Cosay Srays
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 14
She went to the hills four days later.
Coulter was at the barn when she saddled Nah-lin, moving through the familiar routine with the efficiency of long habit. He watched her check the cinch and tie her bedroll and loop the trap line over the saddle horn and did not say anything because there was nothing to say. She had told him she would go when the season called for it. The season was calling.
Marie came out of the house and stood on the porch and watched with her arms wrapped around herself against the morning cold.
“How long?” she asked.
“Three days. Maybe four.” Cosay checked the saddle bag. “I will be back before the end of the week.”
“You said that before.”
“I came back before.”
Marie considered this. “You’ll come back this time too.”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
Cosay turned from the horse and looked at her directly. “I promise.”
Marie nodded, satisfied, and went back inside. Cosay looked at Coulter.
“She will be fine,” he said.
“I know she will.” She gathered the reins. “It is not her I am thinking about.”
“I’ll be fine too.”
“I know that also.” She swung up into the saddle and looked down at him in the early morning light. “There are things up there I need to attend to. The traps, the cache I left, a few things I should bring back.” She paused. “And I need to say goodbye to it. Properly.”
He understood that without needing it explained. “Take your time.”
“I will be back by Friday.”
She turned Nah-lin toward the hills and rode out at an easy pace, not looking back, which he understood was not indifference but simply how she moved through leave-takings — forward, without ceremony.
He watched her until the land folded her out of sight.
Emmie appeared at his elbow. “She’s coming back.”
“I know.”
“You have the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“Papa.” She looked at him with complete patience. “You have the face.”
He went back to the barn.
The days without her had a different quality than the days before she’d come. Before, the absence had been the natural state of things — the house had always been this quiet, always been this small. Now the quiet had a shape to it, a specific outline, the way a space looks different after furniture has been moved out of it.
The girls felt it too, though they handled it differently. Marie went about her work with a deliberateness that suggested she was managing herself carefully, keeping busy as a strategy. Emmie was restless, picking up tasks and setting them down, asking questions that didn’t need answers, repositioning herself around the ranch the way a person did when they couldn’t find the right place to land.
On the second day Tom Fairchild rode up with his son Will to help clear the rest of the storm damage on the south trail. They worked through the morning, the three of them and Emmie who insisted on helping and was useful enough that no one argued. Tom worked the way he did everything, steadily and without waste, and over the course of the morning a conversation developed the way conversations did between men doing physical work together — in pieces, around the edges of the real thing, arriving at the point eventually.
“Your woman,” Tom said at one point, not looking up from the saw.
“Yes,” Coulter said.
“She planning to stay on permanent?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Tom was quiet for a moment, working through a thick section of trunk. “Clara likes her. That’s not nothing. Clara doesn’t like people easily.”
“I noticed.”
“She told me about the conversation they had. In the barn.” Tom set down the saw and picked up the other end of the log. “She said Cosay accepted her apology without making her feel small for needing to give it.” He looked at Coulter. “That’s a quality.”
“It is.”
They carried the section off the trail and came back for the next one. Will was working ahead of them with the axe, clearing smaller branches, and Emmie was dragging them off to the side with a determination that was slightly larger than her.
“People in town are going to have opinions,” Tom said.
“They already do.”
“Some of them will come around. Others won’t.” He picked up the saw again. “Brennan won’t.”
“Brennan’s done,” Coulter said. “He made his play and it didn’t take. He knows it.”
Tom looked at him steadily. “You sure about that.”
“Sure enough.”
Tom grunted. “Well. For what it’s worth, you’ve got us.” He said it without drama, just as fact, the way he said most things. “Clara made that decision at the barn and I made it at the creek. That’s how it is.”
Coulter nodded. “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t let her go.” Tom picked up his end of the next section. “Women like that don’t come twice.”
They finished the trail by early afternoon and Tom and Will headed back south with a wave and no ceremony, which was exactly how Tom Fairchild operated, and Coulter watched them go with the particular gratitude of a man who had been given something valuable and knew it.
That night he sat alone at the table and thought about what Tom had said. Women like that don’t come twice. He thought about Cosay in the hills right now, moving through country she knew better than anyone, tending the life she had built out of necessity and solitude and the stubborn refusal to stop. He thought about what it meant to her to go back there, to say goodbye to it properly as she’d said, and what it would cost her and whether she understood that he knew what it cost.
He thought about her hand turning over under his at this table three nights ago.
He thought about what came next.
He was still sitting there when Emmie came downstairs for water and found him at the table in the dark.
“You should sleep,” she said.
“Probably.”
She pumped water into her cup and stood at the counter drinking it and looking at him with her mother’s eyes. “Are you going to ask her?”
He looked up. “Ask her what.”
Emmie gave him the look that meant she had no patience for that particular kind of deflection. “Papa.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m thinking about it.”
“What is there to think about?”
“A lot of things. Whether it’s what she wants. Whether it’s too soon. Whether she’s ready for—”
“Papa.” Emmie set down her cup. “She crossed a flooded creek for strangers because they were neighbors. She fixed your roof. She told you about Tres Castillos.” She paused. “She promised Marie she’d come back.”
He looked at his daughter.
“She’s already decided,” Emmie said. “She’s just waiting for you to catch up.”