Page 54 of Broken Cedar

“Yeah. Morning. Then…” I trail off. Then nothing. Then airport. Then back to my apartment.

“It’s been nice having you home,” Mom says softly.

She delivers it the way you deliver any ordinary observation about any ordinary day. The chicken salad is good. The weather’s been warm. It’s been nice having you home.

I look at my plate. At my sandwich. At my hands.

“Mom,” I say. I don’t know what comes after Mom. I haven’t figured that part out yet.

She reaches across the table and pats my hand. “Eat your sandwich,” she says. “Before the bread gets soggy.”

I eat my sandwich. The bread is already soggy. Mom changes the subject to the church picnic happening next weekend, the one I’ll miss, the one where everyone will ask about me and Mom will say I’m doing well in the city, thriving, couldn’t make it this time but maybe next time, and nobody will push because small towns understand absence better than cities ever will.

We finish lunch and I help clear the plates.

“You know,” Mom says, drying her hands on a dish towel, “when you left for college, the second time, I mean. I told myself you’d be back for holidays. Then you weren’t. Then I told myself you’d visit in the summer. Then you didn’t.” She hangs the towel on the oven handle. Doesn’t look at me while she says this. Looks at the towel, at the oven, at anything but the daughter standing three feet away. “After a while, I stopped counting the times you didn’t come home.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty, Hallie.” She finally turns and looks at me. Her eyes are the same color as mine, but hers are clouded with sadness and hurt. “I’m saying it because I want you to know that every time you do come back, it matters. This week mattered.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes. Anything I could say feels too small beside eight years of absence.

Mom squeezes my shoulder. Then she’s moving toward the living room, talking about a show she’s been watching, something about British people baking cakes, and I’m left standing in the kitchen with dirty plates and a heart that feels too big for my chest and the knowledge that leaving Colt would be hard but leaving Mom might be harder, and I have exactly one morning to figure out how to do both without coming apart in the process.

After lunch, I need air. Or I need not-air. I need something that isn’t the kitchen, isn’t the house, so I head to the barn. I climb the ladder to the loft, thinking about where, five days ago, Colt had me on my back with hay in my hair and his mouth everywhere and the delirious freedom of wanting something without having to name what it cost.

I sit on a bale near the window and look out over the ranch, watching the horses in the paddock, the clouds stacked over the eastern ridge.

I hear the creak of the ladder before I see him. Colt doesn’t say anything at first, just sits on a bale opposite mine, close enough that our knees almost touch, far enough that the space between us feels measured. His hat is off, his hair damp at the temples with sweat.

“So,” Colt says. His voice is rough, like he hasn’t used it much today. “What happens tomorrow?”

I’ve been expecting the question. Have been constructing answers to it since I woke up this morning, since I stood with Copper, since I sat at the creek and asked myself questions I still don’t have answers to. None of the prepared answers survive contact with Colt’s face. With his eyes, which are doing that thing they do—steady, patient, waiting—make it difficult to look at him.

“I get on a plane,” I say quietly. “Back to the city. Back to work. Back to…” I trail off. Back to what? My apartment with its dying plants? My job that suddenly feels smaller than it did a week ago?

Colt nods. “And that’s what you want?”

“It’s for the best,” I say. Which is, maybe, the only honest thing I’ve said all day.

He looks at his hands, turning them over, studying his palms and the rough callouses there. “This week,” he says. Then stops. Starts again. “This week wasn’t nothing, Hallie.”

“I know,” I say softly.

“I need you to know that. However you need to frame it when you leave. However you need to make it make sense in your head. This week wasn’t nothing.”

I look toward the window because I can’t look at him. “I don’t know how to frame it,” I admit. The words come out cracked. “I don’t—God, Colt, I don’t know what any of this means. I didn’t plan for…this.” I gesture between us. A useless gesture. This is too big for a gesture. Too big for language. Too big, period.

“You don’t have to know what it means,” he says simply. “You just have to know it happened. And it mattered. To me, it mattered.”

I still can’t look at him. “It mattered to me too,” I say softly. It’s not enough.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Colt says, so quietly I almost don’t hear him.

I look at him. His eyes haven’t left mine. “I know,” I say softly.

“Do you?” he asks. “Because I’ve spent a week watching you say goodbye to this place, Hallie. Watching you say goodbye to me. And I need you to understand that when you leave tomorrow, you’re leaving me again.”