“Vaughan.” Jeremy kept his voice low. “Don’t let this go. Be the best father and husband you can. You’ll never regret it. It feels great because it’s what you’re meant to do. I had that once.”

Jeremy paused, probably remembering, as Vaughan had, his little girl who’d died and the wife who was someone else’s now.

“Thanks.”

“If it were me, and I felt up to it, I’d drive home to sleep next to my woman with my babies safe under my roof.” Jeremy raised a shoulder.

Before Vaughan could respond, Paddy and Damien came back into the room with the laser pointer and a furry mass of barking and scampering fur. Minnie jumped from Vaughan’s lap and ran toward her brethren, barking right along with them.

Ezra came in, trying to get the animals to calm down and when that didn’t happen, he lunged at Paddy to get the pointer and they crashed into the wall near the back doors.

Vaughan darted between them to open them both so his brothers could spill out into the night before they broke a window or someone really got hurt.

“Come the hell on. We have this call to handle and then I want to go home to my bed with my woman in it. I’m sure Damien and probably Paddy can attest to this. Ezra could, too, if he’d stop pretending he had to stay away from Tuesday to prove some sort of stupid point.”

“The fuck you know about it?” Ezra swung and Vaughan narrowly avoided his brother’s king-size fist headed toward his nose.

Jeremy sighed and then whistled really loudly as he banged two large copper garden pots together.

“Jesus. I thought Erin and Adrian Brown were bad. You four have given me gray hair. Get inside so we can be there and ready to make some money when the call comes in.” Jeremy turned and went back into the house.

With a few last elbow jabs and muttered insults, the four of them helped one another up from the ground, dusting off and putting things back where they’d been knocked away by the brawl as it passed by.

“I miss your dumb ass,” Paddy said, as he headed back into the house.

Ezra laughed as they followed. Damien had to take the call with a bag of frozen corn on his lip. He’d split it when he’d rolled—or been pushed—from the back deck to the ground a few feet below.

“It’s probably going to save your pretty face if you’re in Gresham most of the time,” Damien said.

“That would be a gift to the world.” Vaughan pretended to buff his nails on his shirt. “Anyway, it’s less than an hour from here. I don’t know what the long-term future holds, but our house in Gresham has plenty of extra bedrooms and Kelly might share her tree house with you if you’re nice. Seriously, she’s got a sweet little setup out there. Weekends, if I can get Mom and Kelly on track, would be spent here a lot. And summer vacation. All that stuff. My point is, I don’t need to be living half a mile away to be around. Things are changing for all of us. But we’re Hurley. We got this.”

“You’re sappy now that you’re in looooove,” Damien sang quietly as the call went through.

* * *

KELLY PUT ON her headphones, hit Play and smiled as the beginning of Beyoncé’s “Flawless” came on. Now that the girls had been asleep awhile, Kelly opened the big windows in her bedroom and scrambled atop the little built-in couch.

Lights off, no one to see her, she lit a cigarette and started to dance in the moonlight in her panties and a tank top. For Kelly, this was illicit and wild.

Technically, she’d stopped smoking the day she found out she was pregnant, but every once in a while, when she got particularly stressed out, Kelly gave in and let herself have a cigarette.

She laughed as she danced. Illicitly smoking and blowing it out her window like a teenager.

When she hit the I woke up like ’dis part, she had one fist pumped in the air as she silently shouted, jumping up and down on the couch, and as the song ended she opened her eyes to find Vaughan standing in the room.

She shrieked and fell off the couch. Luckily he’d rushed to her and saved her from a big fall.

“A guy turns his back for a minute and comes back to find his woman smoking cigarettes and dancing, half-naked, through her bedroom. It’s like a collision between every single great teen movie I’ve ever seen.”

Laughing, Kelly threw her arms around him and then withdrew, getting rid of the evidence and listening to see if she’d woken the girls up when he’d surprised her. Maddie would never, ever let her hear the end of it if she saw Kelly smoking.

And rightfully so. There wasn’t any only those three times a year when I’m about to lose my mind when it came to a kid’s view of the world.

“I told you to stay at the ranch tonight.” Man was she glad he hadn’t listened. She nibbled on his earlobe and pretty much rubbed all over him like a cat.

“We finished the last meeting and I hightailed it out of there. This is where I wanted to be. I’ll go back tomorrow. But for now, I’m here. With you. You in tiny panties and a threadbare tank top looking like a wet dream come to life.” Vaughan slid his hands underneath her shirt to do all this magic stuff on her breasts and nipples. Tracing little patterns with his fingertips, tugging her nipples, all while his scruff abraded her neck where he’d been kissing.

“No one can see in here. There’s no house in the line of sight from the window seat.”

“Mmm. Too bad for them. Because you’re quite the sight.” He kissed her slowly and she hugged him, not wanting him to let go. He came back.