Hunter contributed mostly with eyebrow raises and the occasional grunt, which somehow communicated entire paragraphs if you knew the language. Owen kept telling stories, half-truths and full exaggerations, that had Ivy cackling and Sophia threatening to call him out on every detail.
“…and then,” Owen said as he reached for more brisket, “Clay thought it’d be funny to put a rattlesnake shed in Maggie’s pillowcase.”
Maggie pointed her fork at him. “I was twelve. Twelve. My brain was still developing. I thought it was alive.”
Wyatt leaned back in his chair, grinning. “She let out a banshee scream you could hear clear to County Line Road. Claywas fourteen and already mouthy as sin, but I have never—never—seen him move that fast.”
Clay’s scowl deepened. “I wasn’t running. I was executing a tactical retreat from an unpredictable threat.”
“A twelve-year-old girl with a cast-iron skillet,” Ivy said, laughing. “Yeah. Terrifying.”
“You weren’t there,” Clay muttered. “She was feral. She came at me like a rabid raccoon.”
Maggie lifted a brow. “You put a snake skin in my bed!”
“Shed,” Clay corrected weakly. “Completely harmless.”
Stephy was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes—good tears, the healing kind that made something in my chest unclench.
“Oh my God,” she wheezed, “you all were menaces.”
Clay pointed his fork at her. “Were?”
Sophia leaned toward Stephy conspiratorially. “You should’ve seen the time we put bleach in Clay’s shampoo, and he walked around looking like a highlighter for a week.”
Clay groaned. “You told me it was amedical shampoo!”
“It was,” Sophia said sweetly. “Medically hilarious.”
More laughter. More teasing. More warmth than any one room should’ve been able to hold.
“For the record,” Maggie said, lifting her glass, “the girls have always been outnumbered, but never outmatched.”
“Not once,” Ivy confirmed proudly.
Clay pointed at me like I was his last hope. “Liam, back me up.”
“Nope,” I said, taking a drink. “You’re on your own, brother.”
Stephy grinned at me across the table—soft, warm, a little shy and a lot alive.
And for the first time since LA, she looked like she belonged somewhere.
Like she belonged here.
Ivy leaned toward Stephy. "They do this to everyone. Last month, they spent an hour telling me about Wyatt's attempt to serenade me as if I hadn’t been there myself. He forgot the words to his own song."
"I was nervous," Wyatt protested.
"You were drunk," Ivy corrected, but her hand found his under the table.
This was my family. Loud, invasive, embarrassing, and absolutely perfect. And watching Stephy in the middle of it, laughing and blushing and actually eating, I saw her understanding what she'd been missing. What real family looked like.
After dinner, Louisa conscripted help for dishes—not because of gender roles but because she only trusted certain people with her good china. The rest were banished to the porch with coffee and strict instructions not to break anything.
I found Stephy later on the back porch swing, Sophia beside her, painting her nails a soft pink while Ivy sat in a rocking chair, discussing the logistics of touring.
"Twenty cities in twenty-five days?" Ivy was saying. "That's insane. Cattle drives were less brutal than that."
