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"Say it again," she said.

"I love you." He moved, slow and deep, drawing almost all the way out and coming home again, and her hips rose to meet him and found the rhythm like the two-step, like walking, if walking had any ambition. "I love you. I'll be saying it at ninety. I'm making up a deficit."

"You're ahead," she managed. "You've been saying it for weeks. Gates. Pumps. A porch step at five in the morning."

His rhythm stuttered. He lifted his head and looked down at her, and she looked back up at him, done hiding anything, and put her hand flat over his heart, where it was pounding.

"I heard every one," she said. "I just didn't know the language yet."

He made a sound like a man taking a blow and kissed her, deep and desperate and tender all at once, and after that there were no more sentences. There was his body moving in hers, slow and deep and sure, the old house ticking around them and the headboard finding the wall and neither of them caring. There was her name, and love, and home, fragments with no ends on them, said into her hair, her mouth, the damp curve of her neck. There was the long climb, her legs wrapping higher around him and her nails finding his back, both of them past pacing themselves now, the deep sure rhythm going urgent, and his hand slid beneath her hips and lifted her into him and the angle changed and she gasped his name and he did it again, and again, watching her face, working her toward it with everything he knew.

"Come with me," she said, against his mouth, and he groaned like she'd cut a rope holding him.

She went over first, barely, her whole body drawing tight and then letting go all at once, clenching hard around him, and the feel of her pulled him after her inside three strokes, and Mason came apart deep inside her with her name breaking in half in his mouth and his arms locked around her like a man who'd finally, finally quit bracing for the leaving.

For a long time neither of them moved. He was heavy on her and she held him there, both hands spread on his back, feeling his heart slam and slow against her own, his breath rough in her hair, and when he finally gathered himself to roll his weight off her she tightened her arms and said, "Not yet," and he stayed, and kissed her temple, and stayed.

After, they lay tangled in the quilt, her head on his chest, his hand tracing her spine, the lamp low and the house ticking and the tree burning gold down the hall for nobody, and Lauren lay in the warm dark and took the inventory, out of old habit, a shopkeeper counting the drawer one last time.

A man asleep-adjacent under her ear, heart going slow and steady, hers. A crooked tree, lit. A cedar sign on the porch with her grandmother's year on it. A chair at a long table with her name in a child's cursive, and a county full of people who'd counted her before she ever crossed the cattle guard, and three beds of river rock out there in the dark, waiting on spring, and spring on its way, as it always came, whether you believed in it or not.

Her whole life she'd been good at somewhere else. It was the one thing her whole life had trained her for, and she lay in her grandmother's bedroom in her grandfather's house with the whole weight of a sleeping man's arm across her, and let the skill go at last, the way you'd let a held breath go, because there was no somewhere else anymore.

There was only here. There was only, finally, entirely, and on purpose, home.

She fell asleep before the tree lights, and left them burning.

EPILOGUE

New Year's Eve, Harvey's

Harvey's on New Year's Eve was full to the walls, the band crammed onto the low stage, the pool table retired under a sheet of plywood and pressed into service as a buffet, and Harvey himself behind the taps in a string of silver tinsel that Addi had draped over his shoulders at nine o'clock and that he had, to the astonishment of the county, left on.

The back corner was theirs, as always, except tonight it had annexed two more tables and kept growing. Dean and Lara wedged in on one side, three weeks married and glued at the hip. Elena, off call for one sacred night, on her second actual beer. Remi, already hoarse from the dance floor. Addi, who'd looked into flights home on the twenty-sixth, declared the prices a crime against Boston, and stayed. Ainsley presiding with a pitcher. Knox and Chase and Jett holding down the far end, and Olivia Bateman folded in at the corner, invited by a conspiracy of women so smooth she'd never had a chance to decline, one seat down from Owen, the two of them being carefully ordinary at each other all night while the whole booth carefully didn't watch.

And Mason, in the middle of all of it, with his arm along the seat back behind Lauren and a story he'd been begged for twice already.

"Tell it again," Remi said, dropping back into the booth with a fresh beer. "Olivia hasn't heard it."

"I've heard parts," Olivia said. "Pearl's version."

"Pearl's version has him crying," Lauren said. "I want it on the record that nobody cried."

"Somebody nearly cried," Mason said. "All right. So. Fort Worth, Monday. A dispersal sale, good one, whole program selling off, and we're there for one animal. One. Lot forty-one, a two-year-old Wagyu herd sire prospect with an EPD sheet you could frame, the exact foundation bull we've been circling on paper for two weeks. That's the entire mission. Get lot forty-one, get home before the roads freeze."

"Tell them what you told me in the truck," Lauren said. "About auction discipline."

"I gave her the talk." Mason laid it out with his hands on the table, a man presenting evidence in his own defense. "You sit still at a cattle sale. It's not the church picnic, there's no Pearl, nobody's bidding on you for the fire department. Card stays in your lap till our lot comes up, and if you have to wave at somebody, don't."

"He said it exactly that condescendingly, too."

"And what happened?"

"Lot twelve happened," Lauren said, with dignity, and the end of the table that already knew the story started in early.

"Lot twelve," Mason said, "was an eleven-year-old Hereford bull the size of the truck we came in. Old ranch bull, done working, going through on his way to becoming, and I'm sorry to say it plain, hamburger. Sweet-natured old wreck. Walks into the ring like he's been asked to say a few words at a retirement dinner. And the woman beside me, who has been given the talk, looks at him, and says, 'Oh no, look at his face,' and I said, and this is where I made my mistake, I said, 'Don't look at his face.'"

"His ears," Lauren said, to the table, "were pointing two different directions."