Page 185 of The Best Shot

“You’re still not getting back on that ladder.”

I sighed. “Did you learn nothing?”

His mouth curved, his eyes closed. “Learned plenty.”

52

“IT’S PERFECT.”

YASMINE

The farmhouse felt finished, and it wasn’t the honey-gold floors that did it. It wasn’t the walls we’d painted soft, warm white after arguing for three days about undertones like two people with actual opinions on eggshell.

Not even the crown molding in the study, which Hale had eventually taken down himself while I lay boneless on the couch, too satisfied to argue or care.

It was the noise.

Ava laughing too loud on the couch, Annie yelling that somebody needed to move their big country ass out of her way, Havoc’s tags jingling down the hall on a mission nobody had assigned him. And Hale in the middle of it all, pencil behind his ear, telling Carter there was absolutely no stud where he kept insisting there was.

We’d invited everybody over to help hang the photographs that had come home from my Austin show. Forty-three had gone up in the gallery. Fifteen were going up here.

The rule was simple—everybody got to choose where theirs went.

This had been a mistake.

Annie wanted hers in the hall where everybody would see it the second they walked in. Ava had rejected three spots based on lighting. Grant claimed he didn’t care and then became deeply invested in whether his was better two inches to the left.

Hale’s people stayed where they had always been. Nothing came down. That had been the rule since spring, and it had been mine. His grandmother on the church steps in Sunday white. Harry and his wife on the hood of the Chevelle they’d passed down to their son. Hale at fifteen in a bad blazer holding a plaque, which had been face down under books until I found it and hung it without permission.

“All right,” Hale said. “Nobody puts a nail in anything without me.”

Annie held up her portrait. “Mine’s going in the hall.”

“Fine, but let me do it.”

“I can do it.”

“That wall’s plaster, not drywall.”

“So?”

“You put a nail in it wrong, you’ll take a dinner plate of it down with you.”

Annie considered this. Then she handed him the frame like she had meant to all along.

Ava stepped back from the front room wall, studying it the way she studied a canvas, and pointed with her wineglass at the middle of it.

“Mine goes there. Dead center.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“That spot’s mine.”

She put a hand to her chest. “Hale Henry, I fixed your life.”

“You set me up on dates that didn’t go anywhere.”