“Aunt Maren!”
Maren was out of the car before Colin had the engine fully off. She caught Juni mid-launch and swung her up, tucking her close and breathing her in.There you are.“Hey, Junebug. Did you have fun?”
“Kevin showed me how to make a whistle out of grass!” Juni demonstrated immediately, loud and piercing, directly into Maren’s ear.
“Wow.”It’s okay, I didn’t need two functioning ears anyway. Maren set Juni down.
“It took me twelve tries. Kevin said that was good for the first time.” She craned her neck back toward Shane’s SUV, where Kevin had climbed out, hands in his pockets. Juni waved. Kevin raised a hand back, approximately two degrees above cool, which from a nine-year-old boy toward a five-year-old girl was practically a declaration of love.
Maren glanced at Colin over Juni’s head.
He had his arms folded and a look on his face like he’d noticed the same thing and was filing it away for future reference.
“Hey,” Shane said, coming around the front of his SUV. He looked between Maren and Colin. From the way he smirked, Maren felt like she had a bright-red neon sign on her foreheadreadingI’d rather be scrogging Colin right now. “Juni was great. Kevin taught her three different ways to annoy people with grass.”
“So I heard.” She pretended to clear her ear out. Maren smoothed Juni’s curls back. “What do we say to Shane and Kevin?”
“Thank you for having me.” Juni looked directly at Kevin when she said it.
Kevin’s ears went pink. “Yeah,” he said, his gaze set firmly on his shoes. “Sure.”
Shane cleared his throat. “Good night, all.” He put his hand on Kevin’s shoulder and steered him back toward the SUV with the efficiency of a father who knew when to extract his kid before things got complicated. Kevin went without protest, but he looked back once before climbing in.
Then the front door of the ranch house opened, spilling warm light out into the early evening, and Arden appeared on the porch with a welcoming smile.
“You made it. Come in, come in—I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”
Camo appeared at Arden’s side before Maren had even reached the porch steps, his big head swinging out to survey the arrivals with the calm authority of a dog who considered this his sacred duty. Then he saw Juni.
He went still for just a second, then he was down the porch steps in three unhurried strides, tail moving in long slow sweeps. Juni made a sound that was not quite a word and went to meet him. Camo lowered his head and she pressed her face into it, while his tail kept moving, steady as a metronome, and no one said anything for a moment.
Juni straightened up and took Camo’s face between her small hands and looked him in the eyes the way she did with peopleshe’d decided about. “I missed you, too,” she told him, with great seriousness.
Camo thumped his tail once.Correct.
“Okay,” Arden said, before she did something embarrassing in front of everyone. “Inside, please.”
The front dooropened into a short hall and small parlor to the left, and then opened again into a great room that ran almost the full width of the house, with a kitchen divided from it by a long peninsula. A wall of windows at the back of the room faced west. The late sun had dropped behind the highest peaks and the sky above them looked gorgeous in pinks and burnt orange, the foothills rolling out below in deep purple shadow. Maren stopped walking.
“Oh,” she said.
“I know.” Arden appeared at her shoulder, smiling. “I never get tired of it. Summer evenings especially—the sun holds on for so long up here.”
The great room itself was warm and homey without trying. A leather couch the color of dark honey occupied the center, worn soft and broken in, a throw folded over the back. It faced a stone fireplace taking up most of one wall. Framed photographs lined the mantel. The largest one looked familiar to Maren, not because she’d known the man in it, but because she knew the easy smile and silver-gray eyes as well as she knew her own.
Sean. My God, that’s Juni’s father.
She looked away quickly before she could get choked up.
Camo had followed Juni inside and was now stationed approximately six inches from her left side, moving whenshe moved. Juni accepted this as her due and was already investigating a low bookshelf near the fireplace.
“Make yourselves at home,” Arden said, pointing at a pitcher of lemonade, glasses, and a tray of crackers, cheese, and fruit on the coffee table in front of the couch. “I have burgers in the fridge, and we can grill them as soon as Kyle gets home. He shouldn’t be too long, but have some snacks in the meantime.”
Colin stationed himself at the far end of the peninsula with a water glass. Maren knew he was working, but it still felt so jarring. They’d been dancing no more than twenty minutes ago at most, and now he was keeping a professional distance.
Juni had settled cross-legged in front of the bookshelf with Camo pressed against her side. She’d pulled a book of Colorado photography off the shelf and was showing it to the dog, Mr. Kibble, Snoopy, and the Blue Fairy that she’d pulled out of her backpack. Maren took a seat on the leather couch and let herself actually look at the room—the way the last of the sunset was pouring through the back windows, the warmth of old leather, the photographs on the mantel she was carefully not looking at again.
She realized that in spite of everything she felt…safe.
