Page 65 of Devoured

Elena laughed and that was its own small miracle, and Lara kept it with the rest of the night's improbable gifts.

Ainsley turned up around then, having driven in the second Remi texted her, and the night absorbed her without a ripple, Clay's daughter folding into a knot of John's-side women on a dance floor like the feud was somebody else's problem, which, to all of them, it was. Lara had stopped finding it strange. That was the thing she noticed, watching: that a month ago the sight of the two sides tangled up and laughing would have stopped her, and now it was just Saturday.

She didn't underline it to herself. She just had another beer and got pulled back onto the floor.

They stayed until close. Midnight, lights coming up, Harvey calling time with the weary satisfaction of a man whose bar had been full and loud and happy, and the five of them spilled out into the gravel lot holding each other up and singing the last song badly into the dark, and Lara laughed until her ribs hurt, and could not for the life of her remember the last time she'd done that, and understood — standing in a parking lot in a town at the end of the map with four women who two months ago she hadn't known — that somewhere in the noise she'd stopped being a person who'd landed here and become a person who was from here.

Pearl knew by church.

Lara wasn't even at church. She'd stopped into the diner Sunday morning for coffee and the cure for the gentle hangover, and Pearl set the cup down in front of her, and looked at her, and said, before Lara had got the first sip down:

"So. I hear you closed my competition."

"Harvey's isn't your competition."

"Harvey's is absolutely my competition, he just operates at night so I let it slide." Pearl refilled a cup nobody had emptied. "I hear your sister danced with Dale Pruett's father and I hear Elena Santos was up there carrying on like a teenager and I hear Remi Royston sang, which — that I'd have paid to see."

Lara set her coffee down. "How do you possibly already —"

"Honey." Pearl patted her hand, kind and merciless. "It's a small town."

It wasn't all warm. Mrs. Sherman the principal came in after the early service, saw Lara, and gave her a look over the top of her glasses, brief, cool, weighed and put away, that landed exactly nowhere good, and on her way out Lara caught the tail of something low from two women by the register: —carrying on with John Royston's boy in front of the whole barbecue⁠—

She got out to the truck before her face could do anything.

"This town is hilarious," Addi said in the passenger seat, entirely unbothered, redoing her lipstick in the visor mirror. "We gave them the best Saturday they've had in months and they're scandalized. In a city nobody'd blink. Who cares? You'll never see most of them again."

But Lara would. That was the whole point of the place, you saw everyone again, every day, at the diner and the feed store and the school pickup. She'd put two thousand miles between herself and the last town that had opinions about her, and gone and built herself a new one. She didn't say that to Addi, who lived for a scene and would never understand minding one. She just drove.

Dean found her that evening, walking the fence line in the long light, the way he'd taken to finding her when something was sitting wrong.

"Heard you were the last to leave Harvey's," he said, falling in beside her.

"Does everyone in this county have a newsletter?"

"Pearl is the newsletter." He walked a while. "You're quiet."

"I'm fine."

"You're quiet, and you're walking my north fence at dusk instead of being where the people are, which is what you do when you're chewing something." He said it easy, no push in it. "Mrs. Sherman?"

She shot him a look. "How —"

"Because I've lived here thirty-three years, and I know exactly which ones do the looking." He stopped, hands in his pockets, and looked out at the land going gold. "They'll talk for a week. Then somebody'll buy the wrong bull or somebody's daughter'll run off with somebody's ranch hand, and they'll talk about that instead. It moves on. It always moves on."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime you walk through it with your head up, and you let the ones that matter matter and you let the rest of 'em say what they want." He shrugged. "Most of 'em don't matter, Lara. Pearl matters and she's on your side. Mrs. Sherman's been disappointed in this whole town since 1987. You're just this week's."

She almost smiled. Almost. "Helen says it took her three years to stop caring what people thought."

Dean looked at her a moment, something assessing in it.

"Helen's softer than you," he said.

It stopped her where she stood.

Because nobody had ever said that to her. Nobody, in thirty years, in a whole life of being the careful one, the contained one, the one who managed and absorbed and made herself small and pleasant and easy to have around, nobody had ever once looked at her and called her hard. And he'd said it the way you'd say a person had good hands or a true eye. Like it was a thing he admired. Like it was the best of her, not the damage.