Page 81 of Dallas

“Fair enough. I’ve always imagined that family is complicated.” She laughs. “I have to imagine it, because my family’s not complicated, they just suck.”

“True.”

The grills are going when we arrive at the main house, smoke filling the air, and there are long tables with fixings, sides, and rolls laid out in a pavilion. The ranch staff is also there for the big barbecue, and it actually looks like a giant party. I wonder what it looks like to Sarah. I can remember how it felt to me as a kid who was so used to having nobody. Being surrounded by so much family felt wild.

“This is… This is amazing,” she says.

“Yeah. Isn’t it? When I’m done with the rodeo, I want to buy a spread of land of my own. Maybe I’ll have cows, like my uncle. Or maybe I’ll do horses like Aunt Jamie. I don’t know. But I love the idea of having a place that’s mine. I know when I was a kid, I never even dreamed that far ahead.”

Sarah shakes her head. “I just thought I’d probably die before I turned eighteen.”

I reach across the cab and touch her cheek. “Here you are, though. They didn’t break you, sweetie.”

She puts her hand over mine and smiles at me.

Then we get out of the truck, and are immediately swarmed by a pack of small cousins. “Here we go,” I say.

I growl, and the small kids scatter; that’s what they were waiting for, after all. They want the drama.

Wyatt and Lindy’s kids hang back, a little bit too cool for all this, given that they are edging close to that deadly preteen era. I don’t hold Sarah’s hand as we walk over to my family, only because I don’t need everybody breathing down our necks and asking about marriage or anything likethat. Some of them would behave, but a number of them wouldn’t.

I know them well enough to know that. It can be part of their charm, but not right now.

“Hey all,” I say.

“This is Sarah. She was my foster sister back when I was in care. We finally reconnected, and… She’s been staying with me.”

The greeting she receives is warm and boisterous, and I move her through the ranks of everyone, introducing them, but I know already that all the names are going to get lost in the shuffle. There’s Wyatt and Lindy, Grant and McKenna, Jamie and Gabe, then Luke and Olivia, and Beatrix and Lindy’s brother Dane, who aren’t my blood family, but might as well be. Then there are all the kids, and ranch workers besides.

Lindy is the kind of polished and poised that I can see Sarah finds a little bit intimidating.

I’m sure most people do. But McKenna is scrappy and still has all the sharp edges she had way back then.

“McKenna is one of us,” I say, because I know she won’t mind.

“In what way?” Sarah asks, looking at me.

“A foster kid,” says McKenna.

“How did you… How did you end up here?”

“Gold Valley has foster kids,” Dallas says.

“It does, Dallas,” says McKenna. “But I’m not one of them. I was passing through, all down on my luck. Homeless, actually, and I ended up staying in one of the cabins on the property. Grant found me. He was a humorless piece of work back then. But, rather than calling the cops on me, he offered me a place to stay. A place to work. And I’m just so charming he couldn’t resist me, and he fell in love with me.”

“Wow,” says Sarah. “That’s quite the story.”

“We kill at Two Truths and a Lie,” Grant says.

“I bet.”

And I know that Sarah has found a quick friend in McKenna, unsurprisingly. I’ve always been close to her, too. Because she gets it. She had to do some dicey things to survive, and she made it.

Food is served quickly, and it’s easy to pile too much onto the large paper plates sitting on the table. Once we’ve finished, Sarah gets absorbed into my aunts and ends up getting dragged back to the house to bring desserts back down.

That leaves me with my uncles.

“So,” Wyatt elbows me, “I hear that you and your friend have recently become friendlier.”

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