She breathes out. Comes back at me harder.
"Do you know what I needed at my door, Kane? Not a clean man. Anyone who'd known my brother. That was the entire ask. Danny put it in writing for you because he knew. And you didn't come."
"No."
"You tell me now it was Thorne, contamination, the man you couldn't carry through my door. That's the long story. The short one is that you were afraid of one thing, and the price of you being a coward was me being alone."
She lets her shoulders settle.
"I can't be in this room with you right now."
"Callie."
"Don't."
She gets off the bed. The sheet falls at the corner. She crosses to the door without touching me. I hear her in the guest room. Cloth on cloth. The dresser drawer open and shut.
She comes back through the hall and stops in the doorway. Jeans. The long-sleeved shirt she wore Sunday at Lou's. Her hair loose. Her jacket folded over her arm.
"I'm going to walk down to the creek. Don't follow. I'll come back when I can be in a room with you and tell you what we are. Right now I can't look at you without wanting to break things."
"It's cold out there."
"Don't add the weather to your fucking excuses, Kane."
She holds my eyes a beat. Then she turns.
I hear her boots in the hall, then the door.
I get up and cross to the window.
She comes off the porch with her hands in her jacket pockets, cuts across the grass to the line of pines, and doesn't look back.
I sit on the edge of the bed where she'd been. The pillow still holds the shape of her shoulder.
The envelope is on the nightstand where I set it down. I pick it up, open it once more, and read the last line.
I love you both. Go live.
He'd been asking me to be there for eight years, with or without the letter to put it in writing. Every one of those years I could have come, and I didn't. Last night I let myself believe for a few hours that one night was enough to cancel what eight years of silence had built. It isn't. And I'm a fool for thinking it could be, even for the few hours I did.
I fold the sheet and slide it back into the envelope. I don't put it on the nightstand. I tuck it into the breast pocket of the shirt I'm going to wear today.
Then I get up. There's a fire to lay and a pot of coffee to put on.
She'll come back through that door and when she does, the house she steps into is going to be warmer than the one she left. That much I can do for her now.
Chapter 10: Callie
The path through the pines is harder under my boots than I want it to be, and by the third root I'm crying without making a sound. I don't stop to wipe my face, just let the wet come down hot against the cold morning. The pines don't care, the creek won't either, and anything that doesn't care is what I need right now.
I get to the bend where the rock sits, the one I've been sitting on every afternoon since the third day in his house. The water is louder this morning than it has ever been, swollen with the melt that came down in the night. I sit and put my hands flat on the rock beside my hips, because if I don't hold on I'm going to scream.
For three or four minutes I just shake.
Then the rage comes up properly. Not the controlled version I let him see in that room, but the other one, the one I've been carrying since I was fourteen without knowing it was there.
I'm angry at him, at my grandmother, at Danny for putting that note in my pocket and dying. And every adult who decided for me, behind my back, what I could handle. I pick up a fist-sized stone from beside the rock and throw it into the creek with everything I have. The splash is loud. It feels good.
