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“It was the last brownie. You want a witness, don’t bring one brownie to a creek with me on it.”

“It rang,” Chase said, from the pool table. He said it to the cue ball, and he took his shot, and the shot dropped, and the whole booth turned around to look at him. “Off the hitch. Went about a foot up the bank after.”

Knox put both hands flat on the table. “Thank you.”

“Doesn’t count if it hit the hitch,” Jett said.

“There’s no hitch rule.”

“There’s a hitch rule now.”

“Chase,” Knox said. “Was there a hitch rule?”

Chase chalked his cue and thought about it. “Not till right now,” he said. The booth went up. Knox sat back like a man who’d been robbed in front of a judge, and Owen broke the rack and didn’t have to smile for anybody, because he had the table to look at.

He heard Ainsley’s voice under the noise, the way you hear your own name in a crowd. “He’s not off his feed. He’s sulking. He can see the trailer from the pen and he’s decided what it’s for.”

“He’s not wrong,” Olivia said.

“I’ll bring you a number Tuesday. I’ve got it worked out. I wanted to sit on it a week and see if it still felt right.”

“Does it?”

“It feels like too much. Which is how I’ll know it’s right.”

Owen took his shot from the far end of the table, the end that faced the jukebox, made it, lined up the next from the same end. He'd bought that horse. He'd stood in his own barn three weeks ago and put a check in his baby sister's hand and asked her to buy a fourteen-year-old gelding in her own name, so Liv wouldn't have to sell him to a stranger and wouldn't have to know who she'd sold him to, and now Ainsley sat in a booth telling Liv it felt like too much, and never said whose money it was, because he'd taught her that too. He put the six in the side and didn't turn around.

“How’s the desk?” Jett said, down the table.

“Got a window,” Brody said. “Got a phone. Man came by Monday morning, looked at my window, asked how the flight was. Didn’t say one word about Sunday.”

“He’ll say it.”

“He’ll say it,” Brody agreed, and drank, and moved on. “Knox. You still got that grill in your truck or did Dean make you take it out?”

“Dean can’t make me do anything. Lara made me tarp it.”

“Tell Lauren why it’s bolted.”

“She’s heard it.”

“I’ve heard three of them,” Lauren said. “I’m collecting. I want the one with the fire department.”

“There was no fire department.”

“There was a fire department,” said Mason.

“There was a volunteer, Mason. A single volunteer. Pruitt. He came in his own truck.”

“With a hose,” said Chase.

“Was there a fire?” Lauren said.

“There was a grill,” Knox said, “in the bed of a truck, doing what a grill does.”

“There was a fire,” said Mason.

“Get him going after dark,” Lauren told Olivia, across the table. “You said.”