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"That's not…" She stopped. Started again. "People don't usually mean that as a compliment."

"I do." He said it simply, and meant it, and went back to looking at his land like he hadn't just rearranged something in her chest. "You came out here to the end of the world by yourself and built a whole life in two months and you've got the spine to do it in a town that watches you do it. That's not soft. Soft would've gone home in week two." He started walking again. "You're not going anywhere a little gossip can push you. I'd put money on you over Mrs. Sherman any day of the week."

Lara walked beside him in the gold light and didn't trust herself to answer, because the thing he'd just handed her was so much larger than he knew, and so exactly the thing she'd spent a whole life starving for, that she was afraid of what her voice would do if she used it.

And underneath it, quiet, the cold thread she could no longer quite stop pulling: he sees me. He sees me better than anyone ever has. And he's still going to let me go, because he told me he would.

She didn't say that either.

Addi left Sunday afternoon.

They did it at the little airport in Midland, the way they'd always done goodbyes, loud and joking right up to the gate so neither of them had to do the other thing. Addi hugged her too hard and too long. "Come home for Christmas. Mom's already planning to interrogate you about the cowboy, so be ready, she's got a binder." And then, pulling back, holding Lara's face in both hands, suddenly not joking at all: "You look happy, Lar. You look really happy. I haven't seen that in… " She stopped. "Just. Hold onto it. Okay? Whatever it costs. You deserve the happy one."

"Go," Lara said, "before you make me do something undignified in a TSA line."

"Love you. Name a cow after me."

"There are no more cows to name."

"Name a child after me, then. I'm not picky."

And she was gone through the gate, walking backward, blowing kisses, loud to the last, and Lara stood in the little terminal and watched her go and then sat down in a plastic chair and cried.

Not because she'd wanted Addi to stay. Addi had a life, a loud bright life two thousand miles away, and that was right and good. She cried because for three days she'd gotten to be the other version of herself. The one with a sister in the next bed, the one who got dragged out dancing, the one who was loud and silly and young and held somebody's coat and didn't mind, and now that version was getting on a plane, and Lara was driving back to a town that had already formed its opinion of her, to a man who saw her clearer than anyone alive and had drawn a wall down the middle of their future on purpose.

She cried for about four minutes. Then she fixed her face in the visor mirror, the way she'd watched Addi do it the day before, and drove back to the ranch, because there was work in the morning and there were two kids who'd want to hear about the airplane and there was, God help her, nowhere else she wanted to be.

He was waiting up.

She'd thought the kids would be down and they were, the house dark and quiet, and she came in through the kitchen and Dean was there in the low light, leaning on the counter like he'd been listening for her truck. He didn't ask how the goodbye went. He just looked at her face and read all of it, the way he did, and crossed the kitchen and took her hand and pulled her down the hall.

"Dean… the kids?"

"Asleep an hour ago." The door of his room shut behind them. The lock turned. "Levi didn't make it through the first book."

"I'm a mess," she said. "I cried in an airport. I look…"

"You look like you." He backed her against the closed door and got both hands in her hair and kissed her, slow and deep and unhurried, until the airport and the church ladies and the cold thread all went quiet under it, until there was nothing in her head but his mouth and his hands and the warm solid press of him holding her up against the door. "Stop talking," he murmured against her lips. "I've got you."

He didn't take her clothes all the way off. He didn't take his time the way he had after the barbecue. He got her dress up and her back against the door and his hand between her legs, and she gasped, too loud in the quiet house, both of them going still for a second, listening.

"The kids," she whispered.

"I know." His mouth curved against her jaw. "We're going to have to be quiet, you and me."

"That's going to be a problem. You're very…" she lost the word as his hand moved "…distracting."

"Try," he murmured, and there was a smile in it, and she felt him bring his other hand up and rest it light over her mouth, a question more than anything, his eyes on hers in the dark. She kissed his palm to tell him yes, and he laughed, low and soundless, and kept it there. Not holding her down, just there, the two of them in on it together, hiding the noise of her in his own hand.

And something in her came undone at that, at the warmth of it, the conspiracy of it, his hand moving on her exactly the way he'd learned she needed and his palm catching every sound she made. She made them into his hand where they couldn't carry, muffled and helpless, her forehead dropping to his shoulder, her fist in his shirt. He held her up when her knees went, his mouth at her ear, breathing with her, telling her how good she felt and how he had her and how he wasn't going anywhere, and she came apart against his hand with his name lost in his palm and her whole body shaking and his arm a bar across her back keeping her on her feet.

After, he held her there against the door while she got her breath, his mouth in her hair, neither of them in any hurry to move.

"Better?" he said.

"Don't be smug."

"Wasn't smug. Was asking." But he was a little smug, and she could hear it.