POV: Kameron
The man in my driveway had my jaw. Not similar but mine, the exact angle and set, the line from ear to chin I saw every morning and had never connected to another living person because the person it came from had been a voice on a phone I stopped calling when I was nineteen.
Walker Banks. My brother. Half-brother, same mother, different fathers, different decades, older by six years.
Neither of us spoke. Twenty feet of gravel between us, coffee going cold in my hand, and he stood by his truck with hands in his jacket pockets.
"Jolene said you need hands." Four words, and whatever phone call produced them must have lasted an hour.
"She didn't ask me," I said, and the words came out harder than I intended. "She doesn't get to make that call."
"I know." He shifted his weight. "She didn't ask me either. She told me." His mouth moved toward something that wasn't a smile. "She's good at that."
"That's one way to put it." I gripped the mug. "What else did she tell you?"
"That the ranch was short-handed. That the finances were bad. That you had a newborn and a sick father-in-law and fences falling down." He looked past me at the house. "That you were too stubborn to ask for help yourself."
"She say I didn't want you here?" I set the mug down on the railing because my hand was gripping it too hard.
"She said you wouldn't want me here." He met my eyes, blue to brown. "That's why I drove instead of called, because it's harder to hang up on someone standing in your driveway."
I stepped aside and opened the door wider. No embrace, no tears, just a body moved and a threshold offered. He walked past close enough that I caught his scent, coffee and diesel.
Ivory was in the kitchen with Lucy against her chest. Her eyes tracked Walker the second he came through the door, measuring him the way she measured everyone.
"Ivory," I said. "This is Walker."
"Your brother." Not a question. She shifted Lucy and extended her hand. "Welcome to the chaos."
"That's one word for it." Walker shook her hand, and his eyes tracked the room the way working eyes track any space, exits and structure. Then his gaze found Colt in the office doorway.
"Colt McKenna." Hand extended, steady.
"Walker Banks." Brief handshake. "Jolene mentioned you."
"Jolene mentioned everybody," Colt said. "How much did she tell you?"
"Everything." Walker looked at me. "The spreadsheets, the fences, the kids, the baby, the finances. All of it, Kameron."
"All of it," I said, and those two words covered the arrangement, the family, the CPS case, the dying man upstairs. Walker held my eyes and didn't flinch.
"All of it. I'm here anyway."
The triplets appeared as a unit, Lily first, Luke slightly behind, Levi in the doorway with his notebook. They stared at Walker because he had my shoulders and my height but brown eyes where mine were blue.
"You look like Daddy," Lily said. "But your eyes are different."
"I've been told." The corner of his mouth moved. "You must be the one who runs things."
"I'm Lily. I run some things." She looked at Ivory. "Mama runs the rest."
"She's not wrong," Ivory said, and Walker looked at her with something shifting toward respect. "How long are you staying?"
"As long as the fences need fixing," Walker said. Ivory nodded once, and Luke stepped forward from behind Lily.
"What do you do?" Luke asked.
"I fix things," Walker said. "Fences, equipment, whatever needs doing."
"We need a lot of fixing," Luke said, and the honesty of a seven-year-old who'd been watching his father hold a ranch together landed in the kitchen without softening.
Levi watched from the doorway. "What are you writing?" Walker asked, because Levi's pencil was moving across the notebook page.
"Your name," Levi said. "And the date. And that your eyes are brown."
Jolene stood in the hallway behind the kids, hands clasped. I didn't look at her. The anger was banked, not extinguished.
Walker walked the property that afternoon. He saw the fences, the gaps, the south pasture where Colt and I had been driving posts by hand.
"How long has it been this bad?" he said at the south fence line.
"Since September. Gerald cut off the accounts and we've been patching since then."
"Two of you doing all this?" He looked at the fence line stretching to the tree break. "This is a four-person operation at minimum."
"We know." I looked at the posts I'd driven by hand with Colt beside me. "We managed."
"You survived." He pulled a loose post and tested the base. "That's different from managing. This needs replacing, not patching. Half of what I've seen needs replacing."
"We don't have the money for that." I said it flat because it was fact, and Walker let the post go.
"You don't need money for fence posts. You need hands and time, and I have both."
"And when the hands and time run out?" I said. "When you've seen enough and you leave?"
He looked at me, and his face did something I recognized because my face did the same thing when someone questioned whether I'd stay. It went flat and his jaw set and his eyes held mine without blinking. "I drove eleven hours, Kameron. I didn't drive eleven hours to patch a fence and go home."
"People leave," I said. "People in our family leave. That's what we do."
"That's what she did." His voice was steady and he didn't look away. "I'm not her."
We stood at the fence line and neither of us spoke for a while. Then he picked up the post puller and started working.
That night Walker's duffel was on the cottage floor and his jacket on the hook. I stopped in the open doorway and he looked up from the bed, phone in hand.
"Settling in?" I said.
"It's a good space." He looked around. "Doesn't feel lived in."
"It wasn't." I leaned against the doorframe. "Long story."
"Jolene told me that one too." He set the phone on the mattress. "The cottage, the CPS case. I know what this room was, Kameron."
I didn't answer that. "Deon didn't answer," Walker said after a pause, flat. "She called him too. He didn't pick up."
"How many of us are there?" I asked, and it was the first time I'd said the word us about siblings I'd never met.
"Three that I know of. Me, you, Deon." He leaned back against the wall. "Deon's in Oklahoma. He's angry."
"At Jolene?" I said, and Walker shook his head.
"At everybody. At Jolene for leaving, at the world for letting her, at himself for caring." Walker's jaw tightened. "He's the youngest. She left him last, and he took it the hardest."
"She left all of us," I said. Walker held my eyes across the room, and neither of us looked away.
"She did. But she came back for you first, Kameron. That means something whether you want it to or not."