Fran dropped the ball and gave it a powerful kick. Carlos dove for it with his own hands to keep it out of the goal. Fran bent over, bracing his hands on his thighs, drawing in a breath that didn’t come as easily as it should have.
Finn was already moving before he thought about it. "Are you good?"
Fran lifted a hand without looking up, the universal sign for give me a second, and pulled in another breath. His shoulders rose, held, then settled.
"I’m fine," he said finally, straightening. "Just got winded."
Carlos jogged past them, tapping the ball from foot to foot with easy control. "That’s not wind. That’s age."
Fran snorted, but ruffled the kid's dark hair. When Finn had come here three years ago, Carlos had been half his size. The kid was rapidly approaching manhood. The term kid wouldn't apply to him much longer.
Carlos kept the ball moving, kicking it ahead of him, looping back, restless energy with nowhere particular to go. There was something in the way he moved that reminded Finn of the first few months on the ranch—motion for the sake of motion, like stopping might mean something catching up.
Fran watched him for a second, something quiet and satisfied in his expression, then looked back at Finn. "The field looks good. Grass came in even."
"We adjusted the watering schedule. Heat was pulling too much out mid-day."
"Yeah." Fran’s gaze shifted, settling on him in a different way. "We're all glad you stuck around."
Carlos called something out from across the field, half-formed, mostly nonsense, and kept moving.
Fran leaned back a little, rolling his shoulders. "You know how Eva and I met?"
Finn did. He’d heard the story before, in pieces, over the years.
"I wanted her to marry one of the men from my unit when we first came to the ranch," Fran continued anyway. "That was the plan. She needed a safe place to live for her brother and sister."
He glanced toward Carlos, who was now juggling the ball foot to foot with uneven success.
"I kept finding reasons each one of them wasn’t right for her. Because I was already halfway in love with her, the first time I saw her. Didn’t realize it until I’d run out of excuses."
Fran let out a quiet breath, something like a laugh. "Problem was, I had shrapnel sitting too close to my heart for anyone to call marrying me a good idea."
Finn knew that part too. The mission that had gone wrong. The fragment that had lodged where it shouldn’t have. The risk that had never fully gone away.
"I told myself it wasn’t fair to her, that I couldn’t ask her to build something on top of that. And then I married her anyway."
Carlos whooped from across the field. The ball had made it into the back of the goal.
Fran shook his head, still smiling. "Couple months later, they ran the scans again. The shrapnel had moved. Out of the danger zone. It was a miracle."
What Finn heard, what was left unsaid, was that Eva was Fran's miracle.
"You’ll move heaven and earth for the ones you love. Turns out, sometimes, the earth moves back."
Carlos sent the ball sailing toward them. Fran trapped it with his foot, then nudged it back out without effort.
"Ivy coming over today?" Fran asked.
"Yeah."
Fran nodded once. "Good."
That was all.
Finn turned toward the path that led back to the mess hall, leaving the field behind him. The kitchen was empty when he got there. Clean and orderly.
He set his phone down on the counter and moved through the space automatically, checking surfaces, clearing what didn’t need to be there, aligning what did.
