Ray Callahan had never been the kind of stepfather who tried too hard. He’d learned early that trying too hard with Diane produced the opposite of the intended effect — she’d clock the effort immediately, pull back two steps for every one he took forward, and the temperature between them would drop in that particular way it had where you couldn’t point to a single thing she’d done wrong.
She was talented that way. Had been since she was thirteen, when he’d married her mother and inherited, along with Claire’s laugh and her paint-stained hands and her gift for making a house feel like a home, a teenage stepdaughter who’d already decided how she felt about the arrangement. So Ray had settled into a different approach over the years.