It found a little girl in pink cowboy boots who'd claimed me like I was already hers.
Dad finished his whiskey. Stood. Put his hand on my shoulder — one squeeze, brief and firm — and went inside.
I stayed on the porch. The stars came out, one by one, like someone was turning on lights in a house I couldn't see.
For the first time in twelve years, I didn't dream about the arena that night.
I dreamed about a laugh in the dark and a porch light left on for someone who wasn't home yet.
Chapter 4
Callie
There was a tin on my desk.
Small. Square. Matte black with gold lettering. I stood in the doorway of the office at seven forty-five on a Monday morning with my bag on my shoulder and my keys still in my hand and stared at it like it might detonate.
It wasn't a bomb. It was tea.
Loose-leaf Earl Grey. The exact brand — not just Earl Grey, not the generic supermarket kind, but the specific loose-leaf blend I drank every morning. The one I kept in the kitchen cupboard and brought to the office in a ziplock because the store in town didn't carry it.
Just the tin, centered on my desk, next to my keyboard, and a folded scrap of paper tucked underneath. I pulled it out. Messy handwriting, the kind that suggested a man who held pens the way he held reins — functional, not pretty.
Friends bring friends tea. It's in the handbook. Page 7. — C
I pressed my lips together. I was not going to smile. I was absolutely not going to smile.
I smiled.
I picked it up. Turned it over. The gold lettering was elegant in a way that told me someone had gone looking for this — not grabbed off a shelf, not ordered on impulse. Someone had known exactly what I drank and gone out of their way to find it.
My twenty-seventh birthday, Preston gave me a necklace. Emerald pendant. Beautiful. Expensive. I'd told him three times — once at dinner, once in the car, once while he was reading his phone — that I wanted the leather-bound journal from the stationery store on McKinney Avenue. Thirty dollars. He'd looked at me on my birthday like he'd performed a miracle, and when I opened the box, and my face did the wrong thing for half a second, he'd said, "Most women would kill for that necklace, Callie." I wore the necklace to his mother's dinner that weekend and told everyone it was exactly what I wanted.
And now. This tin. This quiet, specific,page 7 of the friendship handbook,tin of the exact tea I liked.
The comparison was so absurd I almost laughed.
Bev walked in. Saw the tin. Saw my face. Her step faltered — just barely, just a fraction — and then she walked to her desk with an expression so aggressively neutral it was practically a confession.
"Morning," she said. Busying herself with her bag. Not looking at me.
Theo appeared behind her, laptop bag swinging. He spotted the tin immediately — Theo had radar for anything that resembled romantic intrigue.
"What's that? Is that a gift? Who left a gift?" His eyes went wide. "Was it Clay Blackwood? Please tell me it was Clay Blackwood. I will quit this job and walk into the sun if Clay Blackwood left you a present and you're not going to —"
"Nobody left me anything." I put the tin in my desk drawer and shut it. "It's just tea."
"Just tea," Theo repeated. Then he turned to Bev. “Bev, you’re the only one besides Savannah and Levi who have a key."
Bev's pen stopped moving. She didn’t look at us.
"Beverly Ann Kessler," Theo said, with the slow, delighted precision of a man assembling evidence. "Did you let Clay Blackwood into this office?"
She started writing again. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Your left eye is twitching. It twitches when you lie. It twitched when you told Savannah you hadn't eaten the last of the blueberry muffins."
Bev set her pen down. Looked at the ceiling. Then, with the dignity of a woman who knew she'd been caught and had decided to go down swinging: "I may have run into him at Cooper's General on Friday. And he may have asked — casually, very casually — what kind of tea you drank. And I may have mentioned the brand." She picked her pen back up. "That's all."
