“I say things I mean.”
I held his gaze. “I know.”
The way I said it—all the way down, no performance, no armor, just a man stating a fact he had built his life around—landed between us with the weight of something that had been true since the first week and had only just now been allowed to breathe.
Sterling held my gaze for one long second. Then he got out of bed with the deliberate ease of a man who had made a decision and was not reversing it. His feet hit the floor. He pulled yesterday’s jeans from the chair, stepped into them without ceremony, and disappeared down the stairs with the particular heavy stride that said he had decided to make eggs and the eggs had better cooperate.
Caleb watched Sterling’s feet disappear. Turned to me with the bright-eyed look he got when something he’d been planning for finally arrived on schedule, and I watched his face do the thing it does when joy is too large to hold without leaking at the edges.
“He’s making eggs,” Caleb said.
“He’s making eggs,” I echoed.
“In our kitchen.”
“In our kitchen.”
“On a Tuesday.”
“On a Tuesday.”
Caleb’s voice went soft. “Mitch.”
“I know.”
“I need you to understand how long I have been waiting for a Tuesday like this.”
“I’ve been waiting for it too.”
“You’re going to be insufferable about it.”
“I’m going to be insufferable about it forever.”
Caleb smiled. The kind that lived in his eyes first and reached his mouth second, warm and certain and entirely without performance. “Good.”
He meant it completely. Every syllable. The kind of good that lived behind your sternum and didn’t need evidence or argument.
From downstairs came the sound of cabinets opening. A drawer. Then Sterling’s voice, flat and carrying up the staircasewith the authority of a man who was conducting an inventory and expected answers. “Where are the eggs?”
“Bottom shelf of the fridge,” Caleb called back. “Left side. In the blue carton.”
A pause. Then: “There are seventeen eggs.”
“I know.”
“Why are there seventeen eggs?”
“It’s a large recipe.”
“I’m using six.”
“Use whatever you need.”
“I’m going to use six.”
“I heard you.”
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and grinned so wide my face hurt. The sound of Sterling Callahan negotiating with a refrigerator about egg quantities carried up the stairs and filled the bedroom and landed in my chest with the warmth of something I had been building toward since the first week we arrived at Black Butte Ranchwith two backpacks and a determination to finally, actually stay.
