“I’ll be home as fast as I can,” he said.
He said home like it was a fact. Like it was a place he’d been returning to his whole life and had only just figured that out, and the weight of that word—home, in Sterling Callahan’s mouth, directed at the two of us standing in a bunkhouse we didn’t own—did something to my chest that had no operational classification.
He walked out. Boots on gravel, steady, unhurried. The truck door opened and closed. The engine caught. Tires bit gravel, the sound carrying in the thin morning air, and then the headlights swept across the bunkhouse wall—bright, brief, sweeping from left to right—and disappeared.
The sound of the engine faded. The pre-dawn quiet settled back over the ranch, thicker now, weighted with absence.
I stood in the open doorway with my arms crossed and watched the gravel road long after the headlights were gone. I stood in the open doorway until my fingers went numb. The gravel road held the weak pre-dawn light, empty and patient, and the sound of Sterling’s truck had faded so completely it might never have been there at all.
Caleb appeared at my shoulder without a sound. Warm. Quiet. No words, because Caleb Pruitt had never needed words to say the things that mattered. He leaned into my side, his weight familiar and slight, and I pulled him in and held on.
We stood there together in the cold morning air until there was nothing left to listen for. Until the absence had settled intosomething we could carry, the way we’d carried absences before, the way brothers learn to carry things that have no handles.
“I’ve been protecting you for twenty-four years,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “A couple more weeks is nothing.”
Caleb’s breath warmed the front of my shirt. “I know,” he said.
He said it with the complete, unshakeable confidence he’d always had in me. The kind that lived behind his sternum and didn’t need evidence or argument, the kind that was almost too much to carry because carrying someone’s absolute faith was heavier than carrying their body, and I carried it anyway.
I’d been carrying it since we were five years old and a social worker told us we couldn’t share a room anymore and Caleb had looked at me with those wide hazel eyes and said I know you’ll find a way, and I had, because I did not accept verdicts from people in bad shoes.
Caleb shifted against my side. I felt him thinking—the stillness that meant Caleb’s brain had moved on to the next thing while his body was still catching up. He pulled back just enough to look at my face, and his eyes were warm and already somewhere else.
“Maybe it’s time we talked to Rawley about a plot of land,” he said.
The statement landed between us like something with physical weight. Plot of land. Actual words, in the actual air, directed at the actual future.
“Sterling said home like he meant it,” Caleb continued. His voice had that quiet certainty it got when he’d decided something was happening and the universe was welcome to adjust accordingly. “If he meant it, we need an actual home. A real house. Master bedroom big enough for the three of us and our enormous bed. An office with an east-facing window forbrooding over classified documents.” A small smile touched the corner of his mouth. “A kitchen with a proper pantry and all the counter space. All of it. The whole thing.”
I looked at him. Really looked. Caleb Pruitt standing in a bunkhouse doorway at five-thirty in the morning discussing counter space like it was a tactical objective, and the warmth of it—the absolute, bone-deep certainty that we were building something that would stand—did something complicated to my chest.
“What do I get?” I asked.
Caleb’s smile widened. Warm. A little mischievous, the kind he usually reserved for moments when he was about to say something extremely correct and slightly embarrassing. “You get to sit on the porch with your boots up and watch Sterling pretend he isn’t happy.”
I considered this. “That sounds like something I’d do for free.”
“I know.” Caleb’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “That’s why it’s your part.”
I laughed. The sound bounced off the bunkhouse walls and carried into the thin morning air, and for a second the absence felt smaller, like laughter had pressed it back a few inches and made room for something else.
Then I said, carefully, like I was setting something fragile down on a surface that might not hold it: “What about a nursery?”
Caleb went very still. Completely still, the way he did when something landed that was too large to process all at once. The cold air between us felt suddenly thicker.
“Warm yellow,” I said. “Not the sharp kind.”
He turned to look at me. His face did the thing it does when something is too large to hold without leaking at the edges—his eyes going wide and bright, his mouth doing that small tremblehe tries to hide, the whole expression rearranging itself around a feeling that had no adequate container.
“You remembered,” he said.
“I remember everything.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“I know.”
Caleb laughed—short and wet, the kind that lived in the space between joy and whatever came after joy—and wiped his face with the back of his hand. I pulled him back in and held on, my chin resting on the top of his head, and felt him shaking against my chest in small, careful increments.
