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Reenie had been representing Shaws in one capacity or another for going on six years now, which meant she'd bailed Colter out of two different counties' lockups, drafted a cease and desist against a magazine that wanted to run his father's old case files, and once talked Dory through the legal fallout of a stunt Colter pulled without telling anyone first. She knew this family's paperwork better than she knew her own. She did not, as far as she could actually remember, know a single story about any of them that didn't end in a hospital, a courtroom, or a body.
That was really what was behind the question, if she was honest with herself. Not idle curiosity so much as being tired of it.
They were camped outside the city at Colter's usual spot, the Airstream's one string of lights hanging crooked under the awning because nobody had ever bothered fixing it, Russell sprawled in a folding chair nursing a beer that had probably gone warm an hour ago, Dory perched on the picnic table the way she used to sit on countertops as a kid, like she'd never quite grown into using furniture the normal way. Reenie had brought her own wine, because Colter's idea of a stocked bar was instant coffee and whatever Russell forgot to take home.
"Can I ask something?" She said it into a lull, mostly aimed at nobody in particular. "You're all allowed to tell me it's none of my business."
"When has that ever stopped you?" Russell said, not unkindly, and took a pull off the beer.
"Fair." She turned her glass by the stem, working up to it a little. "Any good stories. From when you three were kids. I feel like I only ever hear about your family in relation to a felony."
Nobody answered right away. Dory laughed, short, more surprised than amused. Russell squinted at the fire like the question had actual weight to it.
"Okay." He sat forward eventually, elbows on his knees. "Okay, yeah, actually. There's one." He glanced at Colter, half a grin already starting. "You remember the skinning thing?"
"Don't."
"I'm telling it anyway." Russell looked back at Reenie. "Colter's maybe nine. Dad's got this rule, nobody eats till everybody's cleared their task for the day, and Colter's stuck on some skinning technique he hadn't gotten right yet. Wasn't gonna finish in time." He shrugged, like the next part was obvious. "So I told Dad he was already done, before Dad even went to check. Then once everybody sat down to eat, I snuck back out and finished it myself. Didn't touch my own plate till I got back in. By the time Dad actually looked, the work was done. Just not by the kid who was supposed to do it."
"You never told me that." Dory sat up straighter.
"Wasn't something I bragged about. Lying to Dad." Russell shrugged, though something warmer moved under it. "Kid was nine and starving. Wasn't gonna let that happen over skinning technique."
Colter didn't say anything. Reenie watched something cross his face anyway, there and gone too fast to name.
"Okay, my turn." Dory pulled her knees up onto the table, wrapping her arms around them. "This is after I'd already moved in with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Pete." She paused, like she was deciding how much of it to actually tell. "I came back to visit maybe a year later. Brought Colter this paperback everybody at my new school was obsessed with, figured he'd never get his hands on anything like it out there otherwise." She glanced at him. Something soft in it. "We stayed up half the night on the shed roof. I told him everything about my new school, what regular kids were even like, because I don't think he fully believed they existed as more than an idea before that." She smiled, small. "It's one of maybe three nights from back then I actually remember being happy."
Reenie watched Colter through all of it, and something about his stillness had shifted since Russell's story, gone rigid in a way it hadn't been before.
"Your turn," Russell said, easy, no idea yet what he was walking into.
Colter didn't say anything for long enough that Dory glanced over, the start of a question already forming on her face.
"My childhood was never fun." He said it flat. Too flat. "And I'm sure not gonna sit here and glorify Mom by pretending otherwise."
Nobody said anything. Russell's beer stopped an inch from his mouth. Dory's smile went somewhere else entirely, folding in on itself.
Colter seemed to hear himself a beat too late. "Forget it. That came out wrong. It's not a big deal."
Reenie had known Colter Shaw six years, through two arrests and one funeral, and had never once heard him say a full honest sentence about his own feelings without immediately trying to take it back.
"Colter." Dory's voice had gone careful, testing. "What do you mean?"
"I mean it's not worth getting into." He picked up a stick and started poking at the fire like the conversation was already over. "Somebody else go again. Russell, tell another one."
"Nobody's going again." Russell said it easy, no push in it at all, just a fact laid down gently. "Talk to us."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"There's clearly something to talk about." Reenie kept her voice level, patient, the way you'd talk to somebody standing right at the edge of something. "You don't say a sentence like that and then act like it means nothing."
"It is nothing. It was a long time ago." Colter kept his eyes on the fire, wouldn't look at any of them. "I don't need everybody looking at me like I'm about to fall apart. I'm fine."
"We're not looking at you like that because we think you're falling apart." Dory reached over and rested a hand on his knee, barely any weight to it, just there. "We're looking at you like that because we love you, and you never say things like that."
Colter didn't answer right away.
"That's not an answer either," Reenie said, when nobody else did. "You don't have to tell us anything, Colter. But don't hand us one sentence and act like that's the whole story."
Colter looked at her a long moment. Something almost grateful moved behind the discomfort, like she'd said the thing he'd needed permission to be asked.
He didn't say anything right away even after that. Picked at the label on a water bottle he wasn't drinking. Started to say something, stopped, tried again.
"There's two parts to it," he said finally, and the flatness was gone out of his voice completely. "First part, I was never really a kid. Not the way either of you probably think about it. Dad had me running drills before I could tie my own shoes right. Cold nights on purpose, so I'd know what real cold felt like. Tests I didn't know I was being graded on till I failed one." He was looking at the fire, not either of them. "That part everybody already knows. Dad's whole thing. Honestly I don't even resent that part as much as people probably expect. At least it was honest about what it was."
Nobody rushed him.
"Second part's after." He turned the water bottle over in his hands, not drinking it, just needing something to do with them. "After Dad's gone. After Russell's a suspect and can't come around. After Dory's three states away starting a whole new life." His jaw worked. "Second part it's just me and Mom in that house, and every day she's got some new version of how you two didn't want anything to do with me. How you'd both moved on, and I was the only one who couldn't."
Dory made a small sound. Didn't say anything.
"She told me you didn't want to be bothered." Colter looked at Russell now. "Every letter I tried sending you, and never heard back, she said you'd told her to stop forwarding them. That you had enough on your plate without babysitting a kid who wasn't even really your problem."
"I never got a single letter." Russell's voice came out rough, almost angry, though not at Colter. "I swear to you, I never got one letter."
"I believe you." The word cracked slightly on its way out. Colter turned to Dory last, and something in his face braced before he'd even started. He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
"Colter."
"That night on the shed roof." He said it fast, like getting it out quick was the only way it was coming out at all. "That's not the version I got told."
Dory went very still.
"Mom said, after you left, that you told her the visit was hard. That you felt sorry for me. Didn't know how you'd get through another one, seeing how I'd turned out, and you were glad you'd gotten out before it happened to you too." He wasn't hiding that his eyes had gone wet, which told Reenie more than anything he'd said so far. "I've had that as the actual memory for twenty years, Dory. The one good night I thought I had. She took even that one."
"That's not what happened." Dory's voice broke on it. "That's not what I said. That's not what I felt. I have thought about that night for years too, Colter, it's one of the only good things I have from back then."
"I know that now." He could barely get it out. "Doesn't undo twenty years of the other version."
The fire popped once. Nobody moved for a second.
Then Colter sat back, hard, like he'd only just heard himself say all of it out loud. He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Forget it. This isn't a fireside chat. I don't know why I even brought it up."
"Don't do that." Dory's voice cracked on it. "Don't take it back now."
"There's nothing to take back. I'm just saying we don't need to make a whole thing out of it."
"Colter." Reenie kept her voice level, even though nothing in her felt level right now. "You don't get to hand us that and then pretend you didn't."
He didn't answer right away. Didn't get up and walk off either, which from him was practically a concession.
"What she did isn't just lying." Reenie said it quieter than she meant to, like the word she was about to use had more weight than her voice wanted to carry. "Cutting you off from the only two people who loved you, feeding you a version of them built to keep you alone. That's not a woman making one bad call in a hard year. That's abuse, Colter."
"Don't call it that." It came out sharper than anything he'd said all night, some old reflex slamming a door shut. "She lost her husband. She was out of her mind with grief, and grieving people do messed up things, that doesn't make her a monster. She's still my mother."
"I'm not calling her a monster." Reenie held his eyes, steady, not backing off the point but not pushing it like a blade either. "I'm telling you what she did to you has a name, whether you're ready to use it or not. You don't have to call it anything tonight. But I watched what it did to you five minutes ago, and I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I didn't just because the word makes you uncomfortable."
Colter didn't answer that. His jaw worked. He looked like a man being handed two true things at once that had no business fitting in the same hand, and being asked to hold them both anyway.
Dory got up first, slow, like she wasn't sure her legs would hold the whole way there, and Colter let her cross the entire distance before he moved at all, arms coming up around her a beat late, like his body needed a second to remember it was allowed to do that.
"I came back because you were the reason I wanted to," she said, muffled into his shoulder. "Not despite you. Because of you. That was always true."
Russell got up too. Didn't say anything, just put a hand at the back of Colter's neck, the same steady weight Reenie imagined he'd used a hundred times as kids, back when neither of them had words for what was happening to them either.
Reenie stayed where she was. Six years of paperwork, she thought, and she hadn't known a single real thing about any of them until tonight.
"For what it's worth," she said, once the worst of it had gone quiet, "I'd like to hear the real version of that story again sometime. All the way through."
Dory laughed, wet, still not letting go. "Yeah. Yeah, we could do that."
Colter didn't say anything. But he didn't pull away either, and out there with the fire dying down, his sister's arms still around him and his brother's hand still steady at his neck, that was answer enough.