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“He’s not careful with you,” she said. “I can tell. That’s new. That’s good.”

The screen door creaked and Owen barreled through, making a sound that was either a fire truck or a dinosaur, followed by Hank looking disheveled and smelling like charcoal.

“Lowell says ten minutes on the chicken,” Hank reported. “Owen says—” He looked at Owen, who was now attempting to climb Shelby’s leg. “I’m not sure what Owen says. It was emphatic.”

“Owen says it’s time for juice,” Shelby translated, scooping him up. “Owen is always right about juice.”

She settled him on her hip—the same hip, the same effortless motion Hank had used in the driveway—and reached for a sippy cup from the counter. Her free hand found Owen’s hair, smoothing it back from his forehead. Automatic. Effortless. The gesture of a woman whose body knew how to take care of someone without her brain having to get involved.

Chad’s mother had not been that woman.

The thought arrived uninvited, and he shut it down fast—slammed the door on it, turned the lock. But not before he felt it. The specific ache of watching someone else’s mother be easy with love when yours had made it feel like something you had to earn and never quite did.

Not now. Not here.

“Chad?” Hank was looking at him. “You okay?”

“Great.” He stood. “Can I help set the table?”

Dinner was loud and good. Owen sat next to Hank and negotiated the consumption of green beans like a tiny, belligerent diplomat. Lowell turned out to have opinions about college football that he delivered with the quiet intensity of a man who had been waiting all day for someone to ask. Shelby ran the table the way Chad ran a bar—reading the energy, filling silences, steering the conversation away from anything that might draw blood.

Hank was different here, too. Not Senator Fortner. Not the man who measured every word against its potential headline. Just Hank, eating chicken off the grill with people who’d known him since before any of it—the career, the closet, the coming out. They gave him shit, and he took it. They told stories he’d heard a hundred times, and he laughed anyway. Owen dropped a green bean in his lap, and he didn’t even flinch.

You’re the plus-one, Chad thought, watching from across the table. Last week he was standing in front of a red square, trying to have an opinion about art. Now you’re sitting in his ex-wife’s kitchen trying to have an opinion about the Bulldogs.

Fair was fair.

Shelby put a second helping on his plate without asking. “You’re too thin,” she said. “Hank, are you feeding this boy?”

“He feeds himself. He’s twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three-year-olds eat cereal and call it dinner. I know. I was one.” She pointed her fork at Chad. “You’re eating real food while you’re under my roof. That’s not negotiable.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me. I’m Shelby.”

Lowell turned on the TV for the evening news, and a segment about competitive Senate races came on—a quick montage of candidates and polling numbers, and then footage of a woman named Michelle Carver working a rope line in South Carolina. Confident and articulate.

“She’s running against Clancy,” Hank said, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly.

“She’s good,” Chad said.

“She’s very good. And his numbers have been sliding since—” Hank stopped. Didn’t finish. Didn’t need to.

The segment moved on. Shelby changed the channel to something Owen could watch, and the moment passed.

After dinner, after Owen had been negotiated into bed through a complex treaty involving two stories and a stuffed elephant, Chad and Shelby ended up on the porch. Hank was inside on the phone with Patricia, his voice an indistinct murmur through the screen door—numbers, turnout models, the machinery Chad was learning to recognize by sound if not by substance.

The sky was absurd. More stars than Chad had ever seen in DC, where the light pollution reduced the universe to a handful of bright spots. Here it was everything—dense and reckless, like whoever was in charge had stopped pretending there was a budget.

“He worries about you,” Shelby said. The swing creaked as she rocked it with one bare foot. “About what all this is doing to you. The attention. The scrutiny.”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t. I said he worries.” She took a sip of her wine. “He’s a worrier. Always has been. When we were married, he used to lie awake rehearsing conversations he might have to have the next day. Both sides. Full dialogue. I’d wake up at two a.m. and he’d be staring at the ceiling, moving his lips.”

Chad smiled despite himself. “He still does that.”