Ryan called ahead, which meant he wanted something. My brother didn't call ahead for social visits — he showed up, ate whatever was in the fridge, and left. Calling ahead was his version of a warning shot.
"Stella and I are coming by this afternoon. She wants to see the ranch."
"Stella has seen the ranch."
"She wants to see the ranch, Ivory."
Translation: Stella was eight weeks pregnant, Ryan was spiraling, and they needed someone who'd done this before — either as an expert resource or cautionary tale, depending on how the afternoon went.
They arrived at two. Stella stepped out of the cruiser with the careful movements of a woman who'd learned that sudden head turns were now a gamble. Her complexion had shifted to something resembling the inside of an avocado left out too long.
"Kitchen," I said, steering her by the elbow. "I have ginger tea, saltines, and the specific kind of sympathy that only comes from a woman who once threw up in her own purse at a gas station."
"That happened?"
"Twice. Different gas stations."
She laughed — real, surprised out of her — and sat at the table while I put the kettle on. The ginger tea was a recipe from Marisol's mother during my first trimester.
Fresh ginger, lemon, honey, and a pinch of something I was pretty sure was cayenne but she called "the secret." It worked well enough that Stella's color shifted back to human within ten minutes.
Ryan stood in the doorway watching his partner drink tea with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb.
"She's fine, Ryan. Sit down."
He sat, and immediately stood, then sat again when Stella gave him a look that could have cured leather.
"I have questions," he said. "Practical questions."
"You have terror disguised as practical questions. I recognize the format — I invented it." I set coffee in front of him. "Ask."
Fifteen minutes of Ryan Hill, county sheriff, six-foot-two, armed and decorated, asking questions with the barely concealed panic of a first-time father who'd realized the academy didn't cover this.
"How much sleep do newborns actually need?"
"More than they take. Less than you want them to."
"What about the delivery room — where do I stand?"
"Wherever Stella tells you to stand. If she tells you to leave, you leave. If she says she hates you, she doesn't. If she crushes your hand, you do not complain. Not then. Not ever."
Stella watched with quiet amusement — she'd accepted her partner was going to be a disaster about this and decided to find it endearing. A strategic choice.
"The nausea," Stella said, both hands around her mug. "When does it actually stop? Every website says twelve weeks, but some say sixteen, and one said some women have it the entire pregnancy, and I need you to tell me that woman is a statistical anomaly."
"It eased around fourteen for me. But I had three humans in there, so my body was running a bed-and-breakfast it hadn't consented to. Ginger helps. Small meals help. Saltines on every horizontal surface in your house. And if nothing works, there's medication — ask your OB. They have options they don't advertise because the medical profession apparently believes suffering builds character."
Stella nodded with the desperate gratitude of a woman who'd been Googling symptoms at three a.m. and had emerged more terrified than informed, which is the only possible outcome of Googling symptoms at three a.m.
Colt and Kameron drifted through — Colt to refill his water with a nod, Kameron to steal a cookie and wink at Stella. Both performing normalcy with practiced ease.
For a full hour, the five of us sat at that table — two pregnant women, three men trying not to vibrate apart — and talked due dates, nursery colors, and whether Ryan's apartment had enough closet space for baby supplies, which it absolutely did not.
Two sisters-in-law comparing symptoms like war stories, two men pretending they weren't terrified of the same tiny humans they'd helped create.
The kitchen smelled like ginger and coffee and something that felt dangerously close to ordinary life.
Then Ryan's posture changed. Subtle — shoulders squared, coffee mug rotated a quarter turn, his tell for transitioning from personal to professional. He glanced at Stella. Small nod.
"There's something else. I want you to hear it as information, not crisis."
"That preamble has never once preceded anything that wasn't a crisis."
"Linda Marsh has been talking to other parents." Cop-voice engaged. "About a formal complaint to the school board. She's framing it as concern about household influence on children's behavior — your household, your children."
The kitchen went quiet.
"Has she filed anything?"
"No. Just talk. She's working the church group, the PTA chain, trying to build support. Most parents don't want their name on an official complaint — they'll whisper, but that's a different ask than paperwork."
"But she's trying."
"She's trying." His jaw tightened. "I wanted you to know, not to panic, but prepare."
I wrapped both hands around my mug. Linda Marsh. The woman who'd been calling the sheriff's office asking whether my household was legal. The woman whose son stood up in a school cafeteria and told my daughter her father didn't love her enough.
Now she was organizing — moving from individual phone calls to collective action, building a paper trail that could turn gossip into something with actual teeth.
"What could a school board actually do?"
"Investigate behavioral issues. Call you in for meetings. Recommend additional counseling, put notes in the kids' files. In extreme cases, refer to outside agencies."
He paused on that last part. Let it settle into the air between us like smoke. "But we're nowhere near there. I'm telling you because you'd rather know early and plan than find out late and react."
He was right. Knowing was the only weapon I had that didn't require money I didn't have or time I couldn't spare.
"Thank you," I said. The complicated kind — thanking someone for information that ruins your afternoon but might save your year.
They left at four. I stood on the porch and watched the cruiser pull down the driveway, Stella's hand raised in a wave through the passenger window, and in my head I opened the drawer — the one already too full, the one where I kept the spreadsheet and the napkin and the hairline fracture in the trust — and added two more names.
Linda Marsh. Tyler Marsh.
The list was growing. And lists, in my experience, have a way of becoming something else entirely when they get long enough.