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"We have to leave in forty minutes."

"Then quit arguing."

The flannel she'd slept in was his, and it gave him no resistance at all, buttons parting under his fingers like they knew him, and he got the kitchen door shut behind them and lifted her onto the table's edge and stepped in between her knees, and what happened on that table over the next half hour was fast and greedy and glorious, his hands and then his mouth and then all of him, her heels locked in the small of his back and her fingers wrecking his church-worthy hair, the two of them laughing into each other right up until the laughing turned into something with no air in it, and she came with his name loud in the cold bright kitchen and he followed her with hers.

They were late leaving after all. Lauren fixed her hair in the visor mirror most of the way to Royston Ranch, and Mason drove with one wrist over the wheel wearing the deeply smug face of a man whose latch work had been properly appreciated, and neither of them said one word about it, and both of them were still grinning at the cattle guard.

Royston Ranch on Christmas Day held both families, one long table, and a volume that could be heard from the cattle guard.

They came through the door into woodsmoke and cinnamon and the roar of it, and the first thing that happened was Levi hit her at a dead run, wrapped both arms around her legs, and announced to the room at large, "LAUREN'S HERE," with the authority of a boy officially opening Christmas. The second thing that happened was Giana appeared at her elbow, gravely, and said, "I saved you the chair next to mine. I put a name card. Nobody's allowed to argue with a name card," and towed her into the house by the hand.

The table ran the whole length of the big room, and it was set for an army, and Lauren let herself be walked down it past holly and candles and Helen's good china, to a chair in the middle of the long side with a card in front of it in an eight-year-old's careful cursive. LAUREN. And it was only when she sat, with Giana satisfied beside her and Mason peeling off toward the kitchen with their pies, that she saw how the seating fell. Ainsley on her other side. Lara across. John up at one end of the table and Clay down at the other, both families threaded together down its length like fingers laced, and her chair, her name, set square in the middle of the weave where both sides could reach her.

She sat in it. The girl nobody had told when her own father died, at a table where two feuding houses had both made sure there was a chair with her name on it, and she put her thumb over the ink of the name card, and Ainsley leaned into her shoulder without looking at her and said, "Don't you dare start before the toasts, I did everyone's makeup," which was Ainsley for I see you, and saved her.

Addi had flown in the night before, and Christmas absorbed her like Harvey's had, at full volume.

"I want it noted," she announced, arriving at the table with a tray she'd claimed off Helen by force, "that I have now crossed this country twice in one month, for love, in the middle seat, both times. Nobody at this table understands sacrifice like I do. Giana understands. Giana, tell them about the middle seat."

"You said a man ate a whole egg salad sandwich at six a.m.," Giana reported.

"A whole one." Addi sat down directly across from Jace with the serene confidence of a woman choosing terrain, and Jace, who had been reaching for the rolls, recalculated the reach by a full six inches and got the butter instead. "Jace."

"Addison."

"Merry Christmas."

"It surely is," Jace said, to his plate, and Lara looked at her sister like a woman watching weather form out west, and said nothing, and filed everything.

Dinner was loud and long and the best thing Lauren had ever been in the middle of. Helen and Stephanie ran the kitchen between them like a two-woman government. Remi told the bull story over Jett's objections, and Jett retaliated with a story about Remi and a borrowed horse that had the far end of the table wiping its eyes. Chase carved. Knox got caught testing the potatoes before grace by Helen, who did not need to turn around to catch him, and Owen said grace itself, short and plain, and at the words for the ones not at this table John's eyes went to the window and came back, and Dean's hand found Lara's under the table, and nobody said the name Brody out loud, and everybody heard it anyway.

And Olivia Bateman was there, three chairs down, next to her mother.

Lauren had met her at the wedding for half a minute, the quiet dark-haired woman from the drinks table. It was Helen who'd folded the two of them in, she learned, because Olivia's mother had taken a fall in November and the storm had made a wreck of their fence lines, and in Soluno arithmetic that came out to nobody does Christmas alone. What Helen's arithmetic had or hadn't accounted for was the seating, which put Olivia one chair diagonal from Owen, and Lauren, who'd spent an autumn learning to read this family, spent dinner collecting the evidence with professional interest. Owen passing dishes to Olivia's mother before she asked. Olivia listening to Owen's grace with her eyes open. The two of them talking twice, briefly, about fence wire and her mother's hip, in the flat easy shorthand of people who had known each other their whole lives, and both of them retreating from each conversation like swimmers touching a wall. Nobody else appeared to notice a thing.

She'd mention it to Mason on the drive home, she decided. Or she'd keep it, the way this county kept things, and watch it come true on its own time.

The fathers held. That was the phrase Mason had used on the drive over, they'll hold, they always hold on the day itself, and they held, mostly. John presided at his end with his color good and his voice strong, and Clay told the pecan story at his end with all the old warmth, and to a stranger it would have looked like one family. It was in the lull after pie that the ice creaked, when talk down Clay's end drifted to the new year and Clay said something easy about the west expansion and the survey crew coming in February, and the table's temperature dropped two degrees in a sentence.

"On your own ground, I hope," John said, from the far end. Mild as milk, and not mild at all.

"On my own ground, John." Clay didn't look up from his coffee. "Every acre of it mine, surveyed twice. You're welcome to come watch them stake it."

"I'd sooner watch a grass fire."

"You'd charge admission if it was your grass."

Both ends of the table had gone quiet, forty years of weather in one exchange, and Lauren watched Stephanie set down her fork without hurry, and watched Helen materialize with the coffee pot, as she did at every fracture, and watched, closest of all, Owen, who was looking at his coffee with the line cut deep between his brows and saying nothing, the way a man says nothing when the nothing is getting heavier every year he carries it. Then Levi asked, into the silence, whether anybody wanted to see him do the thing where he could fit a whole candy cane in his mouth, and the table stampeded gratefully toward yes, and the ice held, because it was Christmas, and in this family the ice always held on the day itself.

Under the table, Mason's hand found hers.

"You okay?" he said, low, under the noise.

"Better than okay." She meant it so completely it surprised her. The tension at the table's two ends was real, and old, and going nowhere, next year it would be this mine or another one, and she understood now that she'd married into the weather of it, or near as. But the weave down the middle of the table was real too, the kids and the cousins and the women passing plates across the line the fathers wouldn't cross, and she'd take it. She'd take the whole imperfect roaring thing exactly as it stood. Perfect had never once been on offer in her life. This was better. This was true, and loud, and hers.

It was Ainsley who stood up with her glass when the coffee went around, and dinged it with a spoon till the roar came down.

"Two toasts," she announced. "One. To Dean and Lara, married thirteen whole days and still speaking to each other. To love." The table drank and hollered. "Two." She turned, and looked down at Lauren, and her eyes were bright and her chin was set exactly like her mother's. "To my friend Lauren. Who came out here with a hundred and sixty acres of trouble and a truck full of boxes, and who I am reliably informed has unpacked every last one of them." A sound went around the table, warm, rolling. "Say the thing," Ainsley said. "You said I could make you say the thing."