My father never apologised. What he did instead, in the spring, was mail me a photograph. It was my grandfather standing in front of a fence line in 1974, and on the back, in my father’s handwriting, one line saying he had always assumed I did not want any of it. That was as close as he could get, and I have decided to let it be enough.

Caleb wrote in August. He is the one I talk to now, carefully, every few months. He has never asked me for anything since.

I run forty head. The sheriff, whose name is Wendell, comes out twice a year and has never once needed a reason.

My stepmother still sends a card each Christmas addressed to the ranch. I put them in a drawer.

I spent thirty years waiting for a chair to be set out for me at somebody else’s table. I stopped waiting, and I built one, and then the same people who never made room came to take it, and the paperwork held because it was mine. Belonging was never something they had the authority to grant. It turns out it was only ever mine to build.