Page 63 of Broken Cedar

I look up my my laptop. “You could have run it yourself.”

“I could have.” He leans against the doorframe. “But I waited for you. Go get set up.”

The clients are already there when I walk in, two men who stand when I enter, which I’ve learned means they’ve done their homework and decided I’m worth standing for. I shake their hands and open my folder, and we begin.

For the next hour I am exactly who I’m supposed to be. One of them raises a concern about the Q3 timeline and I answer before the sentence is fully finished. The other wants to revisit the contingency budget and I walk them through it without once looking down at my notes.

By the end, both men are nodding the way people nod when they’ve already decided. Hands are shaken. Steven is quiet in the way that I know means he’s pleased.

Walking out, he squeezes my shoulder once. “That’s why I held it.”

“Mm.” I gather my folder.

I think about how much I would have wanted this, once. How I would have called Mom from the stairwell to tell her about it. I think about this for approximately the length of the hallway, and then I sit down at my desk and open my email and I don’t think about it anymore.

Mom calls while I’m putting away groceries that night after work. I wedge the phone between my ear and shoulder and keep moving.

“Copper got into the vegetable garden this afternoon.”

I stop with a can of soup in my hand. “Really? Did he eat the whole thing?”

“Enough of it. He ate all of my tomatoes.”

“What did Colt say?”

I can hear her trying not to laugh. “That he was sorry about the tomatoes but that it wasn’t really his business to be telling that horse what was and wasn’t food.”

I put the soup down on the wrong shelf. I’m thinking about the way Colt’s face goes when he’s being completely serious about something ridiculous—the total absence of a smile, which is somehow the funniest part. I know exactly how he said it. I know the exact tone.

“He let Copper eat your garden.”

“He did.”

I lean against the counter. “Tell Colt he owes you some tomatoes.”

Saturday afternoon finds me sitting on the couch surrounded by laundry that should have been folded hours ago. The washing machine finished its cycle sometime before lunch, but I just couldn’t find the motivation to do anything about it. The plants on the windowsill have been dead for longer than I’d like to admit, and I’ve been watering them anyway, which I think says something about me that I’d rather not examine.

My phone lights up.

Colt: Just checking in. How’s work?

I read it three times. I pick up the phone and put it back down. I pick it up again and type ‘good, busy, the usual’ and look at it for a second and delete it. I type ‘really good actually’ and delete that too. I set the phone face-down on the cushion next to me and pick up a sock. Eventually the screen goes dark. I leave the text unanswered and pick up the other sock.

Chapter Eighteen

It’s been two weeks since I got back. Two weeks of waking up in a bed that doesn’t smell like Colt. Two weeks of meetings where I nod at appropriate intervals and say things like, “Let’s circle back on that,” while my brain is somewhere else entirely.

I’m eating a bowl of cereal for lunch—the kind with marshmallows. My phone is on the coffee table. I pick it up, scrolling to Mom’s contact. Hit call before I can talk myself out of it.

She answers on the second ring. “Well, look who remembered she has a mother.”

“Hey, Mom.”

There’s a pause. The kind of pause that means Mom is reading something in my voice that I didn’t mean to put there.

“You sound miserable,” she says eventually.

I laugh but it comes out wrong—thin and cracked. “That obvious, huh?”