Tate and Garrett had the good grace to look chagrined, and went back to turning steaks and talking ranch business.
The meal was served, and they all sat down at the long picnic table, kids and adults, with the dogs sitting quietly—and hopefully—nearby.
“Where’s Aunt Paige?” Calvin piped up, barely visible over the hamburger towering on his plate.
An awkward little silence fell, broken only by the distant lowing of cattle and the sound of a car somewhere down the road.
“Eat your supper, sweetheart,” Julie told her son gently.
“What about Aunt Paige’s supper?” Calvin persisted. “Is she going to have any?”
“I’m sure your aunt will be fine,” Julie assured him.
Silverware clinked against dishes, and the wind whispered in the limbs of the oak trees nearest the house. It was November, and turning colder, but thanks to a pair of outdoor heaters, the patio was warm enough.
“Maybe she ran away,” Ava, one of Tate’s twins, speculated, after chewing and swallowing a big bite of burger and bun.
Calvin took immediate offense, stiffening and glaring across the table at Ava. “Did not!”
“Hush,” Julie said, ruffling the boy’s hair.
Ava blinked behind her glasses and then jutted out her fine McKettrick chin, stubborn to the bone. “Did, too!” she insisted. “Maybe.”
“Grown-ups don’t run away!” Calvin said.
“Sometimes they do!” Ava argued.
“Ava,” Tate said quietly. “That will be enough.”
Ava subsided, but not graciously.
And her sister, Audrey, by far the more outgoing of the pair, spoke right up. “Our mom ran away,” she said. “She went all the way to New York City, and she’s never coming back.”
Another silence.
Then Libby, sitting next to Audrey, slipped an arm around the child. Over the girls’ heads, her gaze connected with Tate’s. “Your mother came to visit just last month,” Libby reminded her softly. “She took you and Ava to the ballet in Austin, and you stayed in a hotel.”
Tate sighed, pushed his plate away.
Austin felt a pang of sympathy, watching his brother. Tate’s first marriage, to the twins’ mother, had been a mistake from the beginning. He and Cheryl had been divorced since the twins were babies, but they still butted heads now and then over the kids. Cheryl, probably jealous of Libby, was always playing some kind of head game.
Just one more reason, as far as Austin was concerned, to stay single. And if the idea gave him a lonesome feeling, well, he concluded, nobody had everything.
Garrett, meanwhile, managed to shift Calvin onto his lap without making a big fat production of it. “Your Aunt Paige wouldn’t run away,” he told the boy, looking straight at Austin. “She probably just didn’t feel like having steak for supper.”
Austin felt color rise to his face. What was Garrett implying? That it was his fault Paige didn’t want to join the rest of the family for a meal?
Maybe it was his fault.
Austin decided he wasn’t all that hungry. He excused himself, as he’d been taught to do, having been raised by a good Texas mama, and left the table. Carried his plate inside and left it in the sink in Garrett’s kitchen.
Shep joined him on the short walk to the door of his own apartment, just down the hall from Garrett’s.
In the terrible days immediately after their folks were killed, nothing had made sense to any of the three brothers, and little wonder. They’d been eighteen, nineteen and twenty years old at the time. For the last ten years, they’d shared the main floor of the ranch house, where the big kitchen and the pool and the media room were, among other things, but back then, for reasons Austin couldn’t recall, they’d divided the rest of the house into three separate living areas.
As little kids, still on their first set of teeth, Tate, Garrett and Austin had shared one wide, long room, with lots of windows. When Tate entered tenth grade, the original space was sectioned off into three connecting squares, all the same size but distinctly separate.
Now, those rooms were gone, too, making up the wide corridor. Only the long row of tall windows remained.
Austin shoved a hand through his hair as he entered his own part of the house. The kitchen, living room and master suite were on that floor, while an office and two guest rooms shared the third with a huge attic.
Like Tate and Garrett, Austin had his own stairway.
God forbid they should have to share one.
Bleakly, he wandered to the windows, gazed out over the range, toward the main road. No question about it—he wanted to see headlights, and not just any headlights, either. He was looking for Paige’s car.
No sign of it, though.
He finally turned away, took in the stark simplicity of his living room and longed for the old days, when things had been different. When the folks were alive and they’d lived like a family, not a bunch of strangers.
The Silver Spur ranch house had been just that, a house, before the folks died; a big one, granted, but still a family home, with one kitchen, one living room, one dining room.
One turkey at Thanksgiving.
One tree at Christmas.
Now, it was more like a grand hotel, or an apartment building.
It sure as hell wasn’t a home anymore. Nobody really lived there; they were all just passing through, doing their own thing, on their way to somewhere else.
* * *
PAIGE WOKE UP late the next morning, having tossed and turned until all hours. Glancing at the bedside clock, she gasped, threw back the covers, and leaped out of bed. She showered quickly, put on black slacks and a simple white blouse, gave each of her cheeks a pass with the blush brush, and sped out into the kitchen.
Garrett and Austin were there, Garrett drinking coffee and reading a newspaper at the table, Austin leaning indolently against one of the counters, wearing nothing but a pair of rag-bag sweatpants, a case of bedhead and an obnoxious grin.
Shep, wolfing down kibble from a bowl nearby, spared her a glance but went right on eating.
“Did Julie leave already?” Paige asked. “I was supposed to drive Calvin to school this morning—”
Garrett smiled easily and rose from his chair, remained standing until Paige waved him back into his seat. “Julie didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “She took Calvin over to Libby and Tate’s to ride the school bus to town later on with the twins.”
Paige was aware
