“Our dad didn’t know I existed,” McKenna pointed out, sliding her knife through the garlic butter that had come with the bread and slathering a thick layer on.

Gabe bit back the words that hovered on his tongue. McKenna was right. He hadn’t known that she’d existed. He believed his dad on that score. But there were other kids. Kids that Hank Dalton had known about. No one else but Gabe knew it. Well, Gabe and his mother. And he didn’t even know if Hank knew that they knew.

“He didn’t,” Gabe confirmed.

“I’m not angry at him,” McKenna said. “You guys are the only family I have. I waited twenty-seven years to find you. To find him. And your mom has been... I’m not going to waste time being mad about things I can’t change. There’s no earthly reason.”

“I admire that about you,” Gabe said. “But... I want to take the ranch and make it something big.”

“Are you atoning for Dad’s sins?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think kids who have been in foster care like I was could benefit from knowing there’s a home base. When you’re done with the system, oftentimes you slip away. There are things in place to help, but there’s not a whole lot of accountability, and it’s easy to kind of walk off into the distance. There needs to be more training. A sense of belonging. I can’t tell you what working at Get Out of Dodge did for me. Right away. Just the sense of...accomplishment that he gave me. Ranch work might have saved me.”

“Well, you look like you’re pretty intact.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Yeah. I think I might have gotten this way a little bit sooner if I would have had something that I’d worked for and accomplished. I think the really hard thing about that kind of life is...the sense of futility. You can’t control anything or change anything. Nothing is yours.”

“That must be tough,” he said, his throat tightening, overwhelmed by the differences that had marked his upbringing versus McKenna’s. It made him wonder... It made him wonder if it was different for the other kids that were out there. If they were struggling, too.

Well, it wasn’t like any of them were kids. They would be his age to a couple of years younger. At least, based on what his mother had told him.

Right before she’d...

Right before she’d asked him to go into the rodeo.

“It was,” McKenna said. “Here I am. All survived. And I’m here with you.”

“Yes, you are,” he said.

As if on cue, the waiter brought their dinner.

McKenna looked down at her very expensive steak, then back up at him with a big smile on her face. “Now, can we talk about something other than my depressing childhood?”

“Sure,” he said. “We can talk about mine.”

“Hard pass.”

“I’m still not telling you anything about Jamie.”

“It was worth a shot. Okay...” She looked up as if searching for something in the cracks of the pine plank ceiling. “Have you ever broken your arm?”