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"Sorry, Dad." She wasn't. "Sunny. Did anybody tell you Chase rolled a four-wheeler into that same tank when he was sixteen? “I was under it for ten seconds.”

“You came up crying.”

“There was water in my eyes, Remi, that’s what happens when you go under water.”

“He came up crying,” Remi told Sunny, and Chase threw a roll at her, and she caught it one-handed without looking, and Levi said that was the best thing he’d ever seen, and Giana turned a page under the table.

Sunny ate, and listened, and didn’t say much, and didn’t need to. They were doing it for her. Jett had sat up straighter when she came in and hadn't sat back since. Chase had lost that argument about the barn photo louder than a man loses an argument he's not enjoying. Dean watched his two younger brothers do it with his arm along the back of his wife’s chair and the face of a man who’d seen this before and was enjoying it more than he’d admit. And at the far end Brody had gone quiet, which she’d already figured out he didn’t do, and was eating like the potatoes had done something to him, and every time she laughed at something Jett said, which she did, because Jett was funny, Brody’s jaw did something small. He’d talked at her for the better part of a day and got nothing for it, and here she was handing it to his little brother for free, and he’d noticed. She’d spent six years around men who showed off for a living, and these were amateurs, and she liked them a good deal better for it. She was not going to think about the jaw.

John let it run a while, and then he looked down the length of his table, one at a time, the way he’d gone through the house for her that morning. His eye went over Brody at the far end and did not stop, and went on to Sunny.

“Well, Sunny. That’s all of us. Double it when the cousins come, and they come.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Helen said that.”

“Helen’s coming back,” Sunny said. “I’m just keeping her chair warm and her coffee right.”

He nodded, once, and she’d have sworn he liked that, and Remi laughed, and the far end of the table said nothing, and then Brody said something to Chase about the tractor, and the table went on. Sunny had watched John Royston go around every person at that table but one, in a voice that could have been asking about the weather, and she’d watched the one he’d skipped act like he hadn’t noticed, and act it so carefully she knew he had. She looked at her plate and decided that wasn’t hers. She’d been in the house nine hours. She could give it a week before she started fixing it.

“Brody,” Lara said, across all of it. “Pass the potatoes to Sunny before you eat them all.”

He passed the potatoes. She took them.

“Brody Royston,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

“You let me run you around that yard like hired help.”

“You needed hands. I had two on me.” He said it with the grin on, and she kept her face where it was, and she watched him notice that she’d kept it there, and she watched it interest him, which had not been her plan. “And for the record, I’d have told you anything you asked. You didn’t ask. You told me countertop, not the floor, and I’ve got to be honest with you, it was the best conversation I’ve had all month.”

“Then you’ve had a poor month.”

“I have,” he said, and took a potato, and Remi laughed out loud and got a look from her father for it and didn’t mind, and Sunny ate her supper and did not look down the table again, and knew exactly where he was the whole time anyway.

The guest room was at the top of the stairs, second on the left, and Lara had said the bed’s made and it was, tight and fresh, with a fan in the window and a quilt somebody’s mother had made folded at the foot of it.

She made the bed again anyway, her way, corners squared, the way she’d been taught. She lined her things up by the door. Her clothes stayed in the duffel and the duffel went on the closet floor, unzipped. Some places never got the zipper.

She went down to the car in the dark for the last box, and the dog came with her and waited while she got it, and brought it up, and put it on the shelf in the closet, pushed to the back, tape side out, the way it had gone onto six shelves before this one. She shut the closet door on it. She set two alarms. She lay down in a clean bed in a quiet house in a county where nobody knew her name, and thought about hyenas, and toast, and a girl of nine who’d passed her the butter, and found she was smiling in the dark, and let herself.

On the nightstand her phone lit up, face down, and buzzed once against the wood, and stopped, and lit up again.

She didn’t turn it over.

At ten past midnight she gave up on sleep and went down for water, barefoot, in the T-shirt she slept in and not much else, because the house was dark and the house was asleep and she’d been alone in her own kitchens at midnight for ten years.

The kitchen wasn’t dark. The fridge was open and the light from it was on a man’s bare back, and the man was Brody, in jeans and nothing else, no shoes, drinking milk out of the carton with his head tipped back, and she’d gotten three steps into the room before she saw him and he’d gotten the carton down before he saw her, and then they were two feet apart in the fridge light with nowhere to go.

Neither of them moved.

He was built the way the yard had promised, and the rest of him she hadn’t seen was worse, brown to the waist where the shirt had been and pale under the jeans line where it hadn’t, a trail of dark hair going down from his navel that she looked at and then didn’t look at and then did. She could smell soap on him, and milk. She could feel the cold coming off the open fridge on one side of her and the heat coming off him on the other, and she was in a T-shirt that stopped at the top of her thighs and she’d never in her life been so aware of exactly where a piece of cotton ended.

He looked at that too. He wasn’t quick about it and he didn’t pretend he hadn’t.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, low, because the house was.