The yard is very quiet.
June makes a sound.
Pearl takes a long drink of sweet tea.
Remy is looking at the sky with his jaw set in the way of someone trying very hard to hold himself together after something hit him unexpectedly. Silas is looking at the ground.
Maisie raises the lemonade cup she's been carrying all evening.
"To Dad and Laney," she says. "For figuring it out." She looks between us with those serious eyes. "And to Silver Mesa. For being the kind of place where people do figure it out."
The yard raises everything it's holding.
I find Laney's hand in the dark.
Maisie climbs down from the crate, walks directly to Laney, hugs her once around the middle, says something into her shirt that I don't catch, and goes back to Remy's jacket on the ground and closes her eyes.
Laney looks at me.
Her left hand is in her jacket pocket.
Closing around something.
I saw June slip it to her when she came back from the ranch house.
Small. Rectangular.
I don't know what it is yet.
But Laney's expression in the string light glow is the layered, complicated beautiful one and her hand is closed around whatever June gave her and her eyes are bright in a way that has nothing to do with the toast.
"You okay?" I say quietly.
She looks at me and smiles.
"Ask me tomorrow morning," she says softly.
I look at her.
The creek bend lights glow in the oak tree behind us.
Silver Mesa breathes around us in the dark.
Tomorrow morning.
For her, I can wait one more night.
Chapter twenty-six
Happily Ever After
Laney
Iwake up at four in the morning.
Not the alarm. Not the ranch. Just awake, completely, the way you wake up when something is happening that your body understood before your brain caught up to it.
I lie in the dark for a moment.
