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wasn’t prepared to take on at this juncture, when his whole life was in transition.
    “Because Nash is your brother,” Landry said, with extreme patience.
    “He’s also yours,” Zane pointed out. He was already wondering what a person said to a twelve-year-old kid who’d probably been shuffled between the homes of strangers, their dad’s distant relations, the girlfriend du jour and then back through the whole cycle again. Repeatedly.
    “If I don’t make this meeting in Berlin,” Landry replied, “I could lose one of my most important accounts.”
    “Sucks to be you,” Zane responded mildly. “Who’s been raising this child all this time, anyway?”
    “My understanding,” Landry supplied stiffly, “is that he’s been knocking around the country with Dad. Recently, that is.” His voice softened a little. “He’s not a bad kid, Zane. And he didn’t have the kind of mom who would go to bat for him, like ours did for us.”
    In that moment, Zane could see his late mother—an inveterate optimist, their Maddie Rose—in such vivid detail that she might as well have been standing right there in his kitchen. She’d waited tables for a living, and the three of them had lived out of her beat-up old station wagon more than once, when she was between waitressing gigs, but life had been good with her, despite all the Salvation Army Christmases and secondhand school clothes and food-bank vittles. She’d had a way of “reframing” a situation—her word—so that moving on, when a job ended or a romance went sour, always seemed like an exciting adventure instead of the grinding hardship it usually was. Even when it involved considerable sacrifice on her part, Maddie Rose always made sure they stayed put when school was in session, come hell or high water, and she’d checked their homework and encouraged them to read library books and made them say grace, too.
    As always, he wished Maddie Rose had lived to see her elder son become something more than a rodeo bum, wished he could have set her up in a good house and made sure she never lacked for anything again, but, too often, life didn’t work that way.
    She’d died in a hospital somewhere in rural South Dakota, a charity case, suffering from an advanced case of leukemia, before Zane could so much as cash his first Hollywood paycheck, let alone provide for her the way he would have done, given the chance.
    Although he and Landry usually avoided the whole topic of Maddie Rose’s death, it lay raw between them, all right, like a wound deep enough to rub the skin away, and, even now, it hurt.
    “Send Nash to Missoula,” Zane heard himself say. “Let me know when he’s getting in, and I’ll be there to pick him up.”
    “Good.” Landry almost murmured the word. “Good.”
    It wasn’t a thank-you, but it would have to do.
    Zane didn’t ring off with a goodbye. He simply hit the end call button and sent his phone skittering across the tabletop, causing Slim to perk up his mismatched ears and straighten his knobby spine.
    Zane grinned, then ruffled the hide on the dog’s back to reassure him. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, boy,” he told Slim. Then, with a philosophical sigh, he added, “And that makes one of us.”
    * * *
    T HE NEXT AFTERNOON , Zane was late getting to the airport in Missoula, and it was easy to spot Nash, since the kid was standing all by himself, next to the luggage carousel, a battered green duffel bag at his feet. Earbuds piped music into his head, and his blondish-brown hair stood up in spikes, as though he’d been accidentally electrified. Seeing Zane, he scowled in recognition and dispensed with whatever tunes he’d been listening to while he waited.
    “Montana sucks,” Nash said sullenly, and without preamble. “I thought I was going to Hollywood, and now I find out I’m stuck here. ”
    “Life is hard,” Zane replied, smoothly casual, “and then you die.”
    Nash rolled cornflower-blue eyes. His clothes were