"I asked you to have a position about it." She picks her fork back up. Then puts it down again. "Forget it."
"Sloane."
"Everett." She says my name the way she says things she means. "You pulled back. Today, after the call, you pulled back. I felt it. And I get it — I do, but don't tell me you're right here when you're not."
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, Burl shifts on his blanket on the porch, the slow creak of an old dog resettling.
"The last person who I let into my heart," I say, "chose not to stay." I look at my hands on the table. "I'm not doing that to you. But I'm also not going to pretend I don't know how this kind of thing tends to go."
Sloan's quiet for a long moment. She looks at me and then she nods, once, and picks up her fork, and we finish dinner in a silence that is different from the one before. Not easier. But honest.
After, I carry Burl up the porch steps. Both hands under his hips, the way I've done it every night for two years since his back legs started failing him. He's heavier than usual, or I'm more tired, or the weight is just more particular tonight. He leans into my chest. I hold him there a moment before I set him down.
Sloane is in the doorway behind me, her boots in her hand, watching.
She comes to the porch rail and leans on it and looks at the mountains going dark, and I straighten up and we stand there together without touching, and the last of the light is on the valley and the bees are quiet and there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than this porch with this woman, which is exactly the problem.
"I haven't decided," she says. "About the job. I want you to know that."
"Okay."
"And I want you to know that whatever I decide, I'm deciding it. Not running from something." She glances at me. "Notleaving the way you think people leave. For now, I’m going back to the hotel. I need some…space."
She puts her boots on, one hand on the rail for balance, and goes down the porch steps and gets in her car and I watch the headlights sweep the yard and the gravel dust settle in the dark.
I've built this whole life around being the man who doesn't ask someone to stay.
I stand on the porch with my hand on Burl's head and I think about how sustainable that is.
Not very. As it turns out.
seven
Sloane
Itookmytimeto think about the offer, but no matter how I tried to look at the pros, all I could think of was leaving Everett. I didn’t go back to the farm the next morning, and I felt it’s absence like a hole in my chest.
I wait two days before calling Ian back.
He picks up on the second ring, which tells me he's been waiting, which tells me he thinks I'm going to say yes. I know this because I've been on his side of calls like this — the anticipated yes, the logical yes, the yes that makes sense to everyone looking at the situation from outside it.
"I've thought about it," I tell him. "I'm going to pass."
A pause. "Sloane. This is a significant opportunity."
"I know what it is."
"The location?"
"The location is the primary factor," I say. "I appreciate the consideration. I mean that."
He tries twice more, gently. I hold my position. We hang up on good terms because Ian is a reasonable person and because I'm not wavering, and there's nothing to negotiate with a person who isn't wavering.
I sit with the phone in my lap.
Outside the hotel window Silver Ridge is doing what it does on a Sunday morning — slow and unhurried, the mountains in the background, a couple walking a dog on Main Street below. Maple left a fresh jar of wildflowers in the room yesterday. The stems are in the water and the blooms are open.
I know what I'm doing. The same impulse that made me follow a man's truck down a gravel road for a rabbit. My impulses have better judgment than my plans did. I'm working on trusting that.
