Page 45 of Branded

Mrs. Sebastian Drake. Aunt Lennox. The woman strong enough to survive this family.

Or just Lennox Briggs, counting down days until she can escape. I don’t know any more. And that terrifies me more than anything else.

15

SEBASTIAN

Lennox has opinions about boots.

This shouldn’t surprise me. Lennox has opinions about everything—the way I take my coffee, the route I drive into town, the fact that I don’t say good morning before I’ve spoken to another human being for at least twenty minutes. She informed me of that last one on day four of the contract like she was filing a formal complaint.

But the boots are something else.

She’s been standing in front of the same wall of them for fifteen minutes, arms crossed, head tilted, like she’s negotiating a land deal. Hector, who has owned this shop for thirty years and has never once looked uncomfortable in his own store, is watching her with an expression I recognize because I’ve worn it myself. Waiting. Not sure if he should speak.

I lean against the counter and say nothing.

She pulls a boot off the display—dark brown, simple, good leather—turns it over, checks the sole, sets it back. Pulls another. This one she holds longer.

“These,” she says.

Hector exhales.

“Good choice,” he says. “Those are⁠—”

“I know what they are.” She hands them over. “Eight and a half, please.”

She says it without looking at me, which I’ve come to understand means she’s aware I’m watching and has decided not to give me the satisfaction of reacting to it.

I pull out my card before Hector can even move toward the register.

“I have money,” she says.

“I know.”

“Sebastian.”

“Lennox.”

She looks at me then. The look she gives me is the same one she’d give a fence post that had been installed wrong—annoyed, resigned, already calculating how much energy it’s worth. Then she turns back to Hector and says, “Thank you,” and lets it go.

Hector boxes up the new ones and we head out of the store. I follow her out onto the main street of Madera in the middle of a Thursday afternoon and think that three weeks ago I did not have a wife and now I have this one, and I am still not entirely sure what to do with that.

The town is quiet, a few trucks at the diner, a couple of old men outside the feed store, the stillness of a place that runs on its own clock and doesn’t much care what the rest of the world is doing. I’ve been coming here my whole life. My grandfather’s photograph is on the wall inside the bank. The Drakes built half of what’s standing on this street and purchased the other half, and there is not a person in Madera who doesn’t know my name.

Lennox stops on the sidewalk and looks up and down the street. “It’s smaller than I expected,” she says.

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Something that matched the ego.”

I look at her. She looks back, perfectly composed. She smirks and I find myself grinning.

“There’s a diner,” I say. “If you’re done insulting me.”

“I could probably eat.”

We’re halfway down the block when I hear it.