Page 237 of Fearless

“What?” Mercy asked, voice sharp and displeased.

“It’s you.” She laid the picture carefully on the carpet. Beneath it was a shot of what had to be his grandmother: frail, wrinkled little thing, white hair streaming across her shoulders, small gnarled hands busy over a knitting project. “You family.” The next was a small house made of tar paper. It was just a shack, really, on the water’s edge, a rusted truck parked in the weeds at the back door. “Is this the house you grew up in?”

When he didn’t answer, she lifted her head.

His eyes were dark, angry, defensive, his jaw tight. He didn’t like this.

“Do you not want me to look?” she asked. “I can put them away.”

She watched him wrestle with himself a moment, hands clasping together and clenching until the veins stood out in his wrists.

Ava began to slide the pictures back into their envelope.

“No,” he said. “Look if you want to.”

She gave him a soft smile. “You know I won’t love you any less because of anything I see in a picture.”

He exhaled noisily, forcing his hands flat on his thighs. He glanced away. “Yeah.”

“You wanna come look with me?”

Maybe that’s a bad idea, she thought, when he stared at her. But then he got up and came to lower down to the rug beside her, lying on his stomach at her hip, propped up on his elbows.

“Yeah, that’s the house,” he said of the top photo in her hand. “Ready for the cover ofSouthern Living, huh?” he asked wryly, his smile ashamed and wistful all at once.

“It’s not about what a house looks like, but how much the people who live in it love each other,” she said, and watched his face twitch with acknowledgement. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head, his hair silky against her lips. “Here.” She set the photo on the carpet with the other two. “What’s this?”

“I brought a pie,” Jackie said when she appeared at the back door, Littlejohn in tow. She held up the pie plate with a chastened expression that let Maggie know it was a peace offering in more ways than one. “It’s cherry.”

Maggie took a deep breath. “It looks great.” She opened the door wide. “Do you mind helping me set the table?”

Jackie looked relieved. “Sure.”

“Do you need any help?” Littlejohn asked as he stepped in and carefully removed his boots.

“No, sweetie,” Maggie assured. “Get you a beer and go hang out with the guys.”

Once she’d secured the deadbolt, she turned and saw Jackie pulling down plates. They’d cohosted so many dinners that each knew the other’s kitchen as well as her own, where everything was kept, which napkins would be best for each occasion, which places at the table the boys preferred (it usually reflected their positions around the table in the clubhouse chapel). Maggie realized she didn’t trust Jackie anymore, not the way she always had, and the notion saddened her in a way the thrown eggs that afternoon hadn’t been able to. So often, it was the club against everything outside of it. If you couldn’t trust one another, who could you trust? What a horrible thing internal politics were.

“There’s seven of us?” Jackie asked.

“Nine.” Maggie went to pull the silverware.

They set the dining room table, since the kitchen wouldn’t hold that many of them. Aidan and Tango showed up right as the food was being laid out, bearing Jack Daniels and a bottle of Pino Grigio for Maggie.

Aidan gave her a sideways hug. “Heard you got egged.”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “Nothing a little soap won’t fix.”

He snorted in disagreement.

No one seemed surprised to see Collier. When they were all seated, and the serving platters were passed around, Maggie felt herself sagging in her chair, suddenly tired and anxious. She caught Ghost’s eye, from his place at the head of the table, silently asking a half dozen questions.

She recognized his responding look: he needed her support right now. He needed her to be the queen of the castle, solid and ready to catch him when he leaned against her.

She straightened. Queens didn’t slouch.

There was a whole history of Lécuyers spread out on the rug. Early photographs of Mercy’s grandparents, when they were in their twenties: his grandmother smooth-skinned, black-haired and beautiful, tiny even then, cinched tightly into her white wedding dress. His grandfather had been very tall and very thin, handsome, with a blade-like nose and a headful of pale hair. There was a gentleness to the austere lines of his face, a sweetness she saw in Mercy. It was from his grandmother that the ferocity had come, her black eyes chips of unforgiving obsidian.

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