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Nobody moved.

"Now."

This time they went. But Jett looked back once before he headed for the barns. Not angry. Just disappointed.

Dean stood alone at the chute with his chest heaving and the sound of Levi crying quietly over cereal suddenly stuck in his head like something alive.

John came that night.

Dean heard the slow drag-and-tap of his father's cane in the hall and didn't have time to do anything about the bottle on the table or the glass in his hand before the old man was in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the cane, looking at the scene with eyes that had not missed a single thing in sixty-one years and weren't about to start.

"Go to bed, Dad."

"I will." John didn't move. He looked at the bourbon, and at his son in the dark, and then he came in, slow, the cane and the bad leg and the whole effortful post-stroke shuffle of it and lowered himself into the chair across the table. Lara's chair. Dean looked away from it.

"You're drinking in the dark," John said. "Alone. At my kitchen table." He let that sit. "I've been lying down the hall four nights listening to you not sleep. You going to tell me you're fine, or you going to let me talk?"

"I don't want to hear it."

"I know you don't. That's how I know you need to." John folded his hands on the head of the cane. When he spoke again his voice was quiet, and worn, and absolutely without mercy. "I let you carry a lie for four years because you were grieving and a man gets to grieve however he can. But you're about to wreck the best thing that ever happened to you and those kids over that same lie, so I'm done being kind about it. You listening?"

Dean said nothing. John took it as a yes.

"Lucia never loved you, son."

The words landed in the dark kitchen like a stone through glass.

"I'm sorry if it hurts to hear it. It's a fact, and you've spent four years calling it your own failure instead." John's eyes didn't leave him. "She had some romantic picture in her head of ranch life and a cowboy to go with it, and she married the picture, and then she got here and found out it was work and weather and a long way from anywhere, and she didn't have the grit for it. That's not a sin. Plenty of people don't. But it was never anything you did or didn't do. You about killed yourself trying to make that woman happy and there was no making her happy, because what she wanted was a daydream, and you were a man, a real one, with dirt under his nails and two kids who needed her, and she wasn't, God rest her, the mothering kind." His voice didn't soften and it didn't harden; it just told the truth. "You didn't drive her to drink. She was drowning before she ever met you. You just happened to be standing close enough to spend the rest of your life thinking it was your fault she went under."

Dean's jaw was working. His eyes had gone hot. He didn't trust his voice.

"And here's the rest of it," John said, "since I'm already breaking your heart. Lara loves you. That woman loves you, and she loves those kids, and she loves this ranch, and this land. I watched her stand in my south pasture and look at it like she'd been waiting her whole life to find it. Hell, the entire town of Soluno fell in love with her, you know that? Pearl, the school, the whole damn county. She didn't just want the picture. She wanted this. The work and the weather and the long way from anywhere and you and those two kids in the bargain, all of it, eyes wide open." He leaned forward on the cane. "And you stood in this house and told her no. Because you decided a long time ago that a woman couldn't really want this life, or want you in it, because the one who didn't taught you that's how it goes. Well, she wasn't a measure of anything, son. She was just a sad woman who married the wrong dream. Lara's the measure. And you're failing it on purpose."

"Dad —" It came out wrecked.

"I'm not finished." John's voice finally cracked, just slightly, the father under the verdict. "I’ve buried a wife I loved more than my own life. I’ve got one son on another continent who won't pick up the phone and another driving off to work for my own brother every morning like a knife in my back, and I learned, too late to do me any good, exactly what it costs to let pride and fear run your life till the people are gone. I’m sixty-one years old and I had a stroke in a cow pasture and I’m telling you the only thing I know for certain at the end of all of it." He pointed one shaking finger at his son across the dark table. "Stop being a stubborn fool. Get your head out of your own ass. And go get her. Before it's too late, if it isn't already — and pray to God it isn't, because you have earned every bit of losing her and you don't deserve the chance you might still have." He sat back. "You fucked this up about as bad as a man can. So go to Boston and you get down on your knees and you un-fuck it. If she'll have you. Which is more than you've got coming."

The kitchen was silent. Somewhere out in the dark a windmill turned.

Dean sat there a long time after the words stopped. Four years he'd held a certain shape, and his father had just walked in on a cane and taken it apart in about ninety seconds, and what was left underneath wasn't grief, and it wasn't guilt, and for once it wasn't the no.

"...Okay," he said finally. It came out rough. "Okay, Dad."

"Don't okay me. I'm too old and too tired to okay." John planted the cane and hauled himself up, waving off Dean's move to help. "Pour the rest of that out. You've got a flight to find." At the doorway he stopped, and his voice came back gentler, the father instead of the judge. "She was a sick woman, Lucia. Sad and lost and a long way past anywhere you could reach her, and that was true the day you met her and it stayed true till the day she died." His voice came back gentler at the door, the father instead of the judge. "You didn't break her, son. You couldn't have fixed her either. Quit carrying a thing that was never yours to carry, and don't let it cost you the one who's standing right out in the open with her arms wide, waiting on you to wake up." And he went, the cane marking him slow down the hall.

Dean poured the bourbon down the sink.

He stood at the counter a long moment with his hands braced on the edge of it and his head down, and then he went to check on his kids the way he hadn't trusted himself to in four days. Levi first, sprawled and frowning even in sleep, then Giana's door.

It was open a crack. She was awake. She was sitting up in the dark in her bed with the one-eared rabbit she'd had since she was a baby, and she looked at him in the light from the hall, and her face was her mother's flat measuring look, and Dean's heart cracked straight down the middle.

"Levi told everybody at school you sent Lara away," Giana said. Her voice was very small and very steady. "Is that true?"

He could have softened it. He looked at his daughter and he could not. He never had. It was the one thing he'd always done right.

"Yeah, baby," he said. "That's true. I did."

She absorbed it, the small face working, and he braced for the door to shut for good.