Chapter Sixteen – Rowan #2
“They listened,” I tell the oak. “Even when I didn’t make it… fancy.”
“Fancy’s overrated,” she says. “Showing is enough.” She leans her shoulder into mine, light, cautious, like checking the integrity of a new board with your palm. I lean back the same amount. The measure feels right.
“Bailey says she can bring another group next week,” she adds, casual if you don’t know her tells. I do. She’s watching me without moving her eyes.
I open my mouth with a we should— and shut it before I get stubborn to prove something no one asked me to. “Let me think,” I say instead. “Sleep on it. See how it sits.”
“Okay.” No push. No pout. Just that steady belief she has that makes me want to build her a porch swing and bolt it into the joists with hardware that could hang an engine on.
A pecan leaf falls and lands in her braid. I pluck it out because I can, and because the world feels simple enough in this second to allow small indulgences. My knuckles graze her temple. She turns her face toward my hand like the cat that lives in the hayloft and tolerates me on Tuesdays.
“Hungry?” I ask, because if I keep touching her, I’m either going to say something too big or do something that asks too much.
“Starving.” She tilts her head toward the house. “Is there a rule where I get fed if I do dishes?”
“That’s the only rule,” I say, and stand. She slips her hand into mine. I keep it for one extra heartbeat because I haven’t learned every smart thing, but I’ve learned to claim the good quiet when it shows up.
We pack fast—blankets shaken, crate and cooler in the bed, gate latched.
I open the passenger door. She climbs onto the seat, arm resting against the center console.
My own brushes against hers as I settle in my own seat, neither of us budge.
I roll us down the lane, dust lifting behind in a slow ribbon.
The drive is short and easy. Past the pecans, past the bend where the bay flashes silver through the pines, right at the rusted mailbox that still leans like it’s thinking about quitting.
Wind through the open windows smells like cut grass and sun-warmed salt.
She hums the four-line seed song under her breath.
I don’t say a thing because I like the way it threads the cab.
I turn into my drive and kill the engine under the oaks. We climb out together. Gravel crunches. Somewhere, a gull complains like it’s late for something.
We walk the path side by side, and it does what it always does—splits in two: left toward the house, right toward the cottage.
Two porch lights that will touch when dusk remembers us.
She pauses in that small overlap, like last time.
Back then, distance felt like kindness to two people who didn’t know what they were doing.
“Left,” I say before I can overthink it.
In the kitchen, I slice tomatoes and she salts them like she’s baptizing them.
I throw bacon in the pan, and the house smells like memory.
She perches on the counter and swings her heels, humming the four lines from the wish book.
I pretend to study the bread like it’s complex machinery.
Truth is, I’m smiling into the cutting board like a fool because her plain singing voice does something to the shingles on this house I can’t explain.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“That’s my brand.” I flip the bacon and don’t look at her. If I do, I’m going to say I like you here like a boy, and she deserves an adult.
“Tell me what you were thinking out there,” she presses, voice softer. She’s not pushing. She’s making space. It makes me want to fill it.
I set the knife down. “I kept waiting for something to go wrong. For a kid to slip. For a parent to decide I was doing it wrong and take it personally. For me to say the wrong word and have to watch it ricochet around a dozen heads because that’s how I am sometimes, and I hate it.
” I breathe in. Out. “And then it didn’t go wrong.
It went… like it was supposed to. Because the work stayed small.
Because you held the story together, and I held the edges, and Bailey did the thing where she makes a crowd behave without anyone feeling managed. ”
I glance up. Ivy’s watching me like she does when we’re under the oak at dusk, and I pretend I’m staying for the breeze. “I want to be good at the part where you build something people count on,” I admit. “Not just the part where you fix what you broke.”
“You are,” she says. No wobble. No caveats. “You’re just used to thinking the only proof is a snapped board and a new nail.” She tips her chin toward the window. “Proof looks like ten little names flapping on starter trays.”
My throat goes tight on me. I reach for the pepper like it just asked, then set it down again. “You make it sound simple.”
“It isn’t,” she says. “But simple and easy aren’t synonyms.”
We eat at the counter because tables are for other people.
Tomato and bacon sandwiches, juice that tastes faintly of the cooler this morning, two paper plates because dishwater is for the truly committed.
Her knee nudges my thigh when she laughs at something I don’t remember saying.
It occurs to me, with the kind of thud that puts a crack in pride, that I like myself the most in rooms where she is.
“Walk?” I ask when the dishes are done, and she’s still on my counter like she plans to live there.
“Always.”
We take the long way, skirting the edge of the hay field where the creek thins itself over shale and keeps up a quiet conversation.
Summer sits heavy. A hawk pencils across the high blue.
Dragonflies write cursive above the water.
We don’t talk—boots in gravel, the creek keeping time—until the path splits the way it always does: one track up toward the house, the other tunneling under sycamores to the cottage and the big oak.
No porch lights yet, just late gold rinsing everything flat and the first fireflies waking in the reeds.
We stop without planning to. Habit, maybe. She’s close enough that if I leaned an inch, I’d learn things I’ve been pretending I don’t want to memorize by mouth. I turn to her, palms open.
“Thank you,” I say.
It isn’t for lunch, and she knows it. The corners of her mouth tilt—small, sure—like a woman who can tell the difference between a meal and a day made lighter just by being in it.
The choice hangs there a beat, both tracks waiting.
Then I tip my chin left, and when she nods—once—we take that turn together, the water at our backs and the fields unrolling ahead.
“For what?”
“For holding the middle today.” I find her braid with my eyes again because if I look straight at her, I’m going to overdo it. “I can handle the edges. You’re better at the part where people remember what they came for.”
She lifts a hand like she might put it on my chest but then thinks better of it. “You did that,” she says. “I just sang a four-line song about beans.”
“Best one I’ve heard,” I answer, and that makes her laugh in the way that shows the left canine a little more than the right. It’s a stupid detail to fall for. I fall anyway.
“Left for me,” she says finally, tipping her head toward the cottage. “I’m going to shower and label my moon.” She raises the egg. “Then nap like a seven-year-old who survived the petting zoo.”
“Right for me.” I hook a thumb toward the barn. “I have a strap on the east gate that needs convincing, and the pump by the greenhouse is sulking.”
We don’t move. Not at first. The thing between us sits there, solid as a fence post, and it isn’t asking to be named. Only tended.
She steps in and brushes her shoulder against mine. It’s smaller than a kiss, but braver than not doing it. “Later?” she asks.
“Later,” I say, and mean it.
She heads left, and I head right, and in the middle of the fork where the porch lights will touch when the day goes soft, I tell the knot in my chest it can let go a little more.
I don’t have to name anything today. I only have to keep showing up, keep speaking plain, keep letting the mess be part of the lesson. That’s a kind of building too.
The farm is the same as it was this morning, and nothing’s the same at all. Ten paper labels flap, brave as flags. Sir Wiggles is, predictably, AWOL. The east gate strap forgets itself and holds.
An hour later, I’m back on my own ground, crossing off the dumb little boxes in my head—salt blocks, water lines, mineral tubs—except I’m not really crossing anything off because Ivy’s with me, and it turns out, I don’t count time right when she is.
We saddle Jasper and the old mare for a slow check along the fence line.
She swings up easy, knees braced, fingers light on the reins like she was born knowing how to ask and not demand.
We talk about nothing that matters—Bailey’s best bee story, and which neighbor’s rooster sounds like a smoker’s cough.
I’d let myself enjoy the way she laughs with her whole face.
I like the company. Full stop. So much that I miss the tells I should never miss: wind shouldering out of the south, the metallic edge in the air, the way the calves go still and listen.
I’m watching the way a wisp of hair sticks to her cheekbone. I’m not watching the sky.
The light shifts—drops a note lower—and a white seam splits far off over the pines. The delayed belly-roll hits a few seconds later. Not close. Close enough.
“Damn,” I breathe, already turning Jasper. “That’s on me.”
“What is?” she asks, cheerful, trusting, and I hate that I didn’t earn it just now.
“Storm building fast. We should’ve started back sooner.
” Another flash, brighter, and my stomach goes cold.
I picture the lists Ivy made me promise I’d learn—heat, stress, flashing lights—and I want to kick my own shins for letting the first two pile on while the third announces itself right over our heads.