“Yeah.” He says it casually, as if sleeping upright in an armchair beside an unconscious stranger is a regular activity.
But I’m not a stranger. That’s the part my brain struggles to understand. I was driving to find him, and he found me first. The odds of that—the sheer impossible math of crashing within reach of the only person I was running toward—hit me like a wave. I grip the cushion because the room is tilting again, but this time it has nothing to do with my head injury.
Something warm presses against my hip. A small, scruffy gray kitten has curled into my side as if it belongs there. It opens one eye, assesses me, then closes it again.
“Yours?”
“One of several.” Ethan moves through the room like he’s trying not to take up too much space. I recognize that instinct; I’ve been doing it my whole life.
My stomach growls.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.” I have no idea if that’s true.
Ethan guides me down a short hallway, maintaining a careful distance, close enough to catch me if my legs give out, but far enough that I don’t feel herded. His hand briefly touches the small of my back at the kitchen threshold, guiding me through the doorway. His palm rests there for two seconds, maybe less, warm through my shirt before it’s gone.
The kitchen is full of people.
I stop in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame. Four foster placements taught me to count heads before entering a room. Seven taught me to locate the exits.
The woman at the stove has silver hair pulled back and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over something sequined. Her tanned face splits into a smile that says she’s earned every line and is proud of all of them. “I’m Miss Maggie. Coffee’s on the table.”
“I—thank you?—”
The big voice from this morning belongs to a big man. Daniel. I recognize him from Ethan’s descriptions. He’s sitting at the table, his arms crossed over a chest that takes up its own zip code. His eyes are gray instead of Ethan's blue, and his jaw is broader. He has the kind of shoulders that suggest he’s personally carried most of the problems on this ranch and resents the ones he couldn’t.
Beside him is the woman with the careful hands. Dark hair, sharp cheekbones, brown eyes that are already looking toward the hallway when I appear, as if she were listening for me.
And at the head of the table, an older man. His hair is silver at the temples, deep lines bracket his mouth, his blue eyes sharp with intelligence in his weathered face.
The woman stands first. She crosses the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who doesn’t waste movement and touches my elbow. It’s light and brief, exactly enough to steer me toward a chair without making me feel steered. She sets a glass of water in front of me before I’ve finished sitting down.
“I’m Delaney,” she says. “We didn’t get to meet properly this morning.”
“You tucked my blanket,” I say because my brain-to-mouth filter is apparently still in the ditch with my car.
Surprise flickers across her face, followed by a half-smile with a sharp edge. “Old habit. I spent half my life making sure my little sister didn’t freeze, starve, or make catastrophically bad decisions.” The half-smile turns wry. “Two out of three isn’t bad.”
She delivers it the way I deliver facts about foster care: plainly, with the edges filed down, because the unedited version would make people uncomfortable.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Daniel says from the table, gruff but not unkind.
I sit. Miss Maggie sets a plate in front of me. Soup, thick and golden, with bread torn instead of sliced. My hands shake as I pick up the spoon, and I grip it tighter to hide it.
“My dad, Jacob,” Ethan says from behind me.
I didn’t hear him move, but he’s there, leaning against the counter at my back. Close enough to feel. He holds a coffeemug with both hands and watches me with the quiet gravity of someone who keeps his opinions holstered until they’re needed.
Jacob nods once. Doesn’t smile. Doesn’t frown.
I eat because they’re all watching, and not eating would mean explaining why, and I don’t have the energy for that conversation. The soup is good, but my throat fights it.
The room waits. Not impatiently or with the loaded silence of adults deciding what to do about a problem child. They wait the way you wait for weather.
I set down the spoon. “I work for a company called LandCorp.”
I say it to the table because I can’t look at Ethan. Saying it out loud makes me complicit. I worked for them. I cashed their paychecks. I sat in their fluorescent office and analyzed their data, and I didn’t ask what the data was for until it was almost too late.
