The same way they arrived, gradually and without ceremony. Trucks pulling out one by one until the porch is quiet and the kitchen is mostly clean. The ranch has settled back into the particular stillness of a place that held a lot of people and is now holding just enough.
Hadley went down an hour ago, worn out by the evening and the attention and the extended access to Summer's cooking. The house is quiet in the way it only gets when she's deeply asleep.
Riley is at the kitchen sink finishing the last of the dishes when I come back inside. I lean against the doorframe and watch her for a moment. I watch her with the attention of a man who knows he's looking at something worth paying attention to.
She turns and finds me there. "You're staring."
"I'm allowed," I tell her.
She shakes her head but the smile comes anyway. I feel it the way I always feel it.
I cross the kitchen and take the dish towel from her hands and set it on the counter. I turn her toward me, my hands at herwaist, and she looks up at me. The look that replaced the careful managed version she used to keep in place.
"What?" she says.
"I've been thinking," I tell her.
"About what?"
I look at her for a moment, at the face that has become as familiar to me as this land,
"About what comes next," I say.
She searches my face for answers. "And?"
"Brooks built on the land," I say. "Put down roots and built a life with Summer on McCallister ground." I pause. "Wade fixed up the main house, the one we all grew up in, made it his and Quinn's." Another pause. "Luke and Addie have the Victorian next door and now his own place on the property."
Riley is watching me carefully now, something shifting in her expression, a dawning understanding moving in behind her eyes that she's not quite letting herself land on yet.
"Three brothers," I continue. "Three houses. Three lives built on this land the right way, with the right person, permanent and without apology." I hold her gaze steady. "I built the fourth house. I built it big enough for a family.
"Jace," she says quietly.
"I knew what I was building it for," I tell her. "I knew who I was building it for. I just had to wait for you to get out of your own way long enough to walk into it."
She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. "That's not the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."
"No," I agree. "But it's true."
She looks at me for a long moment, something working behind her eyes, no careful distance, just Riley, all of her, standing in the kitchen of the house I built and finally letting it be what it is.
"What are you saying?" she asks, and her voice is barely above a whisper, not from uncertainty but from the honesty that doesn't need volume behind it.
I reach up and tuck her hair back, my hand settling against her jaw the way it always settles there, like that piece of geography worked out a long time ago that it belongs to me.
"I'm saying this is ours" I tell her. "You, me, and Hadley. This house, this land, this family, all of it." I search her face. "Permanently. The way McCallisters do things."
Her eyes are bright now, steady and certain.
"The cowboy way," she says softly.
"The cowboy way," I confirm.
She puts both hands flat against my chest, feeling the beat of me under her palms the way she does when she needs to know something is real.
"Okay," she says.
Just that.
