I spot Jace first. What I see on his face from twenty feet away is enough to tell me everything before anyone says a word.
It's done.
He crosses the distance between us. I meet him at the porch steps and he pulls me in without preamble, solid and certain, his arms wrapping around me lifting me off the ground. I press my face into his shoulder and feel the reality of him, warm and whole.
Wade comes up the steps behind him. "We got him," he says,
"Quinn called," I tell him over Jace's shoulder. "She told me the good news."
Wade's expression carries the particular satisfaction of a man who has no regrets about that. "Procedurally speaking," he says, "I was simply in the area."
Brooks makes a sound that might be a laugh. Luke catches my eye and nods once, the specific nod that means everything went the way it was supposed to go and the details can wait until everyone has coffee.
I step back from Jace and look at all four of them standing on the porch in the early morning light, worn down and steady and entirely intact. I feel the full weight of what Quinn said on the phone an hour ago, land properly for the first time.
Done.
All of it.
Dusty in custody. Colt in custody. Garret Cole picked up at a bus station in Abilene before he made it out of the state.
The financial records, the draw sheets, the phone records, all of it in the right hands, all of it building toward something that doesn't depend on any one piece to hold.
"Come inside," I say. "I'll make coffee."
Nobody argues with that.
The five of us fill the kitchen the way the McCallisters always fill a space, completely and without apology. I move around them making coffee and pulling mugs down from the cabinet and feeling something I didn't expect to feel at six thirty in the morning after the longest night of my life.
At home.
In the house Jace built. With the family that assembled itself around me. In the life I stopped running from long enough to let it be real.
The coffee maker runs while the morning comes through the window. All four brothers lean against various surfaces in the kitchen looking like exactly what they are.
Men who showed up.
The brothers don't stay long.
That surprises me a little until I realize it shouldn't. They came because they were needed and now they aren't needed in the same way. McCallister's don't linger past the point of usefulness.
Wade heads back to Quinn. Luke has the draw sheets to deliver to the commission office when it opens. Brooks has calls to make and documentation to finalize and the particular satisfaction of a man who built something airtight and wants to watch it hold. Then, of course, they all have chores to do.
They say goodbye the way they do everything. Wade squeezes my shoulder on the way out. Luke nods. Brooks pauses at the door and looks at me with that steady evaluating gaze and says simply, "You did good, Riley," and then he's gone before I can figure out what to do with that.
The door closes behind them.
The kitchen goes quiet.
Just Jace and me and the coffee getting cold on the counter. The morning sitting wide and still outside the window.
I lean back against the island and look at him across the kitchen and feel it hit me properly for the first time. The full accumulated weight of the past six weeks, dropping through me all at once now that there's nothing left to brace against.
My hands aren't quite steady.
I look at them like they’re not mine.
"Hey," Jace says, and he's across the kitchen before I finish the thought, his hands covering mine, warm and certain. "You okay?"
