Chapter 17: Brisket and Tears

The Austin heat found Harper the second the terminal doors slid open.

It wrapped around her like a towel straight out of the dryer, heavy and warm and smelling faintly of cut grass, hot asphalt, and somebody's barbecue pit miles away. She stopped short on the curb. A man rolling a golf bag nearly clipped her heels.

"Sorry," she said, and didn't move.

Valentina pushed her sunglasses down her nose. "Are you smelling the air?"

"Shut up. Yes."

"Babe, that's a shuttle bus."

"It's a Texas shuttle bus."

Valentina snorted and waved down the rental car van. While they waited, she scrolled through her phone, the only one of them still connected to the world.

"Okay. Updates. The video's at four million. Chloe's dentist apparently has a waitlist now. And Keaton booked us a suite."

Harper turned. "He what?"

"At his hotel downtown. The Ashford. Top floor." Valentina held up the screen: a short, polite text, not a single emoji. "I didn't say yes."

"Good."

"I also didn't say no."

"Val."

"It has a rooftop pool, Harper. I'm not made of stone."

The rental counter handed them a little silver sedan that Valentina insulted for the entire first mile. Harper didn't give directions. She didn't need them. Her hands remembered every turn: past the overpass covered in murals, around the taco truck that had somehow survived without her, down the farm road where the city thinned out and the live oaks took over.

Half an hour later, they pulled into a gravel lot beside a low, weathered building with a hand-painted sign swinging over the door: Lone Star Smokehouse. Gray smoke curled lazily from the chimney. A line snaked out the door and along the wall, college kids and construction crews and old men in cowboy hats, all waiting in the heat like it was church.

Harper got out of the car and just stood there.

"Babe?" Valentina came around the hood. "You okay?"

"This is it," Harper said softly. "This is the place."

The line took forty minutes. Neither of them minded.

Inside, the room was long and dim, all picnic tables, paper towel rolls, and squeeze bottles of sauce nobody needed. At the back counter, a pitmaster in a stained apron sliced brisket on butcher paper with a long knife he handled like a violin bow. The smell was absurd. Smoke and black pepper and rendered fat, so thick she could taste it from the door.

"What'll it be, ladies?"

"Brisket," Harper said, and her voice came out strange. "Two pounds. Fatty end. Jalapeño cheddar sausage. A half rack of ribs. Beans. Potato salad. Pickles. Onions. White bread."

The pitmaster raised an eyebrow. "Y'all feeding a family?"

"Just us."

Valentina leaned over the counter. "And banana pudding. Two." She paused. "Three."

He laid it all out on a tray: brisket wearing a crust of cracked black pepper, ribs lacquered dark red, sausage links that split and hissed when the knife went through. He slid it across the counter and gave her a single approving nod, like she'd passed a test.

They claimed the end of a picnic table. Harper tore off a slice of white bread, laid a ribbon of brisket on top, added two pickle chips and a curl of raw onion, folded it, and took a bite.

Oh.

Smoky. Salty. So tender it gave up the second her teeth touched it. The bark crackled. The fat simply vanished. It tasted like the county fair back home and Mom's backyard on the Fourth of July and every summer when the only thing she worried about was her next dive.

Something huge and warm climbed up her throat and refused to go back down.

Her nose started to sting.

No. Not here. Not in a barbecue joint.

One tear slipped out. Then another. She set the sandwich down, pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes, and made a noise she would deny making for the rest of her life.

"Harper?" Valentina's voice went soft. "Hey. Hey, you're okay."

"I'm fine." Harper hiccuped. "I'm fine, I'm just... three years, Val. Three years of quinoa."

Valentina stared at her. Then the corner of her mouth twitched.

"Three years of halibut," Harper went on, wiping her face with a paper towel. "Of kale chips. Of cauliflower pretending to be rice. I forgot what food tastes like. I forgot what it's like to actually eat."

That did it. Valentina cracked first, snorting so hard she had to grab the table, and Harper went right down with her. Within seconds they were both crying and wheezing over a tray of meat while an old man in a Stetson at the next table studied his coleslaw with tremendous concentration.

"God," Harper gasped. "I missed this. I missed this so much."

"I know, babe." Valentina reached across and squeezed her hand, mascara smudged under both eyes. "Now eat your meat."

She picked up a rib, took a bite, and closed her eyes. "Oh my God. That's obscene." She chewed, swallowed, and glared at the bone like it had personally betrayed her. "That's a whole day of calories."

"You're on your second banana pudding."

"I'm aware, Harper."

"You ordered three."

"And I'll starve when we get back to LA. For my career." She took another enormous bite. "Today, I'm Texan again."

Harper snorted and reached for another slice. A while later, she looked down and found her side of the tray scraped clean. When was the last time she'd finished a meal without wondering whether Myles would raise an eyebrow at how much she'd eaten?

She let the thought go and licked a smear of sauce off her thumb.

They stayed until the sun slanted gold through the dusty windows and the lunch rush drained away. On his way out, the old man in the Stetson tipped his hat to them, which Valentina immediately decided meant he was in love with her.

Finally she slumped back with a groan, both hands on her stomach. "I'm going to die. I'm going to die in a smokehouse, and they'll put it on my tombstone."

"Let's walk it off."

"Walk where?"

Harper looked out at the heat rippling off the gravel lot and grinned.

"Campus."

They tossed the butcher paper, grabbed two sweet teas to go, and headed back toward the city with every window rolled down. The hot wind tangled Harper's hair. Valentina sang along, badly, to a country station.

And somewhere past the campus, on a quiet street lined with oaks, waited a door Harper had been avoiding for three years.