“He’d do other things, too—calling her phone and our office dozens of times a day from different numbers. But he wasn’t leaving messages, so again, hard to prove.

“Eventually, we got security footage from the grocery store and yoga studio, to show that he was following her around. And Lucy knew his Reddit username, so we took screenshots of some very . . . graphic . . . posts he had made about her. The posts were violent and threatening. That was enough to get a restraining order.

“He violated it twice. Spent sixty days in jail. And finally he moved to Florida. So, Lucy’s been a lot more relaxed since then. And I’ve been happy about that.”

Riona’s cheeks flush pink. She’s pleased by the memory of the win, and the weight lifted off of Lucy.

I would have expected her favorite case to be one where she accomplished something important for her family or earned a promotion.

Riona surprises me often. Like when she was singing in the car. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look so uninhibited, and simply . . . happy. She has such a tough personality that it’s easy to believe the impression she gives off deliberately: that she isn’t vulnerable or emotional. That she can’t be hurt. That she isn’t human enough to take joy in simple, silly pleasures, like singing along to an old song on the radio.

I like both sides of her. I like her grit and her drive. And I like that she does feel things, underneath. I think she feels them intensely, actually.

* * *

Riona and I are both exhausted, so I get her set up in one of the guest rooms right after dinner.

I can see my sister glancing curiously down the hall from her room—checking to see if Riona and I are staying in the same guest room together. We’re not—I’ll be sleeping in my old room on the other end of the house, like I always do.

My room is tiny, and almost exactly the same as I left it when I joined the army at eighteen. Movie posters all over the walls, and a tiny bed that I know my mother makes up fresh every couple of months, even though nobody’s sleeping in it.

Riona gets the nicest guest room. It has a pretty view down to the paddocks behind the house, and to the garden. It’s got a queen-size bed and an en suite bathroom.

I’ll be sharing the bathroom in the hall with Bo. It’s packed with her stuff scattered all over the countertops and overflowing the drawers. That’s fine with me—means I can steal her shampoo.

Bo just had her birthday, too. She’s eighteen now. Same age I left. I wonder if she’ll run off for a while, like I did. She’s always been the wildest one of all of us.

Grady never left, and he never would. He met Shelby in his tenth grade English class. She’s the only girl he was ever interested in. She wouldn’t marry him until she came home from college, but he waited here patiently, driving up to visit her at the University of Tennessee every weekend. Now they live in the little house Grady built a mile south on the property. You could see it from the front porch, if not for all the trees in the way. It’s close enough that they can drive over for dinner in two minutes, but far enough to give them a little privacy.