Page 155 of Honeyfires

Miller arrived precisely on time, which meant he'd known when everyone else was coming despite not being texted specifically, which meant Jackson had told him, which meant Jackson had coordinated this whole thing and wasn't admitting it.

He brought vanilla extract. Nielsen-Massey, Mexican, from the Oaxaca ranch. A new bottle. He set it on the counter without ceremony and said, "Case it comes up."

Vera pressed her lips together very hard.

Davids came last, and he stood in the doorway for a moment like he wasn't sure of his welcome, and Vera solved that by simply handing him a beer and saying, "Come in," in the exact tone she used when she'd already made a decision for you.

We all found our places in the apartment. Stevens on the couch with his arm carefully arranged, Miller in the chair he'd somehow claimed on the first visit and never relinquished, Jackson and Cassie on the kitchen stools, Davids and Emerson on the floor because Vera had given them throw pillows and that was apparently the deal. I was in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room because I was too restless to sit and nobody was making me.

Vera moved through all of it like she always did. Like she'd been feeding this particular collection of people forever.

"I'm going to say something," Stevens said, at some point when the room had gone quiet in the comfortable way.

"Brandon," Jackson said.

"I'm allowed to say something. I have a cane."

"The cane doesn't give you unlimited say-something privileges."

"It gives me some." Stevens looked around the room, at all of us. "I just want to say—and this is from me, not from the hearing, not from any official thing—I'm glad Petra made the call she made. I'm glad I'm here. And I'm glad all of you are here. And I think we should say it out loud before she—" He stopped. "Before things change."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Miller said, "Agreed." Which was, from Miller, a speech.

Jackson raised his beer. "To the crew."

"To the crew," Davids said. And meant it.

I looked at all of them, this collection of disasters I'd been managing for years, who had shown up in a hallway outside a hearing room and in an apartment on a weeknight and who had, one by one, found their way back to something like honesty, and felt that weighted gratitude again. The kind you didn't have words for that were big enough.

Vera appeared beside me in the doorway. Her hand found mine.

"Hey," she said quietly.

"Hey," I said.

"You okay?"

I thought about it honestly. Not the way I thought about it in the dark at 2 AM, alone with the weight of everything. The way I thought about it now, surrounded by these people, with her hand in mine.

"Yeah," I said. "I think I actually am."

She leaned her head against my shoulder. Miller, from his chair, observed this and said nothing.

Outside, San Jacinto went about its evening. The desert spread out beyond the windows, dark and vast and ancient as it had always been, and somewhere three and a half hours to the north, a station called 47 was running its shifts without knowing we were coming.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, there was this. The crew, and the beer, and the Nielsen-Massey vanilla on the counter, and Vera's shoulder against mine, and the warmth of people who had chosen, one by one, to show up.

I'd go to Copper Valley. I'd do the work. I'd come back when the ground was ready, or I wouldn't, and either way I'd have this.

I'd always have this.

Epilogue

Five Years Later