Page 56

Pearl and Marge came together with four pies balanced between them. Harvey showed up in a clean pressed shirt that made Pearl stare at him for one dangerous second before she looked very deliberately somewhere else. Nathan Greene arrived in a golf shirt that still somehow looked expensive enough to fire somebody. Mrs. Sherman got cornered by Levi within five minutes.

"You can't keep moving recess around," he informed her, seriously. "Nobody can concentrate after grilled cheese day."

Mrs. Sherman blinked. "I wasn't aware grilled cheese day was affecting district performance."

"It is," Levi said, grim.

The band started up under the live oaks sometime after three. Fiddle, guitar, upright bass, and an old man with a squeezebox who looked about a hundred and six and played like he'd been born with it strapped on. People drifted toward the music the way they do. Kids tore through the grass in packs. Old women carried folding chairs into circles and settled in like judges overseeing civilization.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it Lara realized she knew almost everybody. Not deeply. Not fully. But enough. Enough to wave. Enough for people to call her name across the yard. Enough that the place had stopped feeling temporary.

Mason found her by the drinks table and handed her a sweet tea she hadn't asked for.

"You look less terrified than you did at the Cattlemen's Dance."

"Nobody here can publicly judge me while holding potato salad."

"Never underestimate old women," he said, grave. "Most organized threat we've got."

There was the quiet weight on him she'd noticed before. There and gone, the easy sliding back over the top of it whenever he caught himself. She didn't chase it. Dean came up a minute later with Chase, a cooler between them, his older brother Jace trailing behind carrying a folding table one-handed like it weighed nothing.

"Mason talking politics again?" Dean asked.

"I heard that," Mason said.

"Meant you to."

Jace set the table down, put one dry word into the middle of the ribbing that landed harder than anything Knox had managed all day, and went right back to listening. Clay's eldest, the one his side seemed to orbit the way Dean's brothers orbited Dean. The four of them stood there easy in the moving crowd, two of John's and two of Clay's, ribbing each other across a line their fathers wouldn't step over — and Lara watched Dean clap Mason on the shoulder and thought again how strange this feud was, that the men who'd inherited it plainly loved each other, or at least had never learned how not to.

Off past them, Owen hovered at the edge of a conversation he wasn't quite in, his eyes going every so often to a quiet dark-haired woman working the drinks table at the far end — not a Royston, Lara could tell somehow, but long family — the two of them orbiting each other across the whole yard without once landing. Remi cut through with an empty platter, caught the woman's eye for half a beat, something Lara couldn't read passing between them, and moved on. Another wrong note for the collection. Lara let it lie.

Ainsley had the children.

Lara had met her at the Cattlemen's Dance. Clay's only daughter, early twenties, both hands around Lara's the first time like they were already family. She'd been there since before noon hauling chairs, and now she had Levi hanging off one arm and Giana sitting still as a saint in front of her on the porch step while Ainsley worked her hair into a braid and listened to some long involved story with her whole face. Up in his chair, John watched the two of them with a hand resting light on Ainsley's shoulder.

That was the thing nobody in this family would ever say out loud, and Lara understood it watching them: the feud didn't reach the children. And the women — Stephanie and Helen at the stove, Ainsley on the step, Remi everywhere at once — were the reason it didn't. The men had built the wall. The women had spent thirty years passing the kids and the casseroles back and forth over the top of it.

Dean caught her behind the smokers near sunset.

She'd ducked back for a fresh tray of brisket, out of the worst of the crowd, and he came around the end of the rig to swap her full platter for an empty, and then didn't, just set both down on the warming shelf and looked at her.

"What?" She asked.

"Nothing." He backed her half a step into the smoke where the rig hid them from the yard and put his mouth near her ear. "You've been bending over those coolers in those jeans all afternoon. I've forgotten half the conversations I've had today."

"That sounds like a personal problem."

"It's becoming your problem."

She fought a smile. "Some of us are working, Dean."

"I'm aware of exactly how hard you're working." His hand found her hip, brief, hidden between them, and pressed once, and the heat of it went straight down through her.

"There are children present."

"I didn't say anything dirty."

His eyes absolutely did. Somebody hollered his name from the far side of the pit, and he stepped back, host face sliding into place so smooth it should have annoyed her more than it did. Instead, it just made her want him, which felt frankly unfair. He picked up both platters, handed her the empty one, and walked off into the crowd like nothing at all had happened.