She waved off Lainie’s compliment. “Sure you can.”

“I don’t have any fashion sense whatsoever, since I spend most my time in scrubs at the hospital.” She grinned. “Or naked, if Hank has his way.”

Harper almost said, “Bran is of the same mind-set,” but she bit back the comment and changed the subject. “How goes the housebuilding project?”

“Slow. I can’t freakin’ wait to have our own home. Sounds like we’ll be able to move in two weeks.”

“How are things between Abe and Hank?”

“Better. Us having our own space will help. Sometimes I think Hank has mixed feelings about moving out of the house he grew up in. It’s the only place he’s ever lived.”

“I’ve never had that kind of permanence in my life.” Harper pointed to Bran’s abandoned ancestral home. “So I don’t understand why Bran doesn’t live there. I know he still considers that his grandparents’ house, but it’s a shame to let it fall to ruin.”

“I agree. When I asked Hank why Bran lives in a trailer, he looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. But it does remind me of my grandma’s house. I loved that place and was really sad I couldn’t afford to keep it after she passed on.” Lainie took another sip of beer. “Have you ever been inside?”

“Nope. You?”

“Nope.” Lainie looked at Harper with challenge in her eyes. “What do you say we take ourselves a little sneak peek?”

Harper started to refuse, wondering if Bran would consider that a breach of privacy, but he’d never exactly come right out and said she couldn’t explore it. Curiosity won out over propriety. “Let’s do it.”

She wasn’t surprised the front door opened without a key, since Bran never remembered to lock his own door. Dust motes danced in shafts of watery sunlight streaming through the dirty windows.

They stepped into a large entryway with a wide staircase stretching along the back wall.

“Left or right?” Lainie asked.

“Umm, left?”

Their footsteps sounded hollow on the wooden floor as they entered what must’ve been the dining room. Big windows faced the shelterbelt, and Harper could imagine sitting at a long table, gazing out those windows, watching the seasons change.

“Look at the woodwork in here,” Lainie said, running her hand down the mahogany-colored trim around the doorframe.

“It’s gorgeous.” Dark trim also ran the length of the floor, and the ceiling boasted elaborate crown molding. Harper walked through an arched doorway to the kitchen. No appliances had been left behind. The countertops were dated and chipped, as were the cupboards and the linoleum covering the floor, but the space was large for the time frame in which it’d been built.

“It’s weird that the kitchen is in the back of the house. Almost every house I’ve seen from this era has the kitchen in the front. And you enter the house more formally through the back.”

“You mean like this?” Harper asked. An enclosed porch spanned the breadth of the back of the house.

“Oh, wow. This is seriously cool. We’re putting one of these three-season porches off our kitchen too. This house was seriously ahead of its time, although it does appear to have been constructed backward.”

Harper wandered through another arched doorway into the living room. It also had a door that opened onto the porch. More windows. More gorgeous woodwork. More feelings of sadness that Bran could just ignore this beautiful home that was so much a part of his personal history and should be part of his future.

She wound through the L-shaped room, discovering a small bathroom with limited headspace that had been constructed beneath the stairs as an afterthought when they’d added indoor plumbing. “I’m going upstairs,” she said to Lainie.

The handrail and the balustrades were made of that same mahogany-colored wood. The instant she cleared the last step at the top of the stairs, she smiled. The floor was wider than a hallway, with a sunny landing. She imagined Bran as a little boy playing with trucks and Legos under the watchful eye of his grandmother.

Five doors were spread at random intervals. Behind the first door she found a full bathroom. The next two doors she opened led to small bedrooms. She knew that neither of these rooms had held Bran’s childhood dreams and memories. The biggest room appeared to be the master bedroom, but it was small in comparison to modern-day master bedrooms and master suites.

The room directly across the hall, she knew without a doubt, had belonged to Bran. No faded marks from posters marred the walls. But there was one obvious sign of his residency: fishhooks embedded in the woodwork surrounding the window. Probably some fancy hand-tied lures, which made her wonder why he’d taken everything out of the house but left those.

“Harper? I think I hear the guys coming back. We’d better get going.”

She gave the barren room one last, lingering look and returned downstairs.

ATVs, pickups, and horses trickled in from the field. Around that same time, wives and kids, girlfriends, and others showed up with heaping bowls of side dishes. Harper knew almost everyone, and if they were surprised to see her acting the part of hostess at Bran Turner’s branding, they didn’t mention it—an achievement itself in their small community.

After the guys washed up, they dug in like they’d never seen food. Harper had secretly suspected Bran was crazy for having her order a hundred pounds of shredded beef and fifty pounds of shredded pork, but now she wondered if there’d be enough.