He dressed in the washed and folded things from the side table. I remembered that I'd packed a change of clothes in my bag. I dug them out now, changed quickly, and felt the small, disproportionate satisfaction of clean clothes in the morning, which was the kind of thing you appreciated more than you expected to after spending the night somewhere you hadn't planned to stay.
"You look good," he said, without looking up from his boots.
"You can't see me."
"I don't have to."
I threw a pillow at him. He caught it without looking. Which was either skill or luck and was infuriating either way.
The kitchen at Dominion Hall in the morning was a different creature from the kitchen at night—quieter, warmer, smelling of coffee and something baked and the ease of a household that had been feeding people for long enough that the morning routine had become instinct.
One of the chefs—not Delphine, someone younger—was moving between the stove and the counter with the unhurried certainty of someone who'd done this a thousand mornings.
She set plates in front of us without being asked—eggs, properly made, soft and layered, the kind that required patience and a low flame. Toast from bread that had been baked here, I was almost certain. Thick-cut bacon. A bowl of sliced fruit that was too beautiful to have been assembled by someone who didn't care.
Coffee arrived in mugs that were large and serious.
We ate at the kitchen island. Informal. The breakfast of two people who were past the stage of impressing each other and had arrived somewhere more comfortable.
Grant ate with the focused efficiency of a man who'd spent years eating when he could and hadn't fully unlearned the habit. I ate slowly, tasting everything, because Charleston kept producing food that deserved attention.
"Tell me something about the ranch," I said.
He looked up. Considered.
"Mornings there smelled like this," he said. "Coffee and something baked. Mom would be up before the sun. You'd come in from the barn and the house would be warm and there'd be bread or biscuits or something on the counter." He looked at his coffee. "I haven't thought about that in years."
"It's a good memory," I said.
"Yeah." He turned the mug in his hands. "It is."
I didn't push. Let the memory have its space.
After breakfast we went outside.
The grounds in the morning light were something different from the evening version—larger, more varied, the manicured patio giving way to wilder land as you moved toward the water. The stables were active, the sound of horses and the smell of hay reaching us from fifty yards. Grant's step changed when we got close—something loosening.
Valentine's head appeared over his stall door before we reached it.
"There he is," Grant said, low and warm.
The horse pressed his muzzle forward immediately, found Grant's chest, stayed there. Grant's hand went to the horse's jaw—automatic, certain.
I watched them. The big blue roan and the man who'd named him for the town they both came from, both of them doing the wordless thing that happened between people and animalswho'd been through something together and come out the other side mutual.
"He's beautiful," I said.
"He's opinionated," Grant said. "Beautiful and opinionated."
"I know the type," I said.
Grant looked at me. The corner of his mouth moved.
We walked the grounds after that—along the bluff toward the water, through the garden that Hallie Mae had started and which had the slightly chaotic abundance of something that had been tended with love rather than precision.
She was there when we passed through—Hallie Mae, in the morning quiet, moving between the raised beds with a watering can in one hand and the other arm curved protectively around the sling strapped to her chest. Inside it, tucked against her like something the garden had grown itself, was the baby.
Three weeks old. A girl. The first of the new generation of Danes, small and astonishing and entirely unaware of the fortress she'd been born into.
