I laughed. "He's a good boss. Mostly stays out of my way, which is how I like it."
"Smart man." She sat across from me and fixed me with those green eyes—Brody's eyes, but sharper, seasoned by decades. "And you're from Oregon originally?"
"Kinda. Was born on the road, but I grew up there, yeah. Haven't been back in a long time, though."
She nodded, and I waited for the follow-up. Thewhere's your familyor thewhat brought you to Montanaor any of the dozen questions that would require me to either lie or crack myself open at a dinner table.
But Colleen just held my gaze for a beat, smile soft, then said, "Well, you're here now. That's what matters. Brody, pass the potatoes and stop hoggin' the gravy."
She didn't push. Didn't pry. Didn't even glance at me sideways. But the way she'd looked at me, steady and kind and careful, told me she knew more than she was letting on.
I didn't have the emotional capacity to figure out what, so I let it go and ate my roast beef.
And just like that, the interrogation I'd been bracing for turned into somethin' else entirely. She asked about my work—what I liked, what I hated, whether Slim and Tommy were behavin' themselves. She told me about the feed store, about how it had been in the Lancaster family going back to Brody's great-granddad, how the whole town depended on it. She teased Brody about his cooking. "The man can shoe a horse, but Lord help us all if he tries to boil pasta," she said, and Brody took it with the easy grin of someone who'd been loved this way his whole life and knew it. Felt it. Every damn day.
It was warm. And easy. And it hurt me down deep.
Not because anything was wrong. But because everything was right. Because this was what family was supposed to feel like, and I was thirty-four years old and witnessing it for the first time.
At some point, Colleen reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. Didn't say anything. Just squeezed once, brief and firm, and went right back to her roast beef like nothing had happened.
I excused myself to the bathroom before dessert could arrive, because my eyes were doing that thing they did when I couldn't hold it all inside. I stood at the sink, hands braced on the counter, staring at myself in the mirror.
Get it together.
But the woman staring back at me didn't look like someone falling apart. She looked like someone settling in.
When I came back, there was a pie on the table. Apple, from the look of it, with a lattice crust that was golden and perfect and made with the kind of patience I'd never had for anything.
"Brody mentioned you liked apple," Colleen said, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world that her son had passed along my pie preference, and she'd baked one from scratch.
I looked at Brody. He was lookin' at his plate, ears pink.
"Thank you," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "Really."
She cut me a slice so big it was borderline aggressive, and I planned on eating every bite.
We were three forkfuls into the pie when the front door banged open.
"Sorry I'm late!"
Luke came through the kitchen doorway looking like he'd run from wherever he'd been—hair a mess, shirt untucked on one side, slightly out of breath. He stopped when he saw the table, the pie. His eyes bounced between me, Brody, and his mom.
"You made pie?"
"Sit down, Luke." Colleen was already up, pulling his plate from the oven where she'd been keeping it warm. "You look like you've been rollin' around in a ditch."
"I was just— There was—" He scraped a hand through his hair and dropped into the empty chair. "Traffic."
"Traffic," Brody repeated, leaning back and crossing his arms. "Between here and Bozeman? Where you go to... what, exactly?"
Luke's jaw tightened. "I wasn't in Bozeman."
"I literally saw you in Bozeman yesterday."
"That was yesterday," Luke deflected. Colleen set a plate in front of him and he smiled up at her, despite the ongoing inquisition. "Today I was just… around."
"Around where?"
