“Tracker, brother,” I mutter. “You better appreciate this.”
Memphis looks up at me with those steady amber eyes.
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m talking to a ghost. Don’t look at me like that.”
A faint sound from inside the house pulls my attention back to the glass doors. Footsteps, soft and unhurried, are moving down the hallway. Grabbing the plates, I carry both inside and set them on the kitchen island just as Sophia appears at the end of the hallway.
She blinks in the light, hair loose and slightly rumpled from sleep, rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand. She looks soft in a way she hadn’t at the airport, the careful composure of the day worn away, something younger and quieter underneath it.
Padding into the kitchen. “How long was I asleep?”
“Maybe an hour.”
A faint flush moves across her face. “I’m sorry, I should have been up helping you.”
“Don’t be. You’re my guest.” Already reaching for my cut from the back of the stool, I hang it up and pull the stool out for her. “Sit down.”
She does.
Crossing to the refrigerator, I pull out the salad I’d prepared earlier, mix the dressing through it, and set it on the island between the two place settings. Knives, forks, paper towels, laid out and done.
“Steak and salad.”
Sophia looks up at me and smiles a real one, slow and warm, and in that moment, I understand, properly and without any particular fanfare, exactly why my brother fell in love with her. It isn’t just that she’s beautiful—though undeniably she is, standing in the light of this kitchen as if she belongs in it—it’s the whole of her. The intelligence behind her eyes. The warmth that lives underneath the grief. The way she makes even a kitchen island in the Nevada desert feel like somewhere worth being.
Tracker always had good taste.
“It looks incredible,” she says, already reaching for the salad spoons and distributing greens onto both plates with the easyefficiency of someone who is used to taking care of people. “And it smells even better.”
“Figured you’d be hungry after the nap.”
She glances up at me. “I thought motorcycle presidents lived on beer and takeout.”
“That’s a rude assumption.”
“That’s fair,” she concedes.
Looking out through the glass doors at the darkened desert, the last traces of purple are fading from the sky. “What do you say we eat outside? It’s a good night for it.”
Her face lights up. “I’d love that.”
We carry our plates and beers out onto the patio, and the moment Sophia steps outside, she stops and looks up.
“Wow.” She exhales the word, tilting her face toward the sky. “It’s beautiful out here.”
“It is,” I agree, following her gaze. The sky has deepened to a rich dark purple, stars beginning to press through in numbers you never see in the city. The open land stretches out silent and silver beneath them.
“It’s so quiet,” she breathes out.
“That’s why I built here.”
She looks at me for a moment, something thoughtful and searching in her expression, then sits down at the patio table. I take the seat beside her.
“I think I like it,” she says, with a smile that tells me she means it.
We eat in comfortable silence for a while, the kind that doesn’t need filling. The desert doing what it always does at night, just breathing around you, vast, unhurried, and completely indifferent to whatever you’re carrying.
The steaks disappear. The salad bowl empties. The beers go down slowly while the stars come out properly above us, bright and innumerable against the dark Nevada sky.