POV: Colt
The kitchen door closed. Ivory's footsteps and Kameron's retreated down the hallway, and then it was just me and my mother and a table covered in the evidence of what she'd done to my family.
Catherine sat with her hands folded, her posture straight, every angle considered. But the composure she'd held through the last thirty minutes was failing, and I could see the woman behind it for the first time in years.
"You're the only son I have, Colton." Her voice was careful but thin. "Everything your father and I built was for you — the ranch, the business, the name. When you left, it wasn't just a choice for yourself. It affected the entire structure we'd spent thirty years constructing."
"I know what you told yourselves it was."
"We wanted the best for you. The complaint, the pressure on the cattle contracts, coming here — all of it was to bring you home, to give this baby the McKenna name, to give you the life we'd built."
She pressed her hands flat on the folder. "Because I believed the life you were choosing was less than what you deserved."
I let her finish the way I'd always let her finish — patient, measured, filing each sentence before responding. My father interrupted and I listened. Both methods ended in the same place.
"You told a hospital you had legal guardianship of a seven-year-old boy you'd met three weeks before." I kept my voice level because imprecision would let her deflect.
"While he was bleeding and his mother was driving ninety minutes to reach him. You told nurses you had authority over a child who was scared and calling for his parents, and you used legal language to establish control over a boy whose blood was still on the hospital floor."
Catherine's face changed — her mouth opened and then closed, and her eyes filled, and her hands unfolded and pressed flat against the table. She didn't know she was doing it.
"I don't know who I was in that hallway." Her voice broke on the word. "I don't know who tells a hospital she has guardianship of a child she barely knows."
"You were just like Dad."
The sentence landed between us and stayed there. I'd been carrying it for weeks — maybe since the hospital, maybe since I saw my father's handwriting on the strategy notes and recognized the penmanship of a man who managed people the way he managed quarterly projections.
"That's not —" The denial died in the same breath, because the evidence was on the table in her own handwriting and there was nowhere for it to go.
The silence lasted long enough for the kitchen clock to become audible.
"Tell me about her." Her voice was smaller now, and different — a mother asking her son about his life, not gathering intelligence. "About Ivory. About how this works. Not to judge — I want to understand."
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Whatever you'll tell me."
So I told her. All of it, the way I'd never told anyone outside this house because outside these walls the truth was ammunition and inside it was just the air.
"Ivory held this family together for six years alone before I got here," I said. "Three children, a father with dementia, a veterinary practice, and a ranch — and she did it without asking anyone for anything. She challenges me when I hide behind systems. The first time she called me on selling the tractor without telling her, I saw my father in my own reflection, and the recognition of that changed me more than any conversation ever could."
"And Kameron?"
"The man you dismissed as reckless is the reason this family has a heart." I watched her face while I said it.
"He carves wooden horses for children who aren't biologically his and loves them with a ferocity that makes biology irrelevant. He told me I was their Papa — not a word, a fact — and he meant it with everything he had."
"And the baby?"
"Your granddaughter." I let that word settle between us and watched it land — watched her hands go still, watched her throat move, watched the word do the work that argument never could.
"Growing inside a woman who has been under siege for months and still gets up every morning and holds this family together with stubbornness and a spine harder than anything the McKenna name has ever produced."
Catherine listened without interrupting — the one family trait we shared that Gerald didn't. Patience to let someone finish, to sit with what was said before responding.
"I spent your whole life believing I knew what was best for you," she said, her palms pressing together in her lap.
"And if what's good for my child is good for me, even if I don't fully understand it yet." Her voice caught. "You're happy. You're loved. You're a father. That should have always been enough."
"I'd like you to meet her. The baby, when she's born."
Her eyes filled again and she nodded — not the measured agreement I'd grown up watching her deploy in board rooms, but the helpless, uncontrolled nod of a woman offered something she didn't believe she'd earned. "I'd like that, Colton. Very much."
She stood and came around the table, and then her hand was on my face — palm against my jaw, thumb brushing my cheekbone — and the gesture carried nothing strategic in it, nothing calculated, just the muscle memory of a woman who used to touch her son before touch became transactional.
I put my hand over hers and held it there.
"I'm sorry," she said, quiet, her hand trembling against my face. "For all of it. For the complaint, for Luke, for every year I spent believing I was different from your father when I was doing exactly what he would have done. I don't want to be that person anymore."
"Then don't be." I said, but her phone rang from her purse. She pulled it out and looked at the screen, and something shifted in her face, her jaw tightening and her hand dropping from my cheek.
"It's your father." She looked at me. "He doesn't know I'm here."