I'd been turning over the right opening sentence for three weeks. I had a lot of them. I'd given Brian Torres a clean version at the lockers and let him let it go. I'd given Garrett Stone the silence he'd give me back, and he'd taken it. I hadn't given Shane anything because Shane had told me, my second morning, thathe would ask me again, and I knew when he asked, I was going to have to say it.
I said it.
"There's a woman."
"Yeah."
"In Hartsdale. A vet. Lives across the street from my grandmother's place. She came back to town in September. We got together in October."
"And."
"And in November, she told me to take the slot."
I let it sit.
Shane didn't move.
"You believed her."
"I believed she meant it. She did mean it. She told me on the bank of the lake, the afternoon you called me. She told me my life had been pointed at this job for twelve years, and she wasn't gonna be the reason I turned it down."
"Mhm."
"Her ex spent six years overridin' her on every decision she made. I wasn't gonna be the man who told her she'd made the wrong call. So I drove down."
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"Did you tell her you didn't want it?"
The kitchen went very quiet.
I sat there with the mug in my hand. The question had been sitting under everything for three weeks, and I'd been telling myself a long answer. That I was respecting her. That I was honoring the decision of a woman who'd had her decisions overridden for six years.
The long version had a lot of words in it.
The question Shane was asking had one answer.
"I tried."
He looked at me.
"You didn't tell her all of it."
I blew out a breath. "No."
"That you'd been deciding for two months you weren't gonna take it."
"No."
"That you hadn't called the realtor in eighteen months."
"No."
"That you hadn't packed a box."
"No."
