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“It was good,” he said carefully. “Really good. Better than—well, better than I’d built it up in my head, you know? Twenty years of imagining. I was convinced the reality would be awkward and terrible, and I’d discover I’d been wrong about myself.” He looked at her. “I wasn’t wrong.”

Shelby’s face softened. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

“Good,” she said. Simply.

Then she released his hand, and the softness sharpened back. “Follow-up question. Have you experimented? Tried different things? Or are you doing the same thing every time, like it’s a set menu?”

“Shelby—”

“I’m serious. You spent a long time in a holding pattern. You’ve got some catching up to do.” She pointed her beer at him. “Stop being so vanilla. Try something new. Something adventurous. Like—” She waved a hand, searching. “I don’t know. Doggy-style.”

Hank choked on his beer. It went partly up his nose, which was both painful and embarrassing.

“What?” Shelby looked enormously pleased with herself.

“I’m not—” he coughed. “We’re not having this conversation.”

“We are having this conversation. You just snorted a craft beer because of it. That makes it legit.”

“I can’t take sex advice from my ex-wife.”

“Why not? I have ten years of field research. I’m an expert witness.” She grinned. “Doggy-style, Hank. Write it down.”

From the corner, Owen looked up from his stegosaurus. “Doggy,” he said, smiling.

“See?” Shelby said. “Even Owen agrees.”

Hank buried his face in his hands. He was laughing despite himself—or maybe because of himself. It was absurd, all of it: his ex-wife prescribing sexual positions while a toddler spoke of dinosaurs and doggies.

The back door opened, and Lowell came in, wiping his hands on a rag. Broad-shouldered and unhurried, he paused in the doorway, taking in the scene—Hank red-faced, Shelby triumphant, Owen waving a stegosaurus.

“Do I want to know?” Lowell asked.

“No,” Hank said.

“Probably not,” Shelby agreed.

Lowell nodded, unsurprised. He crossed to the sink and washed his hands with the thoroughness of a man who’d learned not to ask follow-up questions. “Heard you met someone,” he said over his shoulder.

“Shelby told you.”

“Heard her on the phone. I was just in the blast radius.” He dried his hands, grabbed a beer, and sat down at the table. “Good for you. About time.”

It wasn’t effusive. It wasn’t a speech. Hank appreciated that more than he could say.

“Thanks, Lowell.”

“Mm-hm.” He took a pull of his beer. “She’ll keep grilling you through dinner, just so you know. I’d pace yourself on the details. Give her too much at once and she escalates.”

“I do not escalate,” Shelby said.

Lowell looked at Hank. Hank looked at Lowell. Neither of them said anything.

“Oh, shut up,” Shelby said. “Both of you.”

They ate lunch on the back porch—pimento cheese sandwiches, tomatoes from the garden still warm from the sun, sweet tea so sugary Hank’s molars ached. Owen sat in his high chair between Shelby and Lowell, dismantling his sandwich and discarding the wreckage.

Watching them—Shelby wiping Owen’s face, Lowell refilling her glass without being asked, the boy reaching for both of them indiscriminately—Hank felt what he always felt here. Warm inside this family’s orbit, yet aware the orbit wasn’t his.