Me:Yes
One word. He liked me best in one word.
Caleb:Then yes, beautiful.
And I stood in the middle of my own kitchen with a ridiculous moony grin on my face — the kind I’d have mocked without mercy on anyone else.
For once I wasn’t bracing to be looked after or talked down or quietly managed — I was the one doing the asking. He’d folded me into his whole loud world last night without a blink; now I got to hand him mine, my Sunday table and my aunt and my sister and the ranch I was raised on, and watch him stand in the middle of it. I wanted that so much I had to put the toast down.
By early afternoonthe cottage had run out of ways to keep me in it, so I drove out to the ranch, because I hadn’t been in eleven days and Daisy kept a ledger.
Only Stephy’s car sat in the drive when I came up the long gravel — Liam’s truck gone, the main house dozing in the afternoon heat. I found her on the back porch in the shade, feet up on a second chair, a sweating glass balanced on the shelf of the baby, third trimester and well past pretending she could see her own feet.
“Don’t get up,” I said, which earned the look it deserved.
“I couldn’t if the place was on fire.” She knocked her feet off the spare chair in invitation; I sat. “I have watched you neglect that horse for almost two weeks, by the way. She’s been standing at the rail giving your kitchen window dirty looks.”
“I know. I’m here to grovel.” I tipped my head at Poet, grazing pretty and useless in the near paddock. “You could come out with me. Take Poet round the slow way.”
“Sophia.” She laid a hand flat on the bump. “I can barely make it off this chair. I said the word riding to the doctor last week purely to watch her face.” She considered Poet with real grief. “She’s getting fat and lazy and so am I, and only one of us has an excuse.”
I picked at a splinter on the arm of the chair and tried to make it sound like nothing. “So. Caleb’s coming Sunday. To dinner. I asked him this morning, and he said yes.”
It did not come out like nothing. It came out like a sixteen-year-old.
Steph went still. Then her whole face did the thing I’d been half dreading. “He’s coming. To the ranch. Fordinner.” She set the glass down like the news needed both her hands. “With Aunt Lou.”
“Calm down.” I could feel my ears going hot. “I’m nervous enough already. Don’t make it a thing.”
“Oh,pish.” She hauled herself up off the chair-back to say it properly, both hands coming off the bump. “It is absolutely a thing, and I am excited, and you are going to sit there and let me be.” She was already gone, planning it. “There will be a tablecloth. There will be the good napkins that don’t come out for Christmas. Aunt Lou will cook for four days and interrogate that man like a customs officer and decide his whole future over the pie. You’ve doomed him and he doesn’t even know.”
“I walked into forty members of his family last night and came out the other side. He’ll survive one aunt.”
“Nobody lives through Aunt Lou. They just come out the far side married.” She grinned, then went soft. “I’m happy for you. I hope you know that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this.”
I let that one sit, because it was true and there was nothing clever to do with it.
Then, as level as I could make it: “Has Liam said anything? About Caleb. About any of it.”
She looked at me a moment. “No. Not a word.” A small frown, like it surprised her too. “Which, for your brother, is basically a press conference. He hasn’t brought him up once.”
“Huh.” I turned that over and decided it was good news. “Is he away?”
“No, he’s around. Had some business in town today, that’s all — left early, cagey as anything, wouldn’t say what.” She rolled her eyes, long since done chasing the cagey out of him. “Ranger business, probably. He goes quiet when it’s work.”
We talked it out in loops the rest of the visit — Sunday, due dates, whether the nursery yellow had gone too yellow — and when I got up she walked me as far as the barn, one hand under the bump and the other hooked through my arm for the rough ground, and propped herself in the cool of the doorway to give Daisy unsolicited reviews while I tacked up.
“She’s judging you,” Steph noted, as Daisy pointedly declined to lift her head.
“She’s holding a grudge. Eleven days of it.” I swung the saddle up and settled it. “She’ll forgive me about a mile in. She always does.”
“Lucky you. I hold mine for years.” She pushed off the doorframe. “Go on. I’ll be on the porch failing to stand up when you get back.”
I took Daisy out along the east fence, and for forty minutes I thought about nothing but the animal under me and the line of the hills and the particular gold the Texas light took on in September, when the heat had broken its own back but wouldn’t say so. Daisy was opinionated about gates, lazy on her left lead, and the best company I kept that didn’t talk. By the time we came back along the line fence at a walk, my hands had eased on the reins and my shoulders had dropped an inch without asking me first.
It was somewhere in there — at the loose easy part of it, the lavender tie at my wrist catching on the rein every time I shortened it — that I let myself go back to the part of last night I hadn’t told anyone, because there was no one to tell who wouldn’t make it fbigger than I could carry.
It was Caleb’s father. Late on, after I’d already been fed to the legal limit, he’d come down the long table with two beers hooked in one big, scarred hand and set one in front of me before asking if I had eaten enough. He claimed he was checking because his son “doesn’t know how to feed a woman.”
