"Has been," I said.
He hadn’t actually been to the property yet—just lurked around town, sending us legal notices like we weren’t even family.
Asshole.
"Place looks good." His eyes moved over the property the way they always did—slow, thorough, doing math I didn't like. The fence line. The stable. The main house. The cottage in the distance with the light on. "You've kept it up."
"I always keep it up," I said.
"You do."
I couldn’t help the way my lip curled in disgust. This land would have gone to Arlo if Arlo hadn't gone to prison the year I was born. Three years older than my dad, the eldest son, the natural heir. He'd forfeited it the way he'd forfeited everything—carelessly, violently, without seeming to understand until it was gone that it wouldn't be handed back. "Your daddy inside?"
"Arlo—"
The screen door opened, and my dad stepped out onto the porch. Even if I ran the place, this was his land, his family's land, built by his grandfather's hands, and he had spent his entire adult life managing his older brother at a cost I would never fully know. He'd been doing it since before I was born. He'd been doing it when Arlo went to prison and when Arlo got out and when Arlo went back in and when Arlo got out again, every single time, steady and quiet and immovable.
He looked at Arlo from the porch.
"Arlo," my dad said.
"Adam." Arlo's smile didn't change. "Been a while."
"Has been." My dad looked at Cooper with something genuinely warmer. "Cooper."
"Hey, sir," Cooper said, easy and amiable. "Sorry to just show up. Dad said?—"
"It's fine," my dad said, in a tone that meant precisely the opposite and was too well-mannered to say so.
But there was one person missing—the personmost likelyto send Arlo packing without even the pretense of politeness.
I felt it before I turned around—the particular shift in temperature that meant my mother had come out. She stood on the porch with her arms crossed and her face doing nothing at all, which was the most dangerous version of my mother's face. She looked at Arlo the way you look at something you stepped in.
She and his first baby-mama, Marlena Meadows, had been best friends since high school. My mother knew things about what Arlo had done to Marlena that had never been said in front of me and never needed to be. She'd been carrying it for thirty-eight years and she carried it the way she carried everything—quietly, completely, without ever putting it down.
"Arlo," she said.
"Peggy." His smile didn't waver. "You look well."
"I look exactly the same," she said. "Come in or go home. I'm not feedin’ mosquitoes."
We went inside.
The kitchen was warm and full—dinner on the table, everyone already seated. Wyatt at the far end, Haven beside him, Sawyer across. And Millie in the kitchen doorway, dish towel in her hands, having come out when she heard voices the way she'd started doing, easy and unthinking, like she'd been navigating this house her whole life.
She looked at Arlo and then at me and I gave her the smallest shake of my head.
Stay easy. I've got it.
She stayed easy.
Arlo saw her immediately. He always saw the new thing first, always found the variable. He looked at her with that pleasant smile and I watched him file her away.
"Well," he said. "You must be the girl."
"Millie," she said, even. "And you must be Arlo."
"Must be." He looked at me with something that was almost approval, which I liked less than open hostility would have been. "Pretty. Good choice."
