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two strands instead of the middle two so he could accommodate his longer legs.
    Maggie watched closely how he zigzagged his bulk between the wires without catching a single barb. Then she mimicked his moves and followed through, holding her breath and wincing when she felt a razor-sharp barb snag her hair.
    On the other side of the fence they continued walking through the knee-high prairie grass. The sun had started to slip below the horizon, turning the sky a gorgeous purple-pink that seeped into the twilight’s deep blue. Out here in the open field, Maggie wanted to stop and watch the kaleidoscope effect.
    She caught herself tucking away details to share later with Benjamin Platt, only she’d relate them in cinematic terms. “Think of John Wayne in Red River ,” she would tell him when she described the landscape. It was a game they played with each other. Both of them were classic-movie buffs. In less than a year what started as a doctor-patient relationship had turned into a friendship. Except recently Maggie found herself thinking about Ben as more than a friend.
    She stumbled over the uneven ground and realized the grass was getting thicker and taller. She struggled to keep up with Donny.
    He was a giant of a man, wide neck and barrel chest. Maggie thought he looked like he was wearing a Kevlar vest under his button-down shirt, only there was no vest, just solid, lean muscle. He had to be at least six feet five inches tall, maybe more because he seemed to bend forward slightly at the waist, shoulders slumped as if walking against a wind, or perhaps he was uncomfortable with his height.
    Maggie found herself taking two steps to his one, sweating despite the sudden chill. The sinking sun was quickly stealing all the warmth of the day and she wished she hadn’t left her jacket back in Donny’s pickup. The impending nightfall seemed only to increase Donny’s long gait.
    At least she had worn comfortable flat shoes. She’d been to Nebraska before so she thought she had come prepared, but her other visits had been to the far eastern side near Omaha, the state’s only metropolitan city, which sprawled over a river valley. Here, within a hundred miles of the Colorado border, the terrain was nothing like she expected. On the drive from Scottsbluff there had been few trees and even fewer towns. Those villages they did drive through took barely a few minutes and a slight decrease of acceleration to enter and exit.
    Earlier Donny had told her that cattle outnumbered people and at first she thought he was joking.
    “You’ve never been to these parts before,” he had said rather than asked. His tone had been polite, not defensive when he noticed her skepticism.
    “I’ve been to Omaha several times,” she had answered, knowing immediately from his smile that it was a bit like saying she had been to the Smithsonian when asked if she had seen Little Bighorn.
    “Nebraska takes nine hours to cross from border to border,” he told her. “It has 1.7 million people. About a million of them live in a fifty-mile radius of Omaha.”
    Again, Donny’s voice reminded Maggie of a cowboy poet’s and she didn’t mind the geography lesson.
    “Let me put it in a perspective you can relate to, no disrespect intended.” And he had paused, glancing at her to give her a chance to protest. “Cherry County, a bit to the northwest of us, is the largest county in Nebraska. It’s about the size of Connecticut. There are less than six thousand people in nearly six thousand square miles. That’s about one person per square mile.”
    “And cattle?” she had asked with a smile, allowing him his original point.
    “Almost ten per square mile.”
    She had found herself mesmerized by the rolling sandhills and suddenly wondering what to expect if she needed to go to the bathroom. What was worse, Donny’s geography lesson only validated Maggie’s theory, that this assignment—like several before it—was yet another one of her boss’s