Page 53

It was nobody's fault. They'd gone in to get the good halters down from the loft, the ones kept up out of the weather, and getting them down took two people, one above and one below, and somewhere in the handing-down of them his hand had closed over her wrist instead of the halter, and she'd looked down at him from the third rung, and that had been the end of the halters.

He got her down off the ladder. He didn’t get her any farther than the stack of square bales by the wall. It was fast and quiet and not careful at all, her back against the hay and her hands in his shirt and the good clean smell of the cut grass all around them, the two of them grinning into it like a pair of kids who'd snuck off from a church social, which was more or less the size of it. Two grown people hiding in a barn in the middle of a workday because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Which was how Remi found them.

"Dean! You up here? Mack needs the…" Her boots came around the corner of the bale stack and she stopped, dead, and took in the whole scene in one comprehensive sweep: her brother, her brother's untucked shirt, the hay in Lara's hair, the both of them flushed and frozen with a guilty yard of daylight opening up between them about half a second too late to do any good.

There was a silence.

"...Mack needs the trailer hitch," Remi finished, with enormous dignity. Her eyes were dancing. "But I can see you're busy keeping the hay company. I'll tell him you're indisposed." She turned to go, and turned back, because she was constitutionally incapable of leaving a thing alone, and looked at Lara, who had given up on her own dignity entirely and was pulling hay out of her hair with the resigned face of a woman who knew exactly how the next month of her life was going to go. "There's a piece right there." Remi tapped her own temple, helpful. "No — up. Higher. There you go." And then, to her brother, sweet as anything: "Y'all take your time."

She was gone. They heard her make it about forty feet before the laughter broke out of her, big and delighted, ringing off the metal of the equipment shed, and Lara dropped her forehead against Dean's chest and started laughing too, helpless with it, and after a second Dean felt it come up in him as well, the unfamiliar shake of it, rusty from disuse, and the two of them stood in the wrecked hay and laughed until it hurt.

"The whole county will know by supper," Lara said into his shirt.

"The whole county knew by the dance." He put his hand in her hay-wrecked hair. "This is just the part where my sister gets to enjoy it."

The county didn't have to wait that long, because Remi told everyone at supper.

Supper had become a thing again. That was the truth of it, a thing it had not been in four years. Helen had always cooked, and the kids had always eaten, and Dean had always sat at the head of the table because somebody had to, but it had been an operation, a refueling, plates and homework and bedtime in a line. Somewhere in the last weeks it had turned back into a meal. The table was full now. Chase came up from the bunkhouse more nights than not. Jett, who'd kept to his cabin and his own quiet for a long time, had started turning up around six with the particular casualness of a man pretending he hadn't planned it. Remi was always there. And Lara was there, at first because the work ran late, and then just because, the because having quietly stopped needing a reason.

John presided from his chair at the end, which was new, and which Dean still couldn't quite look at straight without his chest doing something. Three weeks ago he hadn't known if his father would walk again. Now the old man sat at his own table with a cane hooked over the arm of the chair and ran the room with his eyebrows, slower in the body but every bit as sharp in the eye, and the eye, lately, spent a great deal of time on Lara.

"So," Remi announced, to the table at large, reaching for the potatoes, "funny thing happened in the barn today."

"Remi," Dean said.

"I went up to get the trailer hitch⁠—"

"Remi."

"—and you'll never guess what I found instead." She was grinning at her plate. Levi looked up, six years old and missing nothing that sounded like it might be good. Giana had already gone still and watchful in her chair, her eyes moving between her father and Lara.

"Found a barn cat, I expect," John said, mild, not looking up from his food. "They get everywhere." He forked up a bite and chewed and let it sit just long enough. "Though I'll say the barn cats in my day generally kept their shirts on."

Chase choked on his tea. Jett made a sound into his napkin. Remi pointed her fork at her father in pure betrayed admiration — I had a whole thing, the fork said — and Lara, God bless her, did not flush or fumble or look at her plate. She reached for the bread, calm as a Sunday, and said, "The hay's very clean this year, John. You should be proud."

A beat. And then John Royston laughed, a real one, rusty and surprised out of him, the laugh of a man who'd had little enough to laugh about in a month and had just been handed something worth it, and the whole table went up with him, Levi laughing because everyone was laughing, even Giana's mouth coming unstuck at the corner.

Dean sat at the head of his father's table in the middle of all that noise and looked down the length of it, his father laughing, his sister scheming, his brothers easy, his kids lit up, and the woman who'd caused all of it buttering bread like she'd been born to the chair, and felt the thing in his chest crack a hairline wider.

Because this was the trouble with it. This, right here. Not the nights; he'd known going in what the nights would cost him. It was the suppers he hadn't planned for. It was how easily she fit the empty place, how the table had filled back up around her like water finding its level, how his kids had stopped being careful and his father had started laughing and his whole broken house had quietly knit itself back into a family with her sitting in the middle of it, and how he'd told her, in plain words, over cold coffee, that none of it could be kept.

He'd built the wall to keep a woman from getting hurt. He had not once considered that by the time it came down it wouldn't only be a woman it hurt. It would be all of them. It would be that laugh of his father's, and Levi's whole open face, and Giana coming unstuck at the corner. He'd thought he was risking himself. He was risking the lot of them, and he'd known it for about four days now, and he had no idea on God's earth what to do with knowing it.

He picked up his fork. He ate his supper. He let the noise close back over the top of the thought, because that was the other thing the ranch was good for, and because his daughter was watching his face, and because there was nothing to be done about any of it tonight.

After supper, Levi declared it a fort night.

It was Lara's doing, though she'd deny she'd done a thing. Levi had wanted to build the fort again. The one made of every cushion in the house and three quilts and the kitchen chairs, the architecture of which he held strong and frequently changing opinions about, and somewhere in the engineering of it the whole project had become a four-person operation on the living room floor: Levi directing, Giana load-bearing, Lara taking instruction, Dean handed a quilt and told where to hold it.

He held the quilt. He took his orders from a six-year-old. He watched Lara let Giana boss her about the placement of a cushion, and then he watched Giana — Giana, the careful one, the one who'd taken three months to decide about Lara — lean over without thinking and tuck a loose corner of quilt around Lara's knee so she wouldn't be cold in the fort. An absent small kindness. The kind a kid only does for somebody they've stopped keeping watch on.

Lara caught his eye over the kids' heads. She'd seen it too. The tuck, what it meant. She didn't say anything. She just held his look a second across the wreck of the fort, and something passed between them with no words on it and no need for any, and then Levi demanded the roof and the moment folded back into the work of being a family on a Tuesday night.

Lara felt it land in her, though, even as she reached up to take Levi's roof-quilt. That was the danger she'd known she was walking into and had decided, on a dark porch with two empty bottles, not to look at too hard. It was one thing to fall for a man who'd told her plainly there was a wall at the end of the road. She'd signed for that with her eyes open. It was another thing entirely to be tucked into a blanket fort by an eight-year-old who'd decided to trust her. To have that riding on a road with a wall at the end of it. She held Levi's roof up where he wanted it and let herself not think about it, which she was getting good at, and which was its own quiet kind of trouble.

They got both kids down late. Then they did the dishes Helen had left, the two of them, hip to hip at the sink, and it was the most married thing Dean had done in four years and neither of them said so.