember.” He looked at his plate. “My father wasn’t a bad man. He was a frightened one. When frightened men have leverage they use it.”
She thought about this. “The drought years.”
“He almost lost the ranch in 2018. After that he tightened everything. The invoice was part of that.” He pushed his plate aside. “It was still wrong.”
She looked at him across the table, the morning light coming through the window behind him, the mountains visible over his shoulder through the glass, white and permanent.
“You apologize for him a lot,” she said.
“I clean up after him. There’s a difference.”
She considered that distinction. It was an important one and he had drawn it carefully, the way he drew most things, without making a production of it.
“My mother negotiated the 1994 grazing agreement,” she said. “My father presented it because that’s how things were done. He told me last week. I didn’t know.”
He looked at her. “Why did he tell you now?”
“Because I presented the creek restoration at the formal meeting.” She looked at her coffee cup. “I think he wanted me to know where it came from.”
“Smart woman, your mother.”
“Yes.” She paused. “She died when I was nineteen. Ovarian cancer. Eight months from diagnosis.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“My father never remarried. Twenty-six years and he still looks at the mountains like she’s somewhere in them.” She looked up. “I used to think that was sad. Now I think it’s the most honest thing about him.”
He held her eyes across the table with the steady attention he gave things that mattered to him. Outside the gray had moved to the water trough and was drinking, his neck stretched down, the sun on his back.
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