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She picked up the pie and carried it inside and set it on the counter where the catalogs used to land. The thumbprint was in the crust, right where Pearl said it would be. She cut a slice and ate it standing up in the half-packed kitchen, and Marge had cried in it, and it was good anyway.

She put the plate in the sink and picked the tape gun back up.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The last of her panels came down Saturday.

He'd set them in February, eight of them, to make a crowd pen big enough to hold twenty pairs while he worked them, and he pulled the pins now and carried them one at a time to the stack against the barn where panels went when nobody needed them.

The alley was empty. It had been empty four days, since the last of her lots went out his gate in a hauler's truck, and the place had gone quiet in a way he hadn't counted on. He fed at daylight and was done by seven. Nothing left in his pens needed two people.

He would go a whole morning with wire and a pair of pliers and then set the pliers down and have the shape of her in his hands, the give of her under his mouth on that bunk with the rain going on the tin he'd put up over her at twenty-four. If she came up his drive tonight he'd have her on the floor of that house before either one of them said a word.

He was setting the gate hinges back when the dust came up the road.

Four vehicles, nose to tail. Remi's truck in front, Lauren's flower van behind it, then Lara, then Ainsley's truck last and hanging back. By the time the second set of tires hit his cattle guard he understood they'd met somewhere and driven out together.

He set the hinges on the tailgate and stood in his own yard and waited on them.

The doors went, four of them, near enough together to sound like one.

"Owen Royston," Remi said.

"Remi."

"Don't Remi me. I've had thirty minutes in that truck working out what I was going to say and it's all gone, so I'll start in the middle." She came across the yard with a finger up. "You hit my brother in the mouth."

"I did."

"In Daddy's yard. At a branding. In front of Helen and half the church and every man Dean's got on the place."

"I know where I hit him."

"His lip's still black and he's telling people he caught a gate, and every one of you is letting him say it."

"We're not letting him say it," Lara said. She'd come up on the other side, unhurried, in Dean's old barn coat. "We're just not arguing about it in front of Levi."

"That's letting him say it."

"It's the same house, Remi. That's different from letting him."

"Fine. Then here's my list, and there's three things on it." Remi got a finger up for each one. "One, you split my brother's mouth. Two, you haven’t set foot at Daddy's since, and Daddy’s noticed, and he’s sixty-seven and counts trucks off that porch all day like a man doing sums. Three⁠—"

"Remi."

"I'm on three, Lauren. Three, that man has been home since February and the only two people in this county who will not tell me one true word about anything are him and you." She dropped the hand. "You know what he said when I asked him what y'all fought about? Weather. He stood in my own kitchen with his lip open and told me weather."

"That's about his speed," Lara said.

"It's about both their speeds. That's my point. That's the whole point."

Lauren shut the van door. "Can I go? I've got a wedding in the back of that van and I said one sentence to myself the whole way out here and I'd like to say it and drive home."

Nobody stopped her.

"Olivia rang Charla Denton the afternoon of that branding," Lauren said. "From her mama's kitchen. She told her to take the first offer, and Charla wrote it down, and it's under contract. Settlement's the second of June."

Nobody said anything to that.