Asher laid down three kings with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had been waiting a long time for this moment. He looked around the table. He said nothing. He simply began collecting the pot with the unhurried precision of someone savoring every second of it.
Jude threw a pretzel at him.
“I told you,” Asher said serenely, not even flinching as the pretzel bounced off his shoulder. “I told all of you. Statistically. The math.”
“Don’t,” Cade said.
“I’m just saying?—”
“We know what you’re saying,” I said. “Deal the next hand.”
Asher dealt, still smiling to himself in a way that was going to take at least another beer to outlast.
From upstairs, faintly but distinctly, came the sound of two eight-year-olds giggling. Nobody bothered to do anything about it.
We played another two hands, which Cade won both of with quiet efficiency, having apparently been biding his time all evening and simply waiting for the right moment to stop being polite about it. Jude accused him of counting cards. Cade denied it in a way that didn’t entirely rule it out. Asher made a second plate of garlic bread on the grounds that the first onehadn’t survived long enough to be properly appreciated. We ate it standing around the kitchen counter while Jude told a story about a call from earlier in the week that had started as a noise complaint and escalated in ways that defied straightforward explanation. It ended with everyone laughing hard enough that Asher had to wave us quiet in case it woke the kids.
It didn’t wake the kids. They were already awake. We could hear them.
By the time we called it, the beer was gone, and the pretzel bag was empty. We filtered out into the cool night air in the loose, unhurried way of people who had nowhere urgent to be but were starting to feel the lateness of the hour. Cade’s truck was parked at the curb, Jude’s just behind it. Asher stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching us go with the expression of a host who considered himself to have performed admirably under difficult conditions, which in fairness he had.
Jude pulled his keys out and spun them once around his finger. “Same time next month?”
“Already looking forward to taking your money again,” Asher said, from the doorway.
“You got lucky,” Jude shot back. “Home field advantage or something.”
“I got skills,” Asher said. “There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t,” Cade said. “Not in poker. It’s just the luck of the draw.”
Jude grinned, clapped me once on the arm, and headed for his truck. “Tell Becca I said hi,” he called back, without turning around, in a tone carefully calibrated to be just innocent enough that I couldn’t object to it.
“Drive safe,” I said.
He waved without looking back and got in.
Asher pushed off the doorframe and looked at me for a moment, the porch light catching the red of his hair.
“You know we’re just?—”
“I know,” I said. “I know you’re worried, and I get it. It’s okay.”
Something in his expression settled. He nodded once—the older brother version of everything he hadn’t said all evening,I mean it, go in carefully, I’m on your side even when I’m annoying about it—and stepped back inside. The door closed behind him. The porch light stayed on.
I turned toward my truck and found Cade leaning against the hood of his, arms folded, watching me. He’d been so smooth about hanging back, I hadn’t even noticed.
“Hey,” he said, quietly enough that it didn’t carry.
I stopped. “Hey.”
He looked at me for a moment, just looked, the way he did when he was deciding how to approach something. Then, carefully: “Have you two talked about it? The proposal. The parking lot.”
I felt my jaw tighten slightly before I could stop it. “No.”
“You going to?”
“That’s the plan.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. Then, quieter, “Thanks for keeping it to yourself. I know Jude would’ve?—”
