Page 51 of Desired

She called Nathan Greene's office at nine sharp.

"Miss Merritt." Warm as Monday. He didn't know yet, then. "The letter's drafted, it goes out tomorrow as promised. What can I do for you?"

"I want to add instructions." She stood at the window where she could see the gate. "The letter stands. The answer to the interest is no. But I want the rest of it on file too, formally, whatever it takes to make it stick. The place isn't for sale. Not now, not later, not to the standing interest, not to any Royston of either name, not to a neighbor, not to anybody. If the county courthouse burns down, that's the one page I want somebody to run back in for."

A pause with a pen in it. Nathan Greene had been a lawyer in this county too long to sound surprised at anything, but the pause had weight.

"That's easily done," he said. "And the property itself?"

"It stays mine. It stays empty." She heard how it sounded and said it anyway. "I'm going back to Colorado. Or somewhere. I'll leave keys with your office and a forwarding address when I have one."

The pen stopped.

"You understand I'll do exactly as instructed," Nathan said, and then, in the tone of a man stepping deliberately off the clock, the same shift he'd made on Monday, "and I'll say one thing first, since your grandfather's not here to say it. That house stood twenty-two years with a man in it who wouldn't be helped, and this county watched it happen slow, one Monday a month. It's hard country for empty houses, Miss Merritt. Harder still on whoever ends up the one inside."

"Send the letter," Lauren said, and got off the phone, and packed the coffee cups, both of them, because throwing his away kept not working.

The first truck turned in at eleven, and it didn't come alone.

Lara. Elena's little car behind her, and behind that a third truck she knew by the horses on the door for Ainsley's, the three of them rolling up her drive in convoy like a small deliberate force, and Lauren stood on the porch with a roll of packing tape on her wrist like a bracelet and understood that the county had a nervous system and she was tonight's signal, and there was nothing to do but stand there while it arrived.

Lara came up the steps first. Still honeymoon-tanned. Married four days, and her face had the careful blasted calm of a woman who'd come home to find her wedding had a hole blown in the back of it.

"Don't," Lauren said, before anybody could start. "Whatever the assignments are. Who talks first, who hugs me, who watches the door. Don't. I'm fine, I'm packing, and you can't stay long, I've got the kitchen half done."

"Okay," Lara said. "We brought food."

"I don't need food."

"Nobody needs casserole. That's not what it's for." And she walked past her into the house with a dish in her hands, Boston-brisk, asking permission of nobody, exactly the way she'd once walked into an office with a dying man's phone ringing and picked it up, and the other two came up the steps behind her, and Lauren stood holding the door she hadn't meant to be holding.

They didn't try to unpack anything, which she'd half expected and had speeches loaded for. Elena set coffee going like a woman who'd located worse kitchens in worse hours. Ainsley moved a stack of flattened boxes off a chair and sat, and it was the first time Lauren had ever seen her sit still, all that bright warmth banked down to coals, and it was Ainsley who couldn't hold it, of course it was.

"I don't believe it." It came out of her low and fierce, aimed at the tabletop. "I've watched him my whole life, Lauren. I know what he is and I know what my dad is, and I'm not, I can't—" She stopped herself, jaw working, and her hands were white-knuckled around each other on the table. "But I didn't come to argue his case. Remi told me what got said at Harvey's, and I want you to know that if it's true, I'll help you salt the ground on your way out. I just… I had to be here. That part's not about him."

"Ains," Lauren said, and her voice came out gentler than she'd planned, because the girl looked gutted, and because of the other thing, the one that caught her sideways in the middle of her own wrecked kitchen. She'd wanted this one. The little sister. An only child her whole life, twenty-seven years of watching other women get handed sisters like it was nothing, and somewhere between the bobby pins and the wedding bench she'd let herself start believing she was getting one at last, part of the whole impossible package, and the man was a canyon of a loss but this was its own grief, small and exact and just as gone. Ainsley was on the list of things she was losing. The list kept unrolling. "You braided half the county's hair at that wedding. Sit there and drink coffee. That's the whole job."

Elena put a mug in front of each of them and leaned against the counter with her own, watching Lauren over the rim with the flat clinical patience that had never once worked on her and never once stopped being deployed.

"You sleeping?"

"No."

"Eating?"

"There's a casserole now, apparently."

"Mm." Elena drank. "I kept a bag packed for eighteen months when I first came here. In the hall closet, by the door. Renewed the registration on it like a parking meter." She said it mildly, to the window. "Fill-in doctor, temporary town. The bag was the plan and the town was the accident, and one day I went looking for something in that closet and realized I'd been unpacking the bag one item at a time for a year without ever admitting it." She looked back at Lauren. "I'm not telling you to stay. I'm telling you I know exactly how heavy that tape gun gets by the third room."

"It's not heavy."

"It will be."

Lara had been quiet, working through the cupboard Lauren had left half boxed, wrapping the plates nobody had asked her to wrap, and when she finally spoke she didn't turn around.

"I got on the plane," she said. "Not so long ago I stood in a bedroom at that ranch and Dean told me everything we had was temporary, and I packed in one night, same as you, and I got on the actual plane." She set a wrapped plate in the box, square, careful. "Everybody remembers that he came to Boston. Nobody knows that leaving was the hardest thing I ever did, and I had to do it. So I'm not going to stand in your kitchen and tell you what to do. I know what leaving is." She turned around then, and her eyes were full and level. "I'm just going to say the other true thing, which is that coming back was my decision too, and I'd never have known that if a lot of loud people hadn't refused to let go of me while I found it out."

The kitchen was quiet. The tape gun sat on the counter between all of them like a fourth guest.