She looked at me for a long moment. That careful, considering look that I was coming to understand meant she was deciding whether to let herself believe something.
"Yes," she said finally. Small and certain. "I want that."
Something settled in me. The last thing that had been waiting to settle.
I picked up the bench.
"Okay," I said. "Now show me how this works."
She laughed—that full, helpless laugh—and snatched it back from me.
"You're unbelievable," she said.
"You bought it," I said. "I'm just being thorough."
"You said that already."
"Still true." I held out my hand for the silicone cup. "Start from the beginning. Walk me through the whole thing."
She looked at my outstretched hand. Looked at my face. Shook her head slowly.
"Bedroom," she said.
"That's what I've been saying," I said.
And she grabbed the box off the counter and led the way down the hall, and I followed her, and thought about thirty years of limestone conversations and a table that always had too many people at it and felt like a man who had accidentally walked into the best thing that had ever happened to him and had the good sense to stay.
TWELVE
Gage
This was starting to feel like home.
Millie at the table every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Millie in the morning, looking well-fucked and well-loved. Millie talking to my dad about his art, to my mom about baking, to Haven about growing up around horses, to Sawyer about movies.
Even to Wyatt, who didn’tevertalk. EvenWyattwas starting to like her.
She was becoming a fixture right in front of me.
It was a night like any other when our bad seed showed up.
I saw Arlo’s truck from the porch; it was pulling up the drive slow, kicking up clouds of dust, the horses watching with interest. Even the most friendly of them seemed to know this wasn’t good—like they knew this was the guy who wanted to take their home away and sell it to the highest bidder.
I was off the porch before I'd made a conscious decision about it.
"Stay inside," I said, back through the screen door. I didn't know who I was talking to specifically. Everyone, maybe.
The truck rolled to a stop and Arlo climbed out moving like a man who owned the ground under his feet, which was thewhole problem in a nutshell. He was sixty-one and lean and weathered in the way of men who'd spent their lives outdoors and in trouble, and he had that smile—that easy, pleasant, I'm-just-passing-through smile that he'd been wearing my entire life like a second skin.
Behind him, out of the passenger side, came a younger man I'd only ever met a handful of times: my cousin—Arlo’s youngest.
Cooper Holt was twenty-five and built like Arlo but softer around it, with blond hair like Wyatt’s, too many tattoos, and the particular loose-limbed quality of someone who worked hard and played harder and hadn't yet learned that the world kept score. Cooper was the only one of Arlo’s kids who’d actually had him around when he was growing up—probably a bad thing, all things considered. He was in jeans and boots and a t-shirt with an oil company logo on it and he looked around the property with genuine, uncomplicated interest, like he'd been told they were stopping by somewhere and hadn't asked a single follow-up question.
"Gage," Arlo said. Warm as anything. "Hope we're not interrupting."
"You are," I said.
He smiled wider. Like I'd said something fond. "Thought we'd stop by. Been a while."
