Page 44 of Desired

Breakfast was eggs and half a foil package of wedding cake, and the pact got drawn up over it like a contract, which, with these four, it was.

"Terms," Addi said, presiding from the end of the table in Jace's shirt with a fork for a gavel. "This was a one-night thing. It happened once, it's concluded, and there's no need for Lara and Dean or anyone else to ever know. Right?" She looked around the table for ratification and got three nods. "Right. So nobody speaks of this. Not tonight, not at Christmas, not at anybody's funeral. It goes in the ground with all four of us."

"Agreed," Jace said. He'd made it as far as sitting up, the blanket around his shoulders, and was eating eggs with the fragile dignity of a man rebuilding a life. "God, agreed. If Knox ever hears one word of this I'll be dead by Friday. He'd retire on it. He'd never need another joke as long as he lives, it'd be like leaving him oil money."

"If Pearl hears about it," Mason said, "Knox won't matter, because it'll be countywide by the lunch rush and your mother will have it by supper."

The table went quiet one respectful second, all four of them contemplating Stephanie Royston receiving this news, like weather on the horizon.

"Nobody tells Pearl," Addi said. "Nobody tells anybody. And I meant it about Lara, before you say it," she leveled the fork at Lauren, "yes, she's my sister, and no, keeping things from her has never once worked, but she's on her honeymoon being happy and this is mine, not hers. I get one thing this county doesn't pass around with the pie. This is it."

And there was something under that, quick, real, there and gone like everything real Addi ever put on a table, and Lauren caught it and put it away without comment, because she was learning how this family handled the true things, which was carefully and never head-on.

"Sworn," Lauren said.

"Sworn," Mason said.

"Sworn," Jace said, from inside the blanket. "Witnessed by God and this hangover."

They shook on it, all four, actual handshakes around the breakfast table like fools, Addi solemn as a judge with egg on her fork, and it was ridiculous, and Lauren sat in a warm kitchen shaking hands over a secret and realized she was inside one. A family secret. Her whole life she'd stood in other people's kitchens watching them have their private weather, the jokes with no visible setup, the looks that carried whole histories, and now there was a story with four names on it and hers was one of them.

Nobody in the room knew what that was worth. She'd have been embarrassed to say it out loud. She buttered her toast and kept it, the way you keep the good receipt.

"For what it's worth," Jace said, later, at the door, showered and human again, his ruined dress shirt balled in one fist and his hat restored, and he said it to Addi, quieter than the room. "It never happened. But if it had, it'd have been..." He tipped his head, looking for the word, and gave up somewhere short of it. "Yeah."

"Yeah," Addi said, matching him exactly, giving him nothing and everything in one syllable, and the two of them looked at each other one last second, neither one blinking first, and then Jace touched his hat brim to the kitchen in general and was gone, and his truck, which nobody had stolen, rolled off down toward the main road.

Addi watched the window until it was out of sight.

"Not one word," she said, to the room.

"Wasn't going to say one," Lauren said.

"You were composing it."

"I was, yeah."

Addi's flight went out of Midland at four, and Lauren drove her, the two of them in the truck with the heater going and Addi's suitcase in the bed, wedding cake for the plane in her lap.

They talked the whole way in, about the wedding, about Lara's face during the vows, about Marge's cake and Pearl's hat and the little girl who'd fallen asleep mid-dance standing up against Ainsley's legs like a horse. Addi did all the voices. She had the county down cold after three weeks, Pearl's broadcast register and Harvey's flat one and Knox's drawl, and Lauren laughed until the caution signs went by unread, and somewhere in the middle of it she understood that she was going to miss this person, actually miss her, with the ache you only got for people who'd claimed you fast and meant it.

At the drop-off curb Addi hauled her suitcase down, then stood there in the cold with it, not going in yet.

"Okay, listen," she said. "Two things, and then I'm leaving, because I cry at airports and I have a reputation." She held up one finger. "One. You're keeping the ranch. You know it, you've known it longer than you've known it. When it goes official, call me before Lara, she gets everything first her whole life, it's exhausting."

"How did you..."

"Honey. You've spent a month fixing up a place you keep claiming you're selling, and you cried doing Lara's flowers. Nobody's selling anything." The finger became two. "Second thing. My sister landed out here with one suitcase and a broken everything, and this place put her back together, and I watched it happen from two thousand miles away on bad phone calls. So I know what it looks like from the outside when Soluno keeps somebody." She looked at Lauren a second, the brightness banked down to something steadier underneath, her sister's same eyes. "It's keeping you. Let it."

Then she hugged Lauren hard, suitcase and all, and said "never happened" into her ear like a blessing, and walked into the terminal without looking back, loud again by the doors, charming somebody in a Santa hat before she was fully through them.

Lauren drove home with the radio low and the sun going down gold and enormous over the basin, and let herself feel all of it, the whole ridiculous perfect weekend, the flowers and the vows and the porch and the kitchen full of sworn liars, and by the time she turned in at the Wainwright gate to collect the man she'd left there, she'd stopped being able to keep the smile off her face and had quit trying.

Mason was on his porch with two cups of coffee like he'd timed her.

She took hers and sat down next to him on the step, hip to hip, both of them looking out at the dark coming down over the seam, his ranch behind them and her ranch out there ahead somewhere under the first stars, and she thought about telling him Monday. She'd meant to save it, do it properly, papers first, the way you did things that mattered.

She lasted about ninety seconds.