We stay on that porch long after we should have gone inside.
Talking about things that matter and things that don't, about Hadley starting school in the fall and Riley's work and the horse that's already here with no name yet. The room that can be something else when the time comes. Hopefully sooner than later.
About the family that has been building itself on this land one house at a time, one life at a time, the legacy their father left in their hands taking shape exactly the way it was always supposed to.
About the Miller land, what it was and what it became and what it's going to be now, where a family got built on top of it.
About what comes next.
All of it.
The swing moves easily in the night air and her hand is warm in mine and the ring sits on her finger catching the low light of the porch. The ranch spreads out around us vast and patient and entirely ours.
Four brothers. Four houses. Four lives built on McCallister ground the right way.
Built to last.
Chapter twenty-six
The Ranchers Way
Riley
The house has a sound in the morning.
I noticed it the first week and I notice it still, the particular way it settles and breathes before the day gets going. The creak of the porch in the early air, the coffee maker running, Jace's boots on the kitchen floor before anyone else is up.
I've started waking up to it.
That surprised me at first. I've always been a light sleeper, always woken to things that felt like disruption. This doesn't feel like disruption. It feels like the day beginning the right way.
I lie there and listen to it for a few minutes before I get up, the way you lie in something good before you have to move. The bedroom is quiet and warm. The ring on my finger catches the early light coming through the curtain.
I'm still getting used to that.
Hadley is already up when I reach the kitchen, which should surprise me and doesn't.
She has Jace's full attention at the island, explaining something with the serious authority of a child who has decided this information is critical, and he's listening the way he always listens to her, like what she's saying is the most important thing happening in the room.
It probably is.
"Morning," he says without looking up.
"Morning," I answer.
I pour my coffee and lean against the counter. I watch them, and I feel it the way I've been feeling it since last night on the porch with the ring and the stars and that one quiet word.
Settled.
Not the temporary kind I kept mistaking for real. The permanent kind. The kind that doesn't shift when things get hard because it's built on something solid enough to hold.
Hadley slides off her stool and wraps around my legs on the way to the back door. "I'm going to see the horse," she announces.
"After breakfast," I say.
She's already gone.
Jace looks at me across the kitchen with that expression, the patient amused one. "She already fed him," he says. "We were out there at six."
