The space between those two things, that's where we live for the forty minutes between the rodeo grounds and the house. We were talking so much, we were even talking over each other sometimes, laughing more than I expected to.
Replaying the night in the way you replay something that went right after weeks of waiting for it to go wrong.
"Quinn's face when she told me," I say, shaking my head. "She was so calm about it. Like she detains people behind rodeo back gates every Tuesday."
"She might," Jace says. "Wade's never real specific about her workweek."
I laugh, and it feels good, easy in a way that laughter hasn't felt since before any of this started. "Brooks had that look. You know the one."
"The,’ I already ran sixteen scenarios and this one landed exactly where I projected look’," Jace says.
"That's the one."
He grins, and the sight of it, full and unguarded, does something to me that I have stopped trying to talk myself out of. "Luke found those draw sheets in a paper file nobody had opened in four years. A paper file, Riley. The man is something else."
"Wade called Quinn before any of us knew he was going to," I add.
"That's Wade," Jace says simply. "Doesn't announce. Just moves."
We ride for a moment in the comfortable quiet of people who have been through something together and come out the other side intact. I look out the window at the dark Texas landscapemoving past and feel the enormity of what tonight actually was settling over me properly for the first time.
It's done.
Not completely, not with Colt still out there, but the foundation of it, the thing Dusty spent twenty years building and protecting, the lie that nearly buried Jace under someone else's history.
That's done. Finished. Dismantled piece by careful piece by four brothers and a woman in uniform who doesn't miss.
"You rode that bull on a sabotaged gate," I say, because I need to say it out loud once before the night is over.
Jace glances at me sideways. "I knew it was coming."
"I know you did. I'm saying it anyway." I hold his gaze for a moment. "That took something, Jace. Don't minimize it."
He's quiet for a second. I can see him accepting that, letting the acknowledgement land instead of deflecting it the way he used to deflect anything that required him to take himself seriously.
"We all took something tonight," he says finally.
He reaches across the console and searches for my hand. I turn it over and let him take it, and we drive the rest of the way home hand in hand. Connected, easy, and carrying the specificsatisfaction of people who fought for something worth fighting for and didn't flinch when it got hard.
Tonight was worth every bit of it.
The house is quiet when we get there.
Porch light on, swing moving easily in the night air, the property sitting still and dark around it in a way that feels safe instead of watchful for the first time in longer than I can remember. I notice that. The difference between a darkness that feels threatening and one that just feels like night.
Tonight it just feels like night.
Jace unlocks the door and we go inside. The house wraps around us, warm, familiar, and that new wood smell. I kick my boots off at the entry. He hangs his hat on the hook by the door, the one that has become so much a part of the landscape of this place that I'd notice immediately if it wasn't there.
Small things.
The small things are what got me in the end.
He moves to the kitchen and I follow, not because I want water or food or anything practical, but because that room is where we do our real talking and I'm not ready for the night to stop. Not Yet.
He leans against the counter with sweet tea in his hand. He looks at me across the kitchen, there's something in his expression I haven't seen before. Maybe I have seen it building toward this for weeks and tonight is just the first night it has nothing left to hide behind.
Open. Certain. Entirely without agenda.
