Page 61 of Devoured

And Giana slid down off the arm of the couch and got close, finally close, and Addi showed her the trick of it like she was passing on state secrets, and Dean let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

Helen took longest, and Helen was the one that floored him.

Helen didn’t warm to people. She'd run this house through three decades and two deaths and didn’t hand her good opinion to strangers who blew in off a plane in a dress. But Addi got herself into the kitchen and got her hands into the work without being asked, and Dean, passing the door with a coffee, caught the tail of it.

"— so he says to me, very serious, this is a man I have been on one date with," Addi was saying, peeling potatoes like she'd done it in that kitchen her whole life, "he says, I feel like you're not taking us seriously, and I said, baby, I have known you for ninety minutes, there is no us, there’s a basket of mozzarella sticks —"

And Helen Crane laughed. A real one, head back, wiping her eyes with the back of a floury wrist, a sound Dean had heard maybe four times in his life.

He found Lara in the hall. "What did your sister do to Helen?"

"I have no idea." Lara was watching the kitchen with plain pride on her face, the loud whirlwind of a sister tearing happily through his house. "She does this. Always did. I'd bring her anywhere as a kid and inside an hour she'd own the room and I'd be in the corner holding her coat." A beat. "I never minded. I liked holding the coat."

He thought there was a whole childhood in that sentence, and he didn't reach for it, because she'd hand it over when she wanted to and not before.

Pearl and Marge came by in the late afternoon on a transparent pretext involving a returned pie dish, having clearly heard within hours that Lara's sister was in town and being constitutionally unable to let that stand uninvestigated. Addi took one look at the two of them and was instantly, theatrically smitten.

"You run the diner," she said to Pearl. "Lara told me. You're the one who knows everything."

"I am the one who knows everything," Pearl agreed, pleased past measure.

"Then I have a professional question." Addi pulled a chair around backward and sat in it like she was settling in for a deposition. "I'm here three nights. Hypothetically. If a girl wanted to find the single most makeout-worthy man in this town for the limited duration of a long weekend — no strings, nothing my sister has to clean up after I leave — who am I looking at? And don't tell me there's nobody, Pearl, I drove in past that fire station."

Marge made a sound into her coffee. Pearl looked, for one beautiful second, like a woman who had been waiting her entire life to be asked this exact question.

"Well," Pearl said, and settled in.

Dean took his coffee and left the room, because some things a man should not be present for, and behind him he heard Pearl begin a briefing of real strategic depth, and Addi taking notes that he sincerely hoped were figurative.

Remi turned up around five, unannounced, the way Remi turned up.

She'd heard. Of course she'd heard, the whole county had heard, and she came up the drive in the Tacoma and let herself into the house calling for Lara, and Dean watched the two of them meet, his sister and Lara's, and had the brief clear sense of a man watching weather fronts collide.

It took about twenty minutes.

By the time he'd finished what he was doing and come back through, Remi and Addi were at the kitchen table with their heads together over Addi's phone and two beers nobody had offered them, and they had — he caught only fragments, and the fragments alarmed him — already established that Harvey's had a band on Saturdays, that Elena could be talked into anything with the right framing, that Ainsley would absolutely come if Remi texted her, and that the four or five of them were, and he quotes, "going to burn that bar to the ground, respectfully."

"No," Dean said, on principle, passing through.

"Nobody asked you," said his sister, not looking up.

"He's very pretty but he doesn't get a vote," Addi agreed, also not looking up, and the two of them dissolved into the particular laughter of women who’ve known each other twenty minutes and intend to know each other for life, and Dean gave it up as a thing already out of his hands and went to find Lara.

She was in the doorway watching the pair of them, and the look on her face was the reason he'd come looking. Half delighted, half braced. A woman watching two of her favorite people become a single weather system she would now be responsible for.

"That's going to be a problem," she said.

"A real problem," he agreed, and put a hand at the small of her back, and stood with her a second watching their sisters plot.

Here was the thing Lara hadn't said out loud, the thing Dean only fully worked out later, lying awake.

All afternoon, with Addi tearing gorgeously through his house. Addi, who was beautiful in the loud obvious way that turned a room, the way Lara had decided years ago she wasn't going to bother being, Lara had been watching him. Not obviously. But he'd felt it, the quiet sideways attention, and partway through he understood what she was checking for.

Whether he'd look.

He didn't. Addi was funny and warm and he liked her enormously and he registered that she was a striking woman the way you register that the weather's fine — a fact, nothing in it for him. His eyes went to Lara in a room the way water ran downhill, sister or no sister, and somewhere in the afternoon he watched Lara realize it and go briefly, privately still, like a woman setting down a weight she'd never told anybody she carried.

So he caught her eye across the kitchen while Addi held court, and held it half a second past easy, and watched the color come up in her face. Better than saying it.