"That sounds right."
We sit for a minute. Waylon nursing. Vanna humming something low and tuneless.
The room is quiet in a way that feels peaceful—not empty, but full.
Full of all the things that almost didn't happen and somehow did.
"Come on," she says once Waylon's done and burped and half-asleep on her shoulder. "Ellie's in the kitchen. She'll lose her mind if she finds out you were here and didn't eat."
We make our way downstairs and head straight into the clubhouse’s kitchen.
A big industrial-looking space with stainless steel counters and a stove that's seen better decades.
But when Ellie's in it, it becomes hers.
That's just how she operates.
The woman walks into a room and it reorganizes itself around her, the same way the whole club does, the same way Backroads did before it was hers and even after.
She's standing at the counter rolling out biscuit dough when I walk in, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder, her reading glasses pushed up on top of her head.
She's not my aunt—she's Ruger's—but she helped raise me and Garrett after the fire, and she's the closest thing to a mother I've ever had since I was four years old.
She doesn't need the title. She earned something deeper than that.
"There she is." Ellie doesn't look up from the dough. She never needs to look up to know who just walked in. "You eat today?"
"I ate."
"You atewhat?"
"Crackers. And part of a protein bar."
She points a flour-dusted finger at the table. "Sit. I'm making chicken and biscuits and you're eating a full plate or I'm calling your brother."
"I'm twenty-eight years old, Ellie."
"And I wiped snot off your nose, so sit down."
I sit down. Some fights aren't worth having, and Ellie's kitchen is one of them.
Vanna settles into the chair next to mine, Waylon dozing on her shoulder.
She shifts him to the other side with the practiced one-handed ease of a woman who's figured out how to do everything in her life while holding an eight-pound human.
"He sleeping?" Ellie asks, glancing over.
"For now. Give it twenty minutes."
Ellie slides a glass of sweet tea in front of each of us without being asked, then reaches for Waylon with both hands. "Give him here. You need to eat too, and you can't do that with a baby attached to you."
Vanna hesitates for half a second—the new-mother reflex, the one that doesn't want to let go even when her arms are screaming—and then hands him over.
Ellie takes Waylon like she's been holding babies her whole life, which she has.
She tucks him into the crook of her arm and keeps right on cooking with her free hand, stirring the gravy without missing a beat.
Waylon doesn't even stir.
