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Chase caught him on the porch after, the way Chase did, materializing out of the dark with two beers and no preamble.

"She staying tonight?"

"None of your business."

"That's a yes." Chase handed him one anyway and dropped into the other chair and put his boots on the rail. They sat a minute. Out past the yard the dark went on forever. "It's good, Dean," Chase said finally, quieter than his usual register, the teasing gone out of it. "Seeing you like this. We weren't sure we were going to get you back. After." He turned the bottle in his hands. "You went somewhere for a long time and none of us could reach you, and we figured maybe that was just how it was going to be from here on. It's good to have you back at the table. That's all. I'll quit."

Dean didn't say anything for a second. The thing in his chest was very wide.

"Yeah," he managed. "Well."

"Eloquent."

"Shut up, Chase."

Chase grinned and let him off the hook, and they sat in the dark and drank their beers and didn't talk about it any further, which was its own kind of love and they both knew it.

Lara found Dean still out there a while later, after she'd looked in on the kids one more time, the way she'd started doing without anyone asking her to.

"Chase gone?"

"To bed." He held out his arm and she came and folded into the side of him, and they stood at the rail looking out at the nothing, her head against his chest. He could feel her heart going, slow and easy, a person at rest. "Whole county really will know by morning," he said.

"They knew about the dance by morning." He felt her smile against him. "I'm starting to think being talked about here isn't the same as being talked about somewhere else."

"How's that?"

She was quiet, working it out the way she did. "Back home, when people talked about you, it was to have something on you. Here it's more like they're glad. Like they've been waiting to have something good to say about you and you finally gave it to them." A beat. "Pearl told me she'd book the church."

"Pearl's been trying to marry this town off since before I was born."

"I know. I'm only telling you what she said." She tipped her face up. He couldn't see much of it in the dark, just the shape of it, and the small flash where the dimple would be. "The barbecue's Saturday."

"Whole county. Again."

"Whole county." She settled back against him. "You ready for it?"

And there it was, the small fear that lived under all the good, the one that had nothing to do with barbecue. Come Saturday the whole county would stand on his own front lawn and watch them be a thing, out in the open, in daylight, and the watching would make it real in a way the dark never had, and once a thing was real that way it had that much farther to fall.

He didn't say any of that. He looked out at the dark and felt her warm and easy against his side and the family asleep behind him and the whole impossible good of it sitting in his chest right next to the fear, the two of them taking up the same room.

"...No," he said.

She laughed, low, and didn't tell him he would be. She just turned in under his arm and held on, there on the porch with the dark running out forever in every direction, and after a while they went inside together, and Dean let himself have one more quiet night before the county came to look.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Royston Ranch Fall Barbecue had happened on the third Saturday in October since before Dean was born.

John and Clay's parents had started it back when the brothers were boys, long before land and mining and pride had hollowed something out between them. After the old folks died, John kept it going every year without fail. Droughts. Floods. Funerals. Didn't matter. The barbecue happened because it was his mother and father's day, and John Royston would have sooner missed Christmas than let that tradition die.

This year nearly killed him anyway.

Dean had wanted to cancel it. Lara knew that from Helen, who'd delivered the information while elbow-deep in biscuit dough like she was discussing weather patterns instead of family warfare.

Dean had told his father he had no business hosting a hundred people six weeks out from a stroke, that he ought to be in a recliner, not a porch chair, and that the barbecue could skip a year and the world would keep turning.

And John, according to Helen, had said: "Over my dead body." Which, six weeks out from a stroke, had not exactly comforted anybody.