It was a deep, dark, mahogany, the way it came out when somebody knew to pull it the exact minute the center stopped trembling. The pecans were arranged in the tight spiral his grandmother had arranged them in because she said a pie was an excuse to make something beautiful with your hands, and the crust had the crimped edge she’d taught all of her daughters and daughters-in-law, and that none of them had ever managed to make look like hers.
The whole table went quiet. Even Lily.
“Where,” Reno said, and had to stop as his voice broke, and start over. “Where did you get that recipe?”
“I asked Tessa,” Grace said simply. “Tessa asked Dillon. Dillon asked your mother. And your mother emailed it to me. Then she called me and talked me through the secret part your grandmother never wrote down.”
Across the table, Dillon was looking at his plate, and his ears had gone red, and Tessa had her hand pressed flat over her mouth.
“Mom scanned the recipe written in Gram’s hand and sent it last night.” He cleared his throat. “She, ah, wanted me to tell Grace something.”
“Don’t,” Reno said, because he could feel exactly where this was headed and he wasn’t sure he could take it in front of a table full of people.
“She said,” Dillon went on, mercilessly, the way only a brother can be, “that any woman willing to bake that pie for Reno is already family, and she’ll fight anybody who says different.”
Reno looked at the pie. Then he looked at Grace.
She was watching him with the same calm directness she’d had in the bakery the day she kissed him and told him the next move was his. She wasn’t blushing. She’d gone past blushing into something deeper. She’d reached all the way into his family, past him, around him, to a recipe in a dead woman’s handwriting, and she’d baked the one thing on earth that could tell him, in front of his brothers and his niece and her daughter, exactly what she’d decided about him.
He understood her loud and clear. He’d been waiting for weeks for her to decide. And she had.
“Aren’t you going to try it?” Lily demanded, into the silence, outraged on behalf of dessert.
Grace cut the pie into eight pieces so everyone could have a slice. Reno put a bit in his mouth, and closed his eyes as a wash of memories flooded over him, some of the best of his entire childhood. Holiday meals with the whole Steele clan. Birthday dinners. The day he got into law school, and the day he passed his bar exam. Sitting in Gran’s kitchen talking with her while she cooked.
It was his grandmother’s pie. Not close. Not a good imitation. It was the thing itself, the brown sugar and the bite of bourbon she swore cooked all the way out, the salt she added because she said sweet without salt was just loud.
It was exact taste of being eight years old in a kitchen in Texas with a woman who’d told him he had good hands and a good heart and that the two together would take him anywhere he wanted to go.
“It’s perfect,” he said to Grace.
“It’s your grandmother’s,” she replied. “I just followed her directions.”
“No,” Reno said. “You put the love in it that makes it taste like hers.”
Everyone at the table, very kindly, found other things to look at. Hank asked Makayla about the Founder’s Day concert. Tessa started slicing the cherry pie and Dillon helped her plate slices.
Madison looked from her uncle to Grace and back, then leaned over to Lily and said, conversationally, “I think your mom likes my uncle.”
Lily replied, “Obviously,” with such withering four-year-old contempt that everyone started laughing again and gave Reno the cover he needed to get his composure back.
Under the table, where no one could see it, Grace’s foot came to rest lightly against his. She didn’t look at him when she did it.
He didn’t move his foot. Neither did she.
He drove them home under a sky thick with stars, Lily asleep in her car seat before they cleared Hank’s driveway with the worn-out copy of Ferdinand Madison had given her—you keep it, I read it a million times—clutched against her chest.
Grace was quiet in the passenger seat, the comfortable kind of quiet, her head tipped against the window and her eyes on the sky.
“Madison liked you,” he said, because it needed saying out loud.
“I liked her, too.” A pause. “She’s carrying a lot for fourteen.”
“She is.”
“She’ll be all right.” Grace said it like a person who knew something about carrying a lot and coming out the other side. “She’s got people now. Not just Hank but uncles and cousins and aunt Tessa.”
He carried Lily in and laid her down. Grace did the quiet work of getting a sleeping four-year-old into pajamas without fully waking her, which Reno had decided over the past two weeks was a kind of magic nobody gave mothers enough credit for.
