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I looked at my hands.

The skinned knuckle had dried into a red line.

“Tonight she fell asleep at the table. Middle of a sentence. I was going to wake her, but she woke enough to ask me to help her to bed.”

Boone’s face eased a little.

“I carried her,” I said. “She said I could. Took off her boots. Covered her up.”

“And?”

“And I’ve been outside for two hours because I don’t know what to do with how much it mattered.”

There.

A true thing.

Ugly in the way anything honest looked after you’d spent your life dressing it better.

Boone leaned back.

“Which part mattered?”

I almost laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because my brother had apparently saved up thirty years of questions for tonight.

“That she asked me.”

He nodded once.

“I keep wanting to help her with things,” I said. “The work. Decisions. Whatever she’ll put down. But I don’t know when that’s helping and when it’s just me wanting to feel like the kind of man somebody needs.”

Boone looked at the folded notes beside his hand. Then back at me. “Good question.”

“I was hoping for a better review.”

“That was a good one.”

I pressed my tongue against the inside of my cheek and let the silence stay.

At last, he said, “Daddy.”

The word sat between us.

I’d heard it before. Once, maybe twice, carried through an open door or across the yard, private enough that I’d pretended my ears weren’t attached.

Hearing Boone say it deliberately was different.

“Josie calls me Daddy,” he said. “Because she wants to.”

I nodded.

He kept looking at me.

“Not because I’m bigger. Not because she needs somewhere to stay.”