The shop is quiet by four. Erin has flipped the sign and is doing her end-of-day inventory, her pen moving across the page in her neat handwriting. I'm sweeping the floor even though I already swept it ten minutes ago, but I needsomething to do with my hands, something to keep my body occupied while my mind runs circles around itself.
"Can I tell you something?" Erin says it without looking up.
"Always."
She sets her pen down and turns on her stool to face me, and I stop sweeping because there's something in her expression I haven't seen before, a vulnerability she usually keeps tucked away behind her competence and her calm.
"I'm thinking about selling the shop." Somewhere outside, a car passes. Inside, neither of us moves.
"Selling it?" I repeat, because I'm not sure I heard her right.
"Not tomorrow. Not next month. But I've been thinking about it for a while." She folds her hands in her lap, organizing her thoughts, and I lean the broom against the wall and sit on the stool across from her because this feels like a sitting-down conversation.
"I want to write, Lily. Full time." She pauses. "I've been doing it on the side for years now. Mornings before the shop opens, nights after it closes. And I love it in a way I haven't loved anything since I first put my hands in soil and understood what I was supposed to do with my life."
Her fingers twist in her lap.
"Rome wants me to do it now. He said he'd cover the gap if I needed him to, that he'd make it work, that he wants me to have the time to actually try." Her eyes are full of conflict when she raises her head. "He wants to invest in my dream, Lily. And it terrifies me."
"Erin."
"I know." She exhales, long and deep.
“It terrifies me because it means closing a business I built with my own hands. Relying on your brother down the line for something that might not work. A shop has customers and hours and structure. Writing has none of that. It's just me and a blank page and no guarantee that anything I put on it is worth reading."
I watch her face, the way she's holding herself together, and I recognize that particular brand of fear. The fear of wanting something so badly that the possibility of not getting it feels like it might break you.
"Tell me the part that isn't about fear," I say quietly.
When she speaks again, her voice is more certain.
"The part that isn't about fear is that I can see it. The book. The life. I can see mornings at my desk with coffee, and Rome downstairs working on his projects, and the light coming through the window the way it does in this town, that particular early light, and I'm writing. I'm actually doing the thing I keep telling myself I'll do someday."
Her eyes are full now, and she presses her lips together.
"Someday is a coward's calendar, Lily. I don't want to be on it anymore."
I reach over and take her hand. Her fingers are cold from handling inventory, slightly rough from years of working with stems and soil.
"Can I say something about my brother?"
"Please."
"Rome is a man who shows love by building things." I squeeze her fingers. "He builds you. He would build you a city if you let him. When he says he wants to make this possible for you, he's not offering charity. He's doing thething he does best. He's making room for your dream because that's how Rome loves."
I hold her gaze. "Let him invest in you, Erin. Let him make you happy. Let him help your dreams come true. That's the way he loves best, and letting him do it is the way you show him that you love him back.”
Erin wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
"You're so smart," she says. "And so sure."
"I'm very sure about my brother. He's in for the long haul. It's for the both of you, not just you."
She squeezes my hand back. And we sit there for a minute in the closed shop, the late afternoon light making long rectangles on the floor, neither of us saying anything because sometimes quiet is its own kind of conversation.
Then I start thinking. Erin's partner is making room for her dream. Rearranging his life so she can chase the thing that matters most to her. Holding the structure in place while she steps into the open space of what she wants to become.
Is that what Callahan is doing? Is his silence a version of the same thing? HisI am so happy for you. His refusal to say the thing I can feel pressing against him every time we're together. That he wants me to stay. That leaving is going to break both of us. That he's making room for my dream by not standing in the doorway.
