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"He lives," Jett announced as Dean slid in. "Harvey, my brother needs a beer and possibly a personality. Helen stay up at the house with Dad?"

"Helen's there. Kids are down. He was asleep before I got my boots on."

"Three weeks ago I didn't think we'd get him back up his own steps," Chase said, quiet, "and he walked in tonight cussing about a wheelchair. He's gonna outlive all of us out of pure spite." There was relief under it, the whole booth easing — Mason hadn't been at the house, and the plain fact of John home and asleep in his own bed loosened something in him too, in all of them, these men who'd each in their way been holding their breath about John Royston for three weeks.

The beer came. Dean drank it faster than he meant to.

Knox blew in around the second one. One of Mason's younger brothers, Clay's side through and through, which meant money and a mouth and the easy swagger of a branch that had bet on the mine and been right about it, at least in the bank. But there was a chip on him all the same, the kind a younger son carried when he'd grown up the loudest in a house that kept looking past him to his brothers, the kind that came out as too much noise and a readiness to take offense on his family's behalf before anyone had offered any. Where Mason picked his spots and let a slight roll off him, Knox came in talking and stayed ready for a fight nobody'd started. He greeted the booth loud, smacked the back of Mason's head in passing, took Dean's hand and used it to haul him half out of his seat in a one-armed thump of a hug, and grabbed a cue off the wall rack on his way to chalk in on Chase's game.

"Where's Owen," Mason said, not looking up. "He said he was coming."

"Owen's not coming. He's home with Ainsley watching some movie she made him promise weeks ago, and you know Owen, a promise is a promise." Knox chalked his cue and racked. "Jace said he might swing by. Ainsley wanted to come too once the movie's done and Dad about had a stroke at the idea, so." He spread his hands. "It's just us reprobates."

And the whole table picked up a gear with him in it, the way it always did. Knox didn't enter a room so much as raise its temperature.

And then, because they were his cousins and they could smell blood, they started in.

"So." Knox lined up his break and turned the full force of his attention on Dean with the particular glee of a man who'd been saving this. "Your office assistant."

Dean took a long pull of his beer and set it down and looked at his cousin with the flat patience of a man who'd seen the truck coming from a mile off. "Fuck off, Knox."

"Not a denial." Knox spread his hands, delighted, performing it for the booth. "A man with nothing going on says 'going on with what.' A man says fuck off, that's a man with something to hide."

"Fuck off twice."

"It's the eyebrows that give him away," Mason said, mild, not looking up from his beer. "He's been doing the eyebrows since Knox opened his mouth."

"You bringing her to the BBQ?" Jett, leaning in, grinning. "Whole family's gonna be there. Be a real good time for everybody to meet the woman who's got you driving fenceposts into your own foot every time she walks across the yard."

"She works in the office."

The booth made a collective groan, a low delighted here we go, four grown men who had been waiting weeks for exactly this.

"He said it," Jett crowed. "I told you he'd say it. 'She works in the office.' Word for word, every time, like it's gonna start being true on the ninth repetition."

"You driven to Odessa lately, Dean?" Knox, slyer, and the booth went a half-step quieter, because that was closer to the bone and they all knew it, the cousins didn't know the particulars but they knew the shape of how Dean had spent four years, the way a big family always knew more than anyone said. "Or you finding you don't much want to anymore?"

Dean didn't answer that. He drank his beer. The not-answering was its own answer and every man at the table caught it, and for once nobody pushed, Knox had got nearer the truth than even Knox had meant to, and the booth let it lie.

It was Mason who turned it, later, three beers further in, when the ribbing had run its course and the hour had got late enough for the real talk to come up the way it did when men were tired and the women weren't there and the fathers weren't there.

He'd been quiet a while. Then, into his beer, not quite to anyone: "My old man asked about Uncle John today. Called me from the truck just to ask how he was doing." He turned the bottle on the table. "Everybody wants my dad to be a monster. He's not. He's just a man who's sure he's right."

"He wants Dad to open the ranch and dig," Chase said. No heat in it, just the old fact, said the way you'd name the weather. "Same as he's been wanting for ten years."

"He thinks Uncle John's throwing away a fortune to keep a promise to a dead woman." Mason said it tired, not unkind. "He's not even wrong about the fortune. He's just wrong about her." He looked at his beer. "He thinks Aunt Kelly would've come around if she'd lived to see the numbers."

"She wouldn't have," Chase said.

And that was flat, and final, and true, and it put a silence on the table that none of them rushed to fill, because they'd all known Kelly-Anne Royston, or known of her the way you know a thing that shaped the whole family before you were old enough to understand it, and not one of them believed for a second she'd have traded the land for any number.

"You ever think," Knox said, after a while, looking at his beer instead of any of them, "how much of this we just… inherited? How much of it we're carrying that was never ours to pick a side on?"

Nobody answered him. Jett, who drove off Royston land every morning to dig in his uncle's lithium mine over on the Wainwright spread, who lived the whole feud in a forty-minute commute twice a day, laughed once, short, no humor anywhere in it, and tipped his bottle back and finished it.

It was Chase who said the quiet thing, to Dean, while the others had drifted half a step into their own thoughts.

"It's gonna be one of us that fixes it, you know. Not them." He wasn't needling now; this was the other Chase, the one that only came out at the bottom of a long night. "Dad and Uncle Clay are gonna go to their graves not speaking, both of 'em sure they're the wronged one. It'll be one of us has to be braver than that. Reach across it." He turned his bottle. "I think about that. Which one of us it's gonna have to be."