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I let that land. I don't rush to fill it.

"If it makes you feel any better," I say, after a moment, "my only role model for motherhood used me as content for her career. Every bath. Every birthday. Every time I cried in the wrong light, she'd wait for better light and try again."

"Isn't that funny?" Destiny laughs, and it's a real laugh—a little raw, a little helpless. "On one side of the spectrum you have Lynn Kane, and on the other you have Eleanor Ashby, and somehow the two of us ended up in the same room with the same baby."

"Would you have rather been me?" I ask, and the question comes out genuine, not rhetorical—because I actually want to know what she sees when she looks at my side of this particular disaster.

Destiny shakes her head slowly, the way someone does when the answer is simple but the math behind it is not. "No," she says. "Because then I'd be in love with my brother."

It takes me a moment—longer than I'd like to admit, honestly—to turn that around and hold it up to the light and see what it means from her vantage point. The arithmetic of it. She's starin' at me, waitin', and I can feel the exact second it lands on my face, the way understanding must reorder my expression from polite to stricken, because Destiny absolutely loses it.

She bursts out laughing like it's the best thing that's happened to her in weeks, and maybe it is, and I can't even be offended because the geometry of this mess is genuinely absurd.

"Yeah," she manages, pressin' her lips together to get ahold of herself. "Think about it. If I was you, I'd be in love with both Colt and Legion."

I let that sit there for a second between us, because it deserves a second.

"Wow," I say. "That's really, genuinely, spectacularly weird."

She almost snorts, the chuckle is that immediate—like my observation didn't even need a full second to land before she was already past it. "Tell me about it," she says. "I know you haven't thought much about me over the years, but I've thought a lot about you."

"Really?"

Destiny nods. "Yeah. I was pregnant when you were comin' by to drop off groceries those last years of Legion's prison time. And I know the only reason social services didn't come haul us away was because your family was right next door."

Right next door is a generous interpretation of the geography. There are about seventy acres between our houses—seventy acres of dry gulch and scrub grass and a whole social order that doesn't bend, not even for kindness—but I understand what she means, and I don't correct her, because the correction would just be pride talkin' and this isn't that kind of conversation.

"I knew that as long as I made Mercy go to school, they wouldn't bother with us. And then, of course, Colt was there the last year and a half as well."

She pauses just long enough to let that land, and I can see her arrangin' her next words with the kind of care that tells me she's said them in her head a hundred times before she ever said them out loud.

"I know what you think about that. I know what Legion thinks about it too. And I don't care. I love Colt, and as far as I'm concerned, he's my prince. He stepped in and made sure the bills were paid, and once I got pregnant he tried to give me one of your cabins—said we could just live out there, quiet, nobody botherin' us. Hell, he offered us the main house at one point. Said he'd tell Cash himself, handle it like it was a reasonable thing, said it would all be okay."

"But you didn't want that?" I ask. My voice comes out softer than I mean it to, softer than the question deserves, like I'm handlin' something already cracked at the seam.

"No." And she doesn't hesitate, not even a breath. Not a flicker. "Because it shouldn't be okay."

She says it like she's reciting something she had to learn the hard way.

"You know what I mean? Legion's reaction is the right one. Colt knows it. I know it." She looks at me steady, and there is nothing wavering in her face, nothin' performative or seeking permission. "You know it too."

I sit with that for a moment. I do know it. But I'm also confused. "What are you sayin' right now, Destiny? Are you sorry you're with Colt?"

"Absolutely not," she huffs, and there's heat in it, genuine and quick, the kind of heat that comes from love, not defense. "I love Colt. I'm not sayin' it's wrong because I'm in the middle of it and it all feels right." She tilts her head, and I can see her working to find the exact right shape for what she means, the way you adjust a frame before you hang it level. "What I'm sayin' is… there's somethin' wrong with people who don't feel the wrongness, even if it's misplaced."

"Oh."

Just that. Just the one syllable, because sometimes the truest response to being understood perfectly is to go quiet.

"Yeah," Destiny says, and she exhales like the word costs her something. "Colt won't admit it out loud, but there's something wrong about Drybone. About that whole area. The whole atmosphere of it, ya know? Like the wrongness is just baked into the ground out there."

"You're talkin' about Marcus, aren't you?"

"Not specifically, no." She shakes her head slow. "I don't know him. Not really. I only know what Colt has told me, and Colt doesn't exactly hand out full portraits of people he finds inconvenient."

That lands.

Destiny reads it on my face without me sayin' a word.