Now Danny was holding her rifle because, ten minutes earlier, while Grant was checking it at the officials' table, Danny had asked, with that same public smile, if he might take a look at the old gun the Callen girl was bringing to a modern final. It was the sort of request that was difficult to refuse without sounding precious, and Grant, who disliked scenes more than he disliked presumption, had let the inspection happen in front of him, muzzle safe, chamber checked, the rifle an object under official eyes. Danny had lifted it, sighted once toward the empty hills in a pantomime that drew appreciative murmurs, and discovered too late that he was enjoying the feel of it. The wood was warm. It had a balance his own sleek competition rifle, all angles and adjustments, did not quite possess. It felt less manufactured than made, if that distinction made sense to a man who had never had to think about it before. He turned it once in his hands, found the place where years of grip had darkened the stock, and felt a thin, unwelcome curiosity about the hands that had worn it smooth.
He covered the curiosity by smiling wider.
"Standing with this," he said to the nearest camera, a phone held by a girl in a red cap who would post the clip before Willa had taken her third shot, "in this heat. You have to respect the ambition, anyway."
Anyway. The word landed where it was intended. Willa heard it land. So did a woman two places down the rope who had brought her daughter to watch, and who shifted her weight and said nothing. So did old Mrs. Alvaro, who had cleaned the clubhouse on Saturdays for a decade and knew Willa's order in the range canteen, and who pressed her lips together and looked at the plate instead. Praise with a trapdoor in it was the commonest currency at the range that season, at least where Willa was concerned. Respect the ambition, anyway. Brave of her to enter, anyway. Her father would be proud, anyway. The final word did all the work, lifting the compliment with one hand and limiting it with the other, like a judge holding up a score that could never quite be the highest on the board.
Danny did not think of himself as cruel. If anyone had accused him of cruelty in that moment he would have been genuinely startled, and then annoyed, and then, later, privately hurt in a way he would have disguised as amusement. He thought he was being generous in public. He was the defending finalist, the known quantity, the man whose posters from last year still hung crooked in the clubhouse corridor, and here he was, acknowledging the girl. Giving her a moment beside him in the frame. That was how he arranged it in his mind, and because his mind was practised at such arrangements, he did not notice the other picture assembling itself at the edges. A tall blond man in the sun, smiling easily, holding a rifle he did not own, while its owner stood quietly beside him with empty hands, waiting to be handed back what was hers.
Willa did notice. She noticed most pictures people were making, because she had spent years being placed inside other people's. The instructor's daughter carrying targets out at twelve while boys her age were given their first supervised shots. The instructor's daughter keeping score at fifteen, neat figures, never asked if she wanted the pencil or the place on the line. The instructor's daughter at nineteen, after the funeral, still setting out chairs for a junior evening her father would not be running, because the range committee did not know how to tell her that they expected grief to have an end date and she might, politely, stop being a reminder. She had learned to read a scene from the outside while standing in the middle of it, and what she read now was simple. If she reached for the rifle too quickly, she would look eager. If she waited too long, she would look as if she was waiting for permission. Danny's smile offered her a narrow path between those two readings and expected her gratitude for the width of it.
She refused the path altogether. She stood still, hands loose at her sides, gaze not on Danny and not on the phones, but on the middle distance where the gravel gave out and the long sand began. Somewhere beyond the safety markers the steel plate stood on its two legs, too small at this angle to be more than a dark fleck, rusty red at the edges when the light caught it. She did not try to see the centre pin. Nobody could see the centre pin from here with the naked eye, and the people who claimed they could were performing confidence for an audience. She looked at one thing only. That was what her father had written, and what she had trained into herself on dawn mornings when the range belonged to rabbits, cold air and her. Look at one thing only. Let everything else be weather. The crowd was weather. The cameras were weather. Danny Mercer's smile, bright as a coin in the sun, was weather too.