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He watched Remi take in the stranger at the counter, the dish towel, the ringless hands, the way Lara had clearly been running this kitchen for weeks and was now standing in it like a guest, and decide she approved before Lara had got a word out.

"You're Lara," Remi said.

"I am." Careful. Pleasant. The office smile, the level one, the one Dean knew now gave away exactly nothing. "And you're Remi. Helen's talked about you. The kids haven't stopped."

"Oh, I bet they haven't." Remi put Levi down. She crossed the kitchen. And before Lara had worked out what was coming — Dean could see her not work it out, could see the half-second where the city in her braced for a handshake — Remi had her arms all the way around her, the kind of hug their family threw at people the way it threw everything, with its whole body and no warning.

"So you're the one who's making my brother's life difficult," Remi said into her shoulder, delighted. "Good. He needs it. Somebody's had to for years and none of us could be bothered."

And Lara laughed.

A real laugh, caught off guard, and he watched her try to rein it in and fail. Dean had no business looking from across the kitchen, and he looked anyway, and there it was. The dimple. Out for his sister inside of two minutes. He'd seen it for Levi, and once for Giana, but never for him — not in all the weeks she'd been good to his kids, good at his work, easy in his kitchen.

For Remi, the ledger noted, in the dry private place it kept its accounts. Two minutes. Not for you. Never for you.

He turned around and got himself a glass of water he didn’t want.

Behind him the two of them were already going. He couldn't have said how it happened so fast — it was a thing women did that he'd never had the knack for, the way they could go from strangers to co-conspirators in the length of one conversation. By the time he turned back around, Remi was up on the counter where she'd been told nine hundred times not to sit, swinging her boots, Lara had given up on the lunch things entirely, and Giana was wedged in between them telling some story that had both women's full attention. The three of them laughed at the end of it, at something Dean hadn't been in the room for the start of and would never now know.

Somewhere in it Remi took Lara's phone right out of her hand, thumbed her own number in, and handed it back. "There. Now you've got me. Call me anytime my brother's being a pain in the ass, which is always, and I'll come sort him out." Lara was still laughing.

His sister. The woman who worked in his office. His daughter. All three at his mother's old counter, laughing at a thing he didn't catch.

He stood in his own kitchen and didn’t know where to put himself. It was the strangest feeling. He'd stood in this kitchen ten thousand times. He'd carried both his children sleeping through it. He'd stood in it the worst night of his life with the whole world ended around him. And he stood in it now with everyone he, with his family in it, warm and loud and exactly as it was supposed to be, and felt, absurdly, like the one person present who hadn't been told where he was allowed to sit.

"Dean." Helen, low, at his elbow, handing him a mug he hadn't asked for. She had a look on her face. The whole county had the same look on its face lately. "Sit down before you fall down. You've been up since four."

He sat down.

Later, after supper, with the kids upstairs fighting sleep and Lara still closing things down inside, Remi found him on the porch.

He'd known she would. There was an order to a Remi homecoming and the porch came near the end of it, after she'd seen the horses and raided the pantry and called the hospital and let Helen feed her twice. She came out with two beers, handed him one he hadn't asked for, and dropped into the rocker beside his with her boots up on the rail and her head tipped back to find the first stars coming out over the basin.

For a while she didn't say anything. That was the other thing about Remi. She knew the value of letting a quiet run.

"She's good," Remi said finally. To the dark. Not to him. "Lara. She's the real thing. You can tell inside of five minutes — there's no performance to her. Helen loves her, which Helen doesn't do. The kids are stupid about her." She took a pull off her beer. "And when you're not looking, she watches you like she's trying to talk herself out of something."

Dean drank his beer and watched the dark come down over land he could have walked blind.

"Don't fuck it up, Dean."

"Don't know what you're talking about." He said it easy. He said it the way he'd been saying it to himself, to Chase, to Jett, to Mack, to the kettle. "She works in my office."

Remi turned her head and looked at him. Just looked. The youngest of them, the only girl, the one who'd been reading this family off its faces since she was old enough to climb in laps, and she let the look sit on him until it had said everything she wasn't going to bother putting into words.

"Mm-hmm," she said. "Right."

"Remi."

"I didn't say anything." She put her boots back up on the rail. "She works in your office. Sure. Won't bring it up again." A beat. "Lord, you're worse than our brothers ever were. At least Jett knows he's a disaster. You walk around with your big tough man-in-charge, nothing-touches-me act thinking nobody can see straight through it."

And that did it, surprised a short rough sound out of him that was nearly a laugh, the first one in days, and Remi grinned at the dark, pleased with herself, and let it go, because she was the only one of them who'd ever understood that you got a thing out of Dean Royston by not reaching for it.

"How long are you home," he said, when the quiet had run again.

"As long as you need me. I quit the thing in Lubbock anyway. It was going nowhere and so was the…" she stopped, and Dean felt his shoulders set before his brain had even caught the word coming, felt the old reflexive thing, the four-brothers-on-the-porch thing, the which one and where does he live thing.

"— and so was the guy," Remi finished, watching him do it, "who you're not going to ask about, because you're going to remember that I'm twenty-three years old and the last time one of you got involved it took the poor man four years to work up the nerve to talk to me at the feed store and then Chase stood behind him the whole time cleaning his nails with a knife."