Chapter 3 #2
“I can’t write,” he finally says. “Haven’t been able to for almost a year. Everyone thinks I’m taking a break, finding my artistic center, whatever. But the truth is, I’m just...empty. I thought maybe coming home would help. Reconnect me with something real.”
“And has it?”
He turns to look at me, and his expression holds a rawness that makes my chest ache.
“I don’t know yet.”
The back door opens, and Jo sticks her head out. “Dinner in ten! Dean says the steaks are almost ready. Levi, can you help me set the table?”
Levi stands, draining the last of his beer. He pauses beside my chair, close enough that I can smell his cologne—warm and woodsy and achingly familiar.
“For what it’s worth,” he says quietly, “I’m glad you’re here. Even if it’s weird.”
Then he’s gone, the screen door swinging shut behind him, and I’m left alone with the sunset and the peach blossoms and the image of his trembling hands that I can’t shake.
Dinner is an exercise in controlled chaos.
Jo has set the table on the screened porch—vintage plates, mason jars filled with daffodils from her yard, candles flickering in glass holders shaped like seashells. The woman knows how to create an atmosphere.
“So!” Jo says, passing a bowl of roasted potatoes. “Wedding flowers. I’ve been up since four thinking about this.”
“Since four?” Dean frowns.
“I was downstairs with my Pinterest boards and a panic spiral.” She turns to me. “We said blues and creams, right? But I keep going back and forth. What if it’s too cold? Too expected? Everyone does blues and creams for a beach wedding.”
There’s genuine anxiety in her voice. Not the manufactured brightness she’s been wielding all evening—this is a woman who wants her wedding to be perfect and is terrified of making the wrong choice.
“Blues and creams won’t feel expected once we add texture,” I say. “The eucalyptus and wildflower accents will keep it from looking like every other coastal ceremony.”
“But what about adding some soft peach? To coordinate with the season?” She gestures toward the backyard. “If the peach trees are still blooming by May—will they be? Do peach blossoms last that long?”
“Probably not. But we can echo the color with garden roses and ranunculus. It would warm up the palette without losing the coastal feel.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s good.” Jo exhales. “I just—I want it to feel like us. Not like a magazine. You know?”
“I know. That’s what we’ll do.”
Jo relaxes a fraction, then turns to Levi. “What do you think? And don’t say you don’t have an opinion, because I’ve been trying to get Dean to care about colors for weeks and all he says is ‘whatever you want, babe.’”
“It’s your wedding,” Dean says, as if proving her point.
“See?” Jo gestures at him. “Useless. Levi, you’re the artist in this family. Help me.”
Levi pauses mid-bite. “Peach sounds fine.”
“Fine? That’s it? Fine?”
“It sounds good. The warm and cool mix—it’ll photograph well. And Delilah clearly knows what she’s doing.”
He says it to Jo, but his eyes flick to me for half a second. I focus very hard on cutting my steak, which is actually incredible. Dean can grill.
“Thank you,” Jo says. “Was that so hard? One opinion. From one person at this table who isn’t a brick wall about aesthetics.” She shoots Dean a look. He shrugs, unbothered.
The conversation loosens after that. Jo mentions the budget—tighter than she’d like, which surprises me—and I make a mental note to adjust my estimates.
She worries about whether the Hensley House can handle the reception flow, whether there’s enough parking, whether her mother will try to invite people who aren’t on the list.
“My mother is already trying to add people to the guest list,” Jo says darkly. “People I’ve never met, Dean. She wants to invite her entire Sunday school class.”
“Your mother is a force of nature.”
“My mother is a menace. Runs in the family.”
Levi has been quiet through most of this, eating slowly, and I notice Jo glancing at him when she thinks no one’s watching.
Not with matchmaking glee—with concern. The same look I’ve been trying not to wear all evening.
She tops off his water glass without asking.
Puts an extra roll on his plate. Small gestures, the kind a mother makes, or a sister.
She’s worried about him too.
“Remember those Fourth of July cookouts?” Jo asks, and I tense, expecting another transparent redirect. But she’s looking at Levi with something soft. “Dean told me about them. Your dad at the grill, the whole neighborhood showing up.”
She’s trying to draw him out. Not toward me—just out. Out of whatever silent place he’s retreated to behind those exhausted eyes.
“I remember.” Levi’s voice is soft. “Dad always burned the hot dogs but nailed the steaks.”
“Sounds like my father,” I say without thinking. “He could never figure out the timing.”
Levi’s eyes meet mine across the table. “Are you still close with your dad?”
“We grew apart for a while. But we reconnected a few years ago. After I moved back to Asheville.”
“I’m sorry about your father, by the way.” Jo’s voice is gentle. “Eleanor mentioned he passed?”
I nod, surprised by the sudden tightness in my throat. “Heart attack. It was quick.”
“That’s hard. Even when the relationship is complicated.”
“Family’s complicated,” Dean says gruffly. “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”
Coming from Dean, the words land differently. He’s looking at Levi when he says it, and something passes between them—an acknowledgment of shared wounds, or just the understanding of two men who’ve learned to be brothers despite everything.
By the time we’ve finished the main course, the conversation has settled into something almost comfortable.
Jo shares stories about her boutique—the woman who wanted a driftwood coffee table that could also function as a bathtub, the couple who commissioned matching vintage desks and then broke up before she finished them.
“Levi chased it out,” Dean says, halfway through a story about a raccoon at the fire station. “This was years ago, when he was still in high school. He just walked up to it and started singing, and the thing followed him right out the door.”
“Animals like music,” Levi says.
“Animals like you. That’s different.”
“Remember that seagull you accidentally adopted?” I hear myself ask. The memory surfaces from nowhere—Levi feeding crackers to a seagull with a broken wing until it healed enough to fly away. “You named it Steve.”
Levi’s face does something complicated. “You remember Steve?”
“You were devastated when he left. You wrote a song about it.”
“I did not write a song about a seagull.”
“You absolutely did. Something about wings and freedom and following your heart?”
“That was a metaphor.”
“For a seagull named Steve.”
He almost smiles. Almost. And even that—that ghost of a smile on his exhausted face—does something devastating to my chest.
Dean is watching us with an expression I can’t read. Jo’s eyes are bright, but it’s not the scheming brightness from earlier. It’s relief. Like she’s been holding her breath all evening, waiting to see if Levi would surface from wherever he’s been hiding, and he just did.
Because of a seagull named Steve.
Because of me.
I’m not sure how I feel about that.
“Dessert!” she announces, jumping up from the table. “I made peach cobbler. From last year’s preserves. Levi, help me with the ice cream?”
They disappear into the kitchen, leaving me alone with Dean.
“She means well,” Dean says after a moment.
“I know.”
“She’s not subtle.”
“I noticed.”
He leans back in his chair, studying me. “He’s different when you’re around. More present.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing.
“Just don’t hurt him again.” Dean’s voice is quiet but firm. “Whatever happened before—that’s your business. But he’s been carrying it for a long time.”
“I never meant to hurt him.”
“People rarely do.”
Before I can respond, Jo and Levi return with cobbler and ice cream, and the moment passes. But Dean’s words stick with me through dessert, through the awkward goodbyes at the front door, through the drive home along dark roads lit only by my headlights.
Don’t hurt him again.
As if I have any power over this. As if either of us has any control over what happens when we’re in the same room together.
I pull into Mom’s driveway and sit in the dark for a moment, staring at the pear tree’s white blossoms glowing in the moonlight.
But it’s not Dean’s warning that keeps replaying.
It’s the tremor in Levi’s hands. The shadows under his eyes. The way he said I’m just...empty like it was a confession he hadn’t meant to make out loud.
I used to know how to help him. Back when we were young and everything was simpler, I’d pull him out of his dark spirals with bad jokes and long drives and the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling.
I’m not that girl anymore. He’s not that boy. And whatever is breaking him down right now is not my problem to fix.
But as I walk inside and lock the door behind me, I can’t stop seeing his hands wrapped too tight around that beer bottle, trying so hard to hold steady.
“Not my problem,” I tell the silk hydrangeas in the hallway.
They don’t believe me either.