25. After Forever #2
Something moves across June's face. "She just needed a minute. She's fine."
"Fine like actually fine or fine like Laney fine." June looks at me. I look at her.
"June," I say carefully. "What's happening."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at her phone. Looks at me with the expression of someone holding information that isn't hers to give and feeling the weight of that considerably.
"She's fine," June says again. Quieter. "I promise you she is fine. Give her a little time."
I look at the ranch house. The cabin. The barn.
"Is she—"
"Beckett." June puts her hand on my arm. Firm, certain, the June version of stand down. "Trust me. Fifteen minutes. She'll come back and she'll tell you when she's ready."
She squeezes my arm. "Go talk to Earl. He's been standing by the food table for forty five minutes trying to figure out how to tell you he's happy for you without saying he's happy for you."
I look at the food table.
Earl is standing at the food table studying a bread roll with the focused attention of a man who is absolutely not thinking about bread rolls.
I go talk to Earl.
"Good party," I say.
"Food's good," he says.
"Jolene brought it."
"Mm." He picks up the bread roll. Sets it down. "You're going to do right by her," he says. Not a question. Not even really directed at me. Just a thing he's saying to the food table.
"Every day," I say.
He nods.
Picks up the bread roll again.
We stand at the food table together in the string light glow and Earl eats his bread roll and I watch the party and think about June's face and Laney's absence and fifteen minutes that feels considerably longer than fifteen minutes.
The ranch yard is warm and loud and full of Silver Ridge being exactly itself. Dale is playing something that has Maisie attempting to line dance with Remy, which Remy is facilitating with great enthusiasm and limited accuracy.
Pearl is sitting in a chair that appeared from somewhere with her sweet tea and her good hat watching everything with the satisfied expression of someone whose town is behaving correctly.
Silas materializes beside me. Looks at the party. Looks at the ranch house. Looks at me.
"She okay?" he says. Quiet. Just for me.
"June says so."
He nods. Accepts this. "June knows things," he says.
"Yeah," I say. "She does."
We stand together at the food table next to Earl who is on his second bread roll and the party moves around us as I watch the ranch house door and think about June's expression and the few minutes that is now closer to twenty.
Then the ranch house door opens.
Laney comes through it.
She crosses the yard toward the party in the string light glow with her boots on and her hair catching the warm light and the ring on her finger and an expression that I have never seen on her face before. Even after I had thought I was learning every expression she has.
She looks at me across the yard.
I look at her.
The expression is complicated, layered in a way I can't fully read yet. There's something underneath the celebration surface that is either very large or very small and I cannot tell which yet and she is not ready to tell me and I know that because I know her.
She reaches me and takes my hand, squeezes it once.
"You okay?" I say quietly.
"More than okay," she says.
She looks at the party around us. At Maisie failing enthusiastically at line dancing. At Remy making it worse. At Pearl tapping her foot. At Earl and his bread roll. At Silas with his thermos and his quiet steady presence.
At Silver Mesa in the glow of the string lights.
She looks at all of it with that layered expression I don't have a name for yet.
Then she looks at me and smiles, the real one
"Dance with me," she says.
I take her hand.
We dance for three songs.
Dale turns out to be an excellent guitarist in the way quiet people sometimes turn out to be excellent at things, completely and without warning.
He moves through something slow, then something with more edge to it, then something that has Pearl out of her chair which nobody expected and everybody pretends is completely normal because Pearl deserves that dignity.
Laney dances with her hand in mine and her head against my shoulder and the expression she came back from the ranch house wearing still sitting underneath everything. Present but layered. Like someone carrying something carefully.
I don't push. I've learned when to wait.
Around nine-thirty the party finds its natural quieter gear. The food is mostly gone, which Jolene takes as a professional compliment. Dale is playing something gentle that fills the yard without demanding anything from it.
People have settled into chairs and tailgates and the comfortable arrangements of a party that has moved past its peak energy into something warmer and more lasting.
Maisie is asleep on Remy's jacket on the ground near Dale's chair.
Nobody is surprised.
Remy has been sitting beside her for twenty minutes making sure nobody steps on her, which he is doing with the protective energy of a man who would absolutely fight someone over this child's right to sleep through the end of a party she helped plan.
Silas puts a second jacket over her without being asked.
I catch Laney watching this from the chair beside me and her expression does the thing it does when something has hit her somewhere real and she's deciding whether to let it show.
She lets it show.
"Hey," I say quietly.
"Come walk with me," I say.
We slip away from the party without announcement, which is easy because Remy is focused on Maisie surveillance and Pearl is telling Wyatt something that has his full attention and Earl is on what I believe is his fourth bread roll and showing no signs of stopping.
We walk to the nearest pasture fence.
The creek bend is visible from here, the string lights still glowing in the oak tree, the warm gold of them catching the water below. The party noise is soft from this distance. Dale's guitar carrying just far enough to be present without being loud.
The ranch is extraordinary in the dark, as it always is.
Laney leans on the fence rail beside me and looks at the creek bend and the lights and the ranch beyond it with that layered expression I've been carrying questions about for the last hour.
I wait. She'll get there. She always finds her way there eventually.
"Beckett?" she says.
"Yeah."
She looks at the ring on her finger in the low light. Turns it slightly. Looks at the oak tree. Looks at me.
"Today was perfect," she says.
"Yeah," I say. "It was."
"The creek bend. The lights." She pauses. "The speech you forgot."
"The speech I remembered later," I say.