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coming!”
    Steven was relieved when the rig, a big, fancy redtruck, turned in at their driveway. Matt would have been pretty disappointed if they’d gone on by, whoever they were.
    He recognized his cousin Meg right away. She leaned out the window on the passenger side and waved, beaming, her bright blond hair catching the dusty light. Her husband, Brad, was at the wheel.
    As soon as the truck came to a stop, Meg was out, sprinting across the yard to throw her arms around Steven’s neck. “You’re here!” she cried.
    Steven laughed. It had been a while since he’d felt this welcome anyplace.
    Matt scrambled down out of the truck bed, eager for company.
    Brad unfolded his long, lanky frame from the interior of the pickup and approached, and the two men shook hands while Meg bent to look into Matt’s eyes and smile.
    “You must be Matt,” she said.
    Matt nodded. “And you must be Steven’s cousin,” he replied. “I forget your name, though.”
    “Meg,” she said gently.
    Brad, looking like a rancher in his old jeans, long-sleeved chambray work shirt and ancient boots, jabbed a thumb in the direction of the house and said, “Looks like this place is in even worse shape than I thought.”
    Meg surveyed it with her hands resting on her trim, blue-jeaned hips. Her white cotton top was fitted and sleeveless, and it didn’t seem possible that she was old enough to be married, let alone the mother of a couple of kids.
    She could have passed for seventeen.
    “Brad O’Ballivan,” she scolded, sounding whollygood-natured, “I’ve told you a thousand times that it’s a train wreck over here.”
    Brad grinned. “It’s better than the barn, though,” he drawled.
    Matt had recognized him by then. “Are you that famous guy who’s on TV sometimes?” he asked. Before Brad could answer, he went on. “We know somebody else with the same last name as yours. Melissa.”
    “Melissa is my sister,” Brad said, obviously enjoying the exchange.
    “You have a sister?” Matt made it sound like the eighth wonder. He was an only child, of course, and so was Steven. Did the child long for a sister, the way Steven himself had, growing up?
    Brad crouched, so he could look directly into Matt’s face. “Actually,” he said, “I have three sisters. There’s Olivia—she’s a veterinarian and she can talk to animals. And Ashley—she and Melissa are twins.”
    Steven felt a pang at the mention of twins, the way he always did when the subject came up. It made him think of his cousins Conner and Brody and their complex family history. They were a matched set, those two.
    “Do they look alike?” Matt asked. “Ashley and Melissa?”
    “Nope,” Brad answered. “They’re not those kind of twins.”
    “Oh,” Matt said, absorbing the information. Then he brightened, looking from Brad, who straightened to his full height and must have looked pretty tall to the child against that sunlit Arizona sky, to Meg, then back again. “You’re famous, though, huh?”
    “Yeah,” Brad admitted, sounding almost shy. “Sort of.”
    Matt nodded and moved on, over the celebrity aspectof the encounter, evidently. “We’re going to get a tent and camp out!” he announced. “And we’re adopting a dog, too!”
    Meg beamed. “That’s great,” she said.
    Matt absorbed her approval like it was sunlight.
    “You could use Brad’s old tour bus,” she told Steven, a few moments later. The two of them had only known each other for about six months; turned out Meg was something of an amateur genealogist, and she’d tracked him down on the internet and sent him an email. Steven didn’t have a lot of kin, and he wasn’t taking any chances on alienating his cousin by imposing on her generosity.
    Brad nodded, though, and rested a light hand against the small of Meg’s back. “That’s a good idea,” he said, before Steven could get a word out. “It’s pretty well-equipped, and nobody’s used it in a while.”
    Steven opened his mouth