I looked at her.
She looked at me.
And then she laughed—that full unrestrained laugh—before walking away.
She got to her car and stopped with her hand on the door and looked back one more time. The sun was getting lower and it was on her face and I stood at the tailgate of my truck and looked back.
"Gage," she said.
"Yeah."
"Thank you." She said it simply, without the deflection she'd been using all afternoon. "For—all of it. The truck. The expenses. The…" She gestured vaguely at the situation.
"Don't thank me yet," I said. "You haven't met Sawyer.”
She smiled. Got in her car.
I watched the silver Honda pull out of the lot, signal at the exit, and turn south.
I pulled out my phone and texted Sawyer.
GAGE
Moving job two weeks from Saturday. San Antonio. Be there by eight.
SAWYER
who is she
It was a joke. I didn’t date and he knew it.
So I stared at that for a moment and thought of the best possible way to respond.
GAGE
The mother of my child.
Behave.
The three dots appeared immediately. Disappeared. Appeared again.
SAWYER
EXCUSE ME
I put my phone in my pocket.
Got in the truck.
Then I drove north…home to Briar Hill.
THREE
Millie
My apartment had never looked smaller than it did empty.
I stood in the middle of the living room at seven forty-five in the morning and looked at the stack of boxes by the door that represented the entirety of my material life. It wasn't a lot. Twelve boxes, two duffel bags, a lamp I'd had since college that I refused to get rid of, and a small print of the San Antonio skyline my dad had given me when I moved in that I'd taken off the wall last night and wrapped carefully in a dish towel. Everything else had been the apartment's—the furniture, the kitchen table, the bed frame—and I'd left it all for the next tenant because Gage had said the cottage was furnished and it turned out that when I stripped away everything that had come with a lease, this was what was actually mine.
