“Monday,” Reno said firmly. “Give her the weekend.”
Grace turned her head and looked at him. He held her eyes.
“My niece is meeting her tonight,” Reno told Cooper, but he was still looking at Grace when he said it. “Let her have two days where the biggest thing on the calendar is a little girl and a pie.”
Cooper looked at the two of them for a moment, and whatever he saw, he decided not to comment on it.
“Monday,” he agreed. “Ten o’clock. My office, or your porch, your call.”
“The porch,” Grace said. “Thank you, Cooper.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Cooper said grimly.
Out in the parking lot , the clouds were finally breaking up, and the sky was blue in between them. Grace stood by the truck, looking at nothing, and he gave her the time. Then she squared her shoulders and got in the truck.
“Bakery,” she said. “I have a lot of baking to do today.”
“Anything special?”
“Nope.” But when she gazed out her window, he caught the tiny upcurve of her mouth. She was so up to something.
Hank’s house smelled like lemon polish and roast chicken and, underneath it, the faint chemical ghost of fresh paint, because the upstairs hall had gotten painted that afternoon whether the custody case required it or not.
Reno had come early to help and grabbed a quick shower in the bathroom after they finished painting. Now it was a quarter to six and the table was set for eight, and his niece was sitting on the bottom stair tying an ugly pair of tennis shoes that were the latest fad in teen shoe fashion..
Madison had her father’s dark coloring and her own opinions about everything, most of which she expressed with her eyebrows that were exactly like her father’s. And, like her father, she usually communicated with her eyebrows well before she bothered to involve words.
Her grandparents had dropped her that afternoon for the weekend, the first of what Hank was clearly praying in his quiet, white-knuckled way would become his daughter living here full time.
“You’re hovering,” Madison informed Reno without looking up from her laces.
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re hovering. Dad hovers standing still. You hover sitting down. It’s a family trait. A family flaw, really.”
“You nervous?” he asked.
“No.” The eyebrows came up. “Are you?”
“A little,” he admitted, because he’d learned a long time ago that the fastest way past a smart kid’s defenses was refusing to perform for her.
That got her to look up. “About what?”
“About whether you’re going to like Grace.”
Madison considered him unsettlingly like he would examine a witness at a deposition. “So she’s the reason.”
“The reason for what?”
“The reason you’re doing lawyer stuff again. Grandpa Steele told Grandma you swore you’d never set foot in a courtroom again. She told me, because Grandma tells me everything when she thinks I’m not a kid anymore, which is whenever she wants something repeated to Dad.” Madison sat back. “Then all of a sudden you’re suing some lady six times. Obviously, Grace is the reason.”
He was actually pretty impressed by her logic and her observational skills. He commented, “You’d make a good lawyer if the field ever interests you.”
She smiled a little and looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Your dad asked me to help with your custody hearing,” he said. “That was the first legal proceeding I agreed to help with. So you’re actually the reason I dusted off my lawyer suit.” He paused. “But Grace is the reason I haven’t taken it off again.”
“Is she nice?” Madison asked. For one second she wasn’t fourteen going on thirty-five. She was a kid who’d ridden a bus across the country, away from a mother who hadn’t come looking for her, and who was about to sit down at a table with strangers in a house she was being asked to call home, and who needed, very badly, for the people in it to be nice.
