1. Hunter
Hunter
The carburetor on the John Deere was finally back together.
I had spent most of the afternoon with it laid out across a shop rag in the barn, and my brother Clay’s stepdaughter, Maisie, had spent most of the afternoon on the floor beside me, handing me sockets she had organized by size on a second shop rag of her own.
She was six years old and practically ran this ranch from the moment she stepped foot on it
She was a talker, and I wasn’t, so naturally she’d scented me out like a bloodhound and decided I would be the person who had to listen to her never-ending train of thought.
Most of it was nonsense, except for the story she’d told me earlier about catching Clay and Callie fooling around and they told her he was teaching Callie bear safety.
I’d laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe for about ten minutes, and Maisie had looked at me like I was having a stroke.
But I fully intended on weaponizing it across the dinner table the moment I got the chance tonight.
Mom appeared in the barn doorway just after five in the blue dress.
It was her favorite dress. Cornflower blue with buttons down the front.
She wore it for birthdays and holidays and, on one memorable afternoon, the day the county commissioner came out to look at the easement.
She’d never worn it for a regular Sunday dinner.
Not in the twenty-seven years I’d been alive.
I thought about asking her why she was wearing it — if something special was happening — but thought better of it.
“You two get cleaned up for dinner,” she said.
Maisie grabbed her horse off the workbench and ran across the yard to the main house.
Mom followed after her, laughing. I cleaned up at the barn sink like always.
Scrubbing grease off my hands and forearms before running my wet fingers through my hair.
I grabbed the clean shirt Mom had left for me on the hook by the barn door earlier.
She'd been leaving one there every Sunday morning for three years. I never asked her to, and she never mentioned it.
I crossed the yard to the main house. The kitchen was loud the way it always was on Sundays because all seven Blackwood kids living on the ranch and most of us working here wasn’t enough — we have to get together every Sunday for dinner, too.
My oldest brother, Wyatt, was at the counter carving the roast, and his wife, Ivy, was beside him, handing him the platter.
Our sister, Maggie, was in the hall arguing with Sophia about something that involved a lot of hand gestures.
Maggie’s fiancé, Jack, was setting the table.
Liam and his fiancée, Stephanie, were uncorking wine together even though it was a one-person job.
Jack’s dog, Sully, had already taken up his station under the table because he’d figured out where the scraps fell and hadn't moved since.
Dad was in his chair at the head of the table with a beer and the settled expression of a man who had long ago accepted that his house would be full and noisy and that this was the price of everything he had built.
I walked past Clay toward the table. I didn’t look at him as I said, ”Heard you've been teaching Callie bear safety.” It was a drive-by tease. An art I’d perfected over the course of my life.
The silence that followed was beautiful.
I glanced back, and Callie’s face had gone beet red.
Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed. She pressed both hands over her eyes and made a sound like she was trying to disappear through the kitchen floor.
Clay, the shameless flirt he was, had the smuggest grin I’d ever seen as he said, "Someone's got to keep the family safe.”
I arched a brow. "From bears."
"From bears."
Callie grabbed a dish towel and threw it at Clay's head without looking.
It hit Maisie instead, which turned into an ordeal that involved her asking about bear safety again.
I could barely hold it together by the time I got to my spot at the end of the table and leaned my hand on the back of the chair while I waited for Mom to come take her seat.
There was an extra place setting.
It was directly across from mine. The napkin was folded with a precision that meant Mom had folded it herself. I looked up. She was at the stove with her back to me, humming. And likely scheming, too, if I knew my mother at all.
And I did. The blue dress. The extra place.
Someone was coming over.
“Mom, whose spot is that?”
"Everyone, sit down," Mom called, ignoring me. "It's ready."
Chairs scraped across the floor, and the table filled. Maisie wedged herself between Clay and Dad, which was her spot nobody else was allowed to sit in. She enforced it with such ferocity that she’d made Liam — my Texas Ranger brother, Liam — relocate. He hadn’t even put up a fight.
I pulled out my chair at the far end and was about to sit down when the front door opened.
I heard her before I saw her.
It came through the hallway — loud, warm, a laugh already woven through it before the first word landed. A voice I hadn’t heard in ten years. A voice my body recognized before my brain caught up. The back of my neck prickled. My hand froze on the back of the chair.
"Louisa Blackwood, this house smells exactly the same. Like heaven decided to open a restaurant."
Mom was out of her seat and across the kitchen so fast her napkin was still settling on her chair. I heard the embrace — the particular sound of joy Mom reserved for people she loved fiercely and hadn't seen in too long.
Then she walked into the kitchen, and the floor dropped out from under me.
Jessica Williams. Here. In the flesh. In my house.
She was smaller than I had been holding her in my head, barely reaching my shoulder, even in the heels. The heels were red and ridiculous. Completely wrong for a ranch house, but so right for a woman who had never once in her life dressed for the room she was in.
She’d kept her hair long and dark. But what really caught my attention was the ruby-red lipstick. It was the kind that was deliberate, that told you she knew exactly what she was doing. A dress that belonged on a Manhattan rooftop clung to curves she didn’t have when I saw her last.
But the part that caught me off guard the most was the smile she wore that belonged everywhere.
Jessica had always been pretty. She wasn't pretty anymore. She was something else. Something that made my brain go blank and my hands forget what they were doing and my jaw lock down on whatever I had been about to say at the exact moment she walked in.
She went around, hugging everyone like it’d only been days, not years since we’d last seen her. The smile she was already wearing was enormous. When her eyes found me it went nuclear.
“Hi, Hunter.” She planted herself in the kitchen doorway with one hip cocked and her arms crossed, and she looked me up and down with the complete absence of subtlety that had been getting her into trouble since the fifth grade.
The table went quiet. Every Blackwood eye in the room moved to me.
"What the fuck?” I said under my breath. She hadn’t even told me she was coming.
"Language, Hunter," Mom scolded. Not under enough apparently.
Jessica was beaming. Actually beaming. I looked at her across the kitchen, and she didn’t look away.
I knew then I’d have to have a conversation with my mother about boundaries, and that she was going to listen to the conversation with great patience, while we both knew that she was going to do exactly as she pleased regardless, because that’s what she’d been doing since before I was born.
Jessica moved further into the room, and it rearranged itself around her the way rooms always had — people shifting, energy lifting, the volume going up just because she was in it.
She moved past me to Dad, and I watched, vaguely horrified as he took her hand in both of his — the two-handed hold, the one he reserved for people he was genuinely glad to see.
His eyes went soft, and his voice dropped low, and he said, "Good to have you home, Jessica," and he meant every syllable.
Then Maisie abandoned her chair and crossed the kitchen at speed to plant herself directly in front of Jessica with her hands on her hips and her chin up and the stance of a person who expected the world to account for itself.
"I'm Maisie Grace Blackwood." She said the whole thing.
Every syllable. The way she said it every time she introduced herself to anyone, because the name was still new enough to matter, and she was going to make sure everybody knew it.
"These are my boots." She pointed at her own feet. "They're pink."
Jessica crouched down to Maisie's height without hesitating, heels and dress and all, and her face broke wide open.
"Well, Maisie Grace Blackwood." She extended her hand the way you extend a hand to the CEO of a company you desperately want to work for. "I'm Jessica Lee Williams. And those are the most spectacular boots I have ever seen in my entire life. And I have seen a lot of boots."
Maisie looked at Jessica’s hand, then her face. She shook her hand once, firm and decisive, the way Dad had taught her to.
"Your shoes are shiny," Maisie said. "Are they hard to run in?"
Jessica laughed, and I felt it right in my sternum. ”No clue. I don't run. I walk fast and look important; it’s a lot more fun than running.”
Maisie seemed to like that answer, given the determined gleam in her eye. ”I can do that."
"I bet you can."
Jessica straightened up. Then she turned to me.
The dining room was still moving around us — I had my hand on the back of the chair, and my mouth wasn’t working because Jessica Williams was walking toward me.
She stopped closer than required. Close enough that her perfume cut through the pot roast and the bread and the gravy and hit me — something expensive, something that had no business smelling that good in my mother's house.