Page 43 of Broken Cedar

Colt nods. “Should hold better than the old one.”

“Nothing holds forever.”

“Nothing’s supposed to.”

There’s a beat of silence. The kind we’ve always been able to sit in, the kind that feels like its own form of conversation. I tip my head back, letting the sun hit my face and close my eyes against the brightness.

“I’ll probably head back in a few days,” I say. The words come out casual. Or I mean them to come out casual.

Colt nods. “Figured.”

There’s another silence, longer this time. I wait for him to say something. The something I’ve been waiting for since I got here, maybe. The thing I’ve been constructing in my head during sleepless nights: Stay. Please stay. I’ve waited eight years. I can keep waiting, but Christ, Hallie, I’d rather not.

What he says is: “You’re good at leaving.”

Four words. He delivers them the way you’d observe that someone is good at parallel parking or making pie crust. I look at him. His jaw is set in that familiar way that means he’s holding something back because holding things back is what he does, has always done.

“I figured after a while you stopped missing this place,” he adds.

“What does that mean?” I ask. My voice wobbles, and I hate myself for it.

He takes a long pull from his water bottle. Sets it down between his boots. Looks at the fence. “Every Christmas I’d think maybe you’d come home.” He pauses. “Then you wouldn’t. After a few years…” He shrugs. “I stopped setting an extra place.”

I swallow. “I kept finding excuses,” I say softly. “Work. Friends. Life. There was always something.”

He glances at me sidelong. “Were you really that busy?”

The question isn’t accusing. That almost makes it worse. Because if he were angry, if he were bitter, I would know what to do with that. Anger is easier. Anger has edges. This is just Colt asking for the truth.

I look down at my hands. “Sometimes,” I say. “The rest of the time…” I swallow. “The rest of the time, I knew what it would feel like. Coming back here.”

He looks away. Not because he doesn’t care, but because he does. “I wondered sometimes,” he says quietly.

I look at him. “About what?”

“If you’d come back.”

The simplicity of it hurts more than anything else could have. Not if I’d called. Not if I’d apologized. If I’d come back. Like some part of him had always left the door open.

“You were my favorite person,” Colt says. The words are quiet, almost inaudible. “Then one day you were gone.”

I don’t know what to say back to that.

For eight years, I told myself leaving was the brave choice. I repeated it enough times that eventually it started to sound like the truth. I was the one who chose something bigger. The one who wanted more. The one who had the courage to walk away from the life everyone expected me to live.

But sitting here now, on the tailgate of a truck that has outlasted two presidents, beside a man who has outlasted every version of myself I’ve ever been, I am not sure courage had anything to do with it. Maybe leaving was easier because it meant I never had to find out what staying would cost me.

I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. The afternoon sun catches in the dust on his jaw, the lines at the corners of his eyes, the tiny scar beneath his chin he’d gotten falling through the hayloft when we were kids.

Before I can think better of it, I reach toward him. My hand stops in midair. His eyes flick to my hand, and for the briefest moment, I think he’s going to close the distance himself. He doesn’t, and I let my hand drop.

We sit in silence. Colt’s shoulder is warm against mine. I wonder, not for the first time, what it would cost to stay. Not for a week. Not for an extended visit, or for the summer. But really stay, day after day. What would happen to my job? My apartment? The life I’d spent eight years building? Could I walk away from all of that?

Could I ask Colt to wait while I figured it out?

I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what staying would look like. Whether it would mean starting over, or whether it would mean admitting the life I’d built and the life I wanted no longer pointed in the same direction. And that might be the scariest part. Because for the first time in eight years, I’m not asking myself whether I want to leave. I’m asking what it would take to stay.

Chapter Eleven