Page 4

She stopped at the diner on the way out of town, because she hadn't eaten and because the truck's gas gauge made her nervous and the diner was next to the only pump, and that was how she learned that Soluno already knew her name.

"Lara Baxter." The woman behind the counter said it like a fact she'd been keeping. She was sixty-something, sharp-eyed, with a pencil shoved into a gray bun. "Coffee, honey?"

Lara had not told this woman her name. She was fairly sure she had not told anyone in Soluno her name except Helen Crane and a rude man who hadn't wanted it.

"Please," she said, and sat, because there didn't seem to be another option.

A second woman came out of the kitchen, older, broader, with flour on her forearms, and set down a cinnamon roll the size of a fist that Lara had not ordered. "You look like you didn't eat," the second woman said, and went back into the kitchen before Lara could answer.

"That's Marge," said the first woman. "I'm Pearl. It's my name on the window." She topped off Lara's cup without asking. "You're going out to Royston Ranch."

It wasn't a question, so Lara didn't treat it as one. "For my first day."

Pearl's eyes dropped to Lara's left hand, frank as a pat-down, and came back up. "You married?"

"No," Lara said, before she'd decided whether she was going to answer at all.

"Mm." Pearl set the pot down and leaned on the counter, a woman settling in for the duration. "Word of advice, then, honey, since you're new and nobody's told you yet. You watch yourself out at that ranch. The good Lord made a lot of men in his time, but he took his sweet time on the Royston boys."

"He surely did," Marge agreed from the kitchen.

"There's Brody, second after Dean. Gone years now — took himself off overseas chasing money and never properly came back." Something passed over Pearl's face, a softness she covered fast. "Left over a girl, that one, though he'd die before he called it that. Some men would rather cross an ocean than sit in the same town as a broken heart." She sniffed. "Anyhow. He's no danger to anybody in this county these days. Then there's Jett — the one with the smile, still lives right out at the ranch, more's the pity for the local girls. Works for his uncle, though." Her mouth pursed like she'd tasted something. "Drives off that ranch every morning to go dig in Clay Royston's mine, and drives home to his daddy's table every night."

"Clay's family," Pearl added, fair-minded, like she was making herself say it. "It's all the one family out there, when you come down to it. Royston land, Royston name on the gate."

"Family's family, Pearl, but your own immediate family comes first." Marge had come to the kitchen pass-through now, dish towel over her shoulder, the argument apparently older than the cinnamon rolls. "You don't take the other side's money and then sit down to your daddy's supper. You pick."

"Nobody's picking, it's a job —"

"It's a job for the man your daddy won't speak to."

"And whose fault is it the two of them won't speak? Takes two to keep a quarrel breathing that long⁠—"

They'd forgotten Lara entirely. She sat with her cooling coffee and watched the two of them go at it like a married couple, and gathered, without anyone telling her a single useful fact, that there was a rift out at that ranch old enough and deep enough that the whole town had picked a pew in it.

"Well." Marge ran out of argument first, the way you do with a thing you've said a hundred times. "It doesn't matter. They'd any of them give you the shirt off their back, that whole family, and you know it."

"Oh, they would." Pearl said it instantly, the fight gone out of her, replaced by something that looked a lot like love. "There's not a finer family in this county and not a one of them'd let you say so to their face. You break down on the road at two in the morning out past their land, it's a Royston who stops. Every time." She tipped her head toward the window, the long road out. "Even the one digging in Clay's mine'd stop. That's the maddening thing about them."

"And Chase, out there working the land like his daddy raised him to," Marge said, mollified. "Sweet as anything and twice as much trouble."

"Half the marriages in this county started with a girl getting her heart broke by a Royston boy and marrying the next steady fella who came along to get over it," Pearl said. "The other half too."

"They are a menace," Pearl said happily, "every last one of them—" and then something caught the sentence and slowed it, the way a current snags on a rock. "Every last one but Dean. He was the worst of the lot once, you'd not believe it to look at him now. But that boy's been nothing but those two babies ever since⁠—"

She stopped. Marge had gone quiet in the kitchen. Pearl looked down at the coffeepot in her hand like she wasn't sure how it had gotten there, and set it on the warmer, and when she spoke again the fun had stepped back out of her voice and left something more careful in its place.

"Well." She wiped the clean counter. "You just be decent to him. That's all. He doesn't make it easy, but you be decent to him anyway."

Ever since. Lara turned the two words over. Ever since what. Nobody finished the sentence, and the not-finishing was louder than anything they'd actually said, and she understood, the way you understand a locked door is locked without trying the handle, that there was a whole story here the town knew and wasn't going to hand to a stranger over a cinnamon roll. She'd met the man for ninety seconds. He'd insulted her shoes and slammed a door. And apparently that was the grief-flattened version of a Royston boy, which was its own kind of unsettling to sit with.

She tucked it away with the rest of what she didn't understand about this place yet, ate the cinnamon roll because it was, in fact, extraordinary, and left too much money on the counter because she didn't know the rules here and overpaying felt safer than not.

She knew something was wrong before she was out of the truck.

Helen's car sat in the drive at an angle, the door not quite shut. The front door of the big house stood open to the heat, which even Lara, one day a local, understood you did not do out here. Two men she didn't recognize crossed fast between the barn and the house, not talking, and one of them had the particular set to his shoulders of a man carrying news he didn't want to be carrying.

She parked the blue truck and got out.