I picked my clutch up off the table. The man Caleb had floored was getting to his feet somewhere behind me and I did not care. I turned for the door.
“Sophia.”
His voice, behind me. Just my name — notbeautiful, never that again; I understood somehow that it was gone — just my name, rough, the closest he’d come to reaching for me, and it almost worked. That’s the worst of it. It almost worked. A month of that voice in the dark had built something in me that turned toward it before my mind caught up.
I turned back. I let him see my face. And I said the only thing that would keep me walking.
“Stay thefuckaway from me, Caleb.”
I had never said that word to anyone who mattered. I watched it land on him like a round.
Then I walked out.
The night air hit me in the back lot, warm still, September not done with the day’s heat, and I got three steps onto the gravel before the problem arrived: I had nowhere to go. Caleb had driven us in. My car sat in the cottage drive across town — and even if it had been here at the curb, where would I have pointed it. The cabin at the ranch meant Liam; it stood a short walk from his door, and he’d come, he’d always come — that was the whole sickness of it. The cottage meant Caleb, his boots by my door and his note still under the mug. There was no door in this county I could shut that one of them wasn’t already standing inside.
I stood in the dark under the little camera bolted above the back door with my arms wrapped around myself and the wine going cold and stiff down the front of my white dress that I hadso boldly worn tonight, and for the first time all night I did not know what to do with my own body.
Then there were footsteps behind me — two sets, quick, hurrying out the back door after me — and I knew them before I turned. Aunt Lou. And Uncle Owen a stride behind her, hat in his hand, his face doing none of the things the others’ faces had done — no shock, no taking of sides, just here, the way he has been here my whole life.
“What do you need, Sophie-honey?” he said.
And the cold-clear thing I’d held up through all of it cracked, just at the edges, just for him.
“Take me home,” I said. “To the ranch. My old room.” My voice held; I made it hold. “And please — please don’t let either of them in.”
Aunt Lou was already moving, her arm coming around me, steering me toward Uncle Owen’s truck like she’d done it a hundred times, because she had. Uncle Owen settled his hat back on and went to bring the truck around.
Behind us, the door of the Spur stayed shut.
26
Caleb
I’d left the truck at the Spur. Walked across town, my boots grey to the ankle with road dust by the time I let myself in the side door and threw the bolt. The bays sat dark but for the work light still burning over the jig, over the half-built frame I’d been bent on that afternoon — Hunter’s frame, steel he’d wanted bent a way it didn’t want to go. He’d asked me three hours back, and I’d leaned in glad — somebody in that family wanting a thing only my hands could give — and let myself sit at a table I’d known better than to walk up to.
I took the bourbon off the shelf by the parts washer and went down onto the concrete with my back against the leg of the jig, the bottle between my boots. Didn’t bother with a glass.
Her face kept arriving, turning around in the bathroom doorway in the white dress.I was conducting a survey.Her hand coming down over mine on her knee in the truck, neither of us saying a word about it. Then the rest, in order. Liam squared up.Ask Caleb.Her saying my name — the two syllables she’d handed me a hundred times — and me with another man bleeding at my feet, giving her nothing back. Then the one word I did give her.Yes.
I put my head against the steel and shut my eyes, and it changed nothing. She’d been right and her brother had been right, and a man made out of the thing that armed the men who put her in that pantry had no business being the safe place she’d finally set the watching down for.
The bolt went over behind me.
Tuck didn’t say anything. He pulled the second stool off the bench, set it down a few feet off, and lowered onto it, looking at the frame and not at me.
“Yeah,” he said. To the frame. To nothing.
That was all. He didn’t take the bottle, and he didn’t tell me to put it down. He stayed in the work light while I came apart on the floor of the thing my father and I had built out of the wreck of what we used to be — the one man who’d never needed me to explain myself, watching and saying nothing.
I hatedthe shape of the following days. I opened the shop because the only other thing to do was not open it. Tuck came by every evening and left when I left, always late.
I slept in pieces — an hour, then the ceiling. And in the dark hours, I went back to the thing I’d taught myself not to need a reason for: I sat at the back of my own unlit front room, where the road couldn’t see in, and watched her cottage.
Nothing watched back. For a month I’d sat there to catch her headlights swing in at the blue end of a shift, to know she was home before I slept. Now the drive held only Doris, and the windows behind the white pickets stayed black, because she was out at the ranch with my name at the top of the list of who couldn’t be let in.
I kept my side of it. But I couldn’t stop watching. It was the last post I had left to stand.
Which is why I saw the truck.
