CHAPTER 15 #3
And he'd spent a decade learning the dumb slow way that you don't lunge at a thing you want before it's ready, or you spook it back over the rail for good.
Be there longer than the fear can last, Tom said in his head. Not bigger than it.
So he swallowed the ring back down whole, and it sat in his chest like a hot coal, and he said, instead, the small true thing he could afford to say:
“I'm glad you stayed, Laney. For the horse. For all of it. I know it wasn't for me. But I'm glad you're here.”
Her throat moved. The chewed-cap pen came up out of habit toward her mouth and then she lowered it, like she'd caught herself reaching for armor and decided she didn't need it just this second.
“You're different,” she said. There was no softness in it.
Like a finding. Like a diagnosis revised.
“I came up that ladder this morning ready for the man who left.
And I keep meeting a different one all day, and I don't have him filed anywhere, and I hate that. I built my whole way of standing on knowing exactly what you were.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying you know.”
“Sorry.” A breath. “Then I'll say this. I'm not asking you to trust the man who left.
I wouldn't trust him either.” He met her eyes and held them open and warm, let the joke pass by, kept his hand down from his face, just stayed still the way he'd stayed still in the pen.
“I'm asking you to watch the one who stayed.
That's all. Watch him a while. See what he does.”
She looked at him a long moment in the gold and the dust, and whatever she read in his face, she didn't argue with it. She nodded, once, slow, the way you'd sign off on something you weren't sure you should.
---
They came down as the light went long and amber across the valley, and finished the corner stall together, bedding it deep and dragging the lamp closer and checking the latch twice, and somewhere in it her hand and his both landed on the stall door at the same time and stayed there, not quite touching, an inch of hot evening air between his knuckles and hers, both of them gone very still over that inch.
He could have closed it. The inch. He wanted to so bad his hand shook, and he understood that if he closed it now, here, it would be him taking again, and she was not a thing to be taken.
She was a thing to be waited for. So he didn't. He left the inch where it was, let her be the one who'd get to decide, when she decided, if she ever did.
And from the look that crossed her face — surprise, and something underneath it he didn't dare name — she knew exactly what he'd chosen not to do, and what it cost him, and that he'd done it anyway.
“I should get Banjo home,” she said, but she didn't move her hand for another beat. Two.
“Same time tomorrow. We vaccinate the broodmares, and you don't die in that round pen.”
“I'll do my best on both.”
“Do better than your best on the second one.” And there it was, almost — the ghost of the girl from the loft, the dry one-liner with the warmth finally close enough underneath to feel through the surface, and it undid him worse than tears would have.
He walked her out to her truck in the long gold light.
Banjo came scrambling off the porch and loaded himself in.
She rolled the window down, and for a second she sat there with her wrist over the wheel looking at him, freckled and sunburnt and lit up amber, and the whole ten years and the whole next ten stood in the cab with her, and neither of them said any of it.
“Night, Beck.”
“Night, Laney.” Her name said low, the way he only let himself say it when he meant it as the whole sentence.
She drove off down the lane and the dust hung gold in the last of the light, and Beck stood in the yard with his hands hanging empty and the coal of the unsaid thing burning a hole in his chest.
He'd come closer today than he had in a decade of trying.
He'd had the whole truth behind his teeth and held it, and this time cowardice had nothing to do with it — his thumb went up toward the eyebrow scar and he caught it halfway and put his hand down, because for once he was telling himself the truth straight.
He'd held the words out of something that might, given enough patience, finally turn out to be the opposite of running.
But he was going to have to tell her. He knew that now, standing in the empty yard with the crickets starting up and Eleanor's half-dead roses ghosting pale by the porch.
The ring wasn't his to keep buried anymore.
It had stopped being a wound he protected and started being a debt he owed her — the truth of why a man leaves the one thing he can't stand to break — and she had a right to it.
Soon, then. On purpose, and to her face, on a porch if he could manage it, the way he'd meant to ten years ago.
He stood there a long time after her taillights were gone, the unsaid words warm and heavy in his chest, close to spilling, and for the first time in a decade not entirely sure he was brave enough — but, for the first time in a decade, almost.