Maisie is asleep on Remy's jacket on the ground near Dale's chair.
Nobody is surprised.
Remy has been sitting beside her for twenty minutes making sure nobody steps on her, which he is doing with the protective energy of a man who would absolutely fight someone over this child's right to sleep through the end of a party she helped plan.
Silas puts a second jacket over her without being asked.
I catch Laney watching this from the chair beside me and her expression does the thing it does when something has hit her somewhere real and she's deciding whether to let it show.
She lets it show.
"Hey," I say quietly.
"Come walk with me," I say.
We slip away from the party without announcement, which is easy because Remy is focused on Maisie surveillance and Pearl is telling Wyatt something that has his full attention and Earl is on what I believe is his fourth bread roll and showing no signs of stopping.
We walk to the nearest pasture fence.
The creek bend is visible from here, the string lights still glowing in the oak tree, the warm gold of them catching the water below. The party noise is soft from this distance. Dale's guitar carrying just far enough to be present without being loud.
The ranch is extraordinary in the dark, as it always is.
Laney leans on the fence rail beside me and looks at the creek bend and the lights and the ranch beyond it with that layered expression I've been carrying questions about for the last hour.
I wait. She'll get there. She always finds her way there eventually.
"Beckett?" she says.
"Yeah."
She looks at the ring on her finger in the low light. Turns it slightly. Looks at the oak tree. Looks at me.
"Today was perfect," she says.
"Yeah," I say. "It was."
"The creek bend. The lights." She pauses. "The speech you forgot."
"The speech I remembered later," I say.
She smiles. Looks at the fence rail. "I want you to know something."
"Okay."
She turns to face me fully, her back to the fence, looking at me in the dark with the particular open expression she only wears when she's about to say something completely true with no management around it.
"Whatever comes next for us," she says carefully. "Whatever the next chapter looks like." She holds my gaze. "I'm not afraid of any of it."
I look at her. Something in that phrasing sits slightly differently than a general statement about the future. Whatever comes next. Whatever the next chapter looks like.
I file it quietly.
"Neither am I," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment.
Then she reaches up and puts both hands on my face the way she does when she means something with her whole self and kisses me in the south pasture in the dark with the creek bend lights behind her and the ranch quiet around us.
