Page 79 of Omega’s Fold

“Yeah.”

She looks at me a long time. Her face has not softened. She turns back to the stove. She wipes the counter. She folds the cloth and hangs it on the rail and takes her cardigan off the back of the chair where she had hung it earlier.

“I’m going home,” she says. “Tell Wyatt I want the casserole dish back.”

“Sure.”

She picks up her bag. At the mudroom door she stops with her hand on the frame. She does not turn round.

“Don’t make me regret leaving him with you, Julian Duffield.”

“You won’t.”

The screen door bangs, then I hear her truck start up. The headlights come on, sweep across the kitchen window, and go.

I sit at the kitchen table listening to the sounds of the ranch. Wyatt is out there with the boys and the cattle. I can hear the lowing of the animals as they are moved toward the barn. The birds are done for the day but I know that the morning chorus will wake me early.

After about an hour, Wyatt comes in. He pulls a chair out from the table and he sits across from me.

I have spent months thinking about what I would say if I ever sat across this table from him again. I had a speech. I had several speeches. I have just done the bravest thing I have done in my professional life and the speeches have all left me and what is left is the truth.

“I am going to ask you something,” I say. “And I want you to know, before I ask it, that the answer doesn’t change what I just did. I would have done it either way. I had the file on my laptop two weeks ago and I knew then. I was working up to it. The scan today decided the timing. So whatever you say to what I’m about to ask you, I am not pulling that email back. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

He goes very still.

“I’m going to say it again, because I don’t want there to be any confusion. I love you, Wyatt. I have for a while. I think I have since the town hall, where you sat next to me about to go into heat and held the wheel of the truck like you were trying to bend it. I just didn’t have the word for it then. I have had months to find the word, and the word is love, and I am not going to sit in your kitchen and say anything else.”

“Julian.”

“I want to be in this child’s life. I told you that this morning. I’m telling you again. But I want to be in yours too. I want to live where you live. I want to wake up in the morning where you wake up. I want to know what your day looks like. I want to be the one you tell about your day. I want all of it. I have already lost too much time with you, and I am not doing that again. I have been miserable, Wyatt. I have been miserable in a way I did not know was possible for me, and I do not want to find out what worse than that looks like. So I am asking.”

He has not moved. His eyes have gone wet.

“I can’t talk,” he says.

“It’s okay.”

“I want to. I can’t get the words out.”

“It’s okay, Wyatt. Take your time.”

“I —”

He stops. He puts his other hand to his mouth. His eyes close. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, four counts.

“I love you too,” he says.

It comes out flat and quiet and not at all the way I had imagined but it is the most beautiful sentence anyone has ever said to me.

This time, it’s me who can’t talk.

I stand up and go round the table. He stands up before I get to him. We meet halfway. His hands come up to my face and mine come up to his, and I get my forehead against his and I close my eyes, and we stand like that. I can feel his breath against my mouth. I can feel his pulse under the heel of my hand at his jaw.

He kisses me. He is shaking. We are both shaking.