Chapter 12
TWELVE
LEVI
Not because I’m anxious. I’m just...early. Punctual. A responsible adult who respects other people’s time.
Michelle doesn’t buy it for a second.
“You’ve been here for thirteen minutes,” she says, refilling my coffee for the third time. “And you’ve checked the door approximately sixty times.”
“I haven’t been counting.”
“I have. It’s slow this morning.” She sets down the pot and leans against the counter. “She texted you last night. Jo told me.”
“Does everyone in this town share information like it’s oxygen?”
“Pretty much.” Michelle grins. “Eleanor’s back early. That’s interesting.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Eleanor Smart doesn’t do anything without a reason. If she cut her Florida trip short—”
The bell above the door chimes.
Delilah walks in carrying a weathered metal box.
She looks exhausted. Hair in a loose braid, shadows under her eyes, wearing an oversized cardigan that makes her look soft and tired and beautiful. She spots me immediately, and something flickers across her face.
Fear. Hope. Determination.
She’s terrified.
That makes two of us.
Michelle evaporates like she was never there—the woman has a gift for strategic disappearance—and then Delilah is sliding into the booth across from me, setting the box on the table between us like a barrier. Or an offering. I can’t tell which.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
She wraps her hands around the chai latte Michelle must have made while I wasn’t looking. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“You said you had something to show me.”
“I do.” She stares at the box. Takes a breath. “Do you remember the summer we were seventeen? The night before I left?”
How could I forget? That night lives in my bones. The pecan tree in her mom’s backyard. The stars through the branches. The way she cried when she said goodbye, like leaving was physically hurting her.
“I remember.”
“We buried a time capsule. Under the tree.”
The memory surfaces—dirt under my fingernails, a metal box, promises written on paper and sealed with teenage certainty. I’d forgotten.
“We were going to dig it up when we turned thirty,” I say slowly.
“We never did.” Delilah pushes the box toward me. “My grandmother dug it up a few years after we buried it. She was worried we wouldn’t be able to find it again. So she gave it to my mom for safekeeping.”
“For twenty years.”
“For twenty years.” Her voice cracks slightly. “Mom brought it to me last night. And I read what was inside.”
My stomach drops.
I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. I was seventeen and stupid and so in love it felt like drowning. I probably said things that were embarrassing. Dramatic. Too much.
“Including,” Delilah continues, “the letter you wrote me.”
Oh no.
“Delilah—”
“You said you’d wait for me.” Her eyes are bright. “However long it took. You said I was worth waiting for.”
The coffee shop feels very small. Very quiet. Michelle is aggressively organizing pastries behind the counter, definitely not listening.
“I meant it,” I say. Because I did. Because I still do.
“I know.” A tear slides down her cheek, and she swipes at it impatiently. “That’s the problem. You meant it, and I left anyway. Twice. And I never told you why.”
This is it. Whatever she’s been carrying for twenty years, she’s about to hand it to me.
“Tell me,” I say. “Please.”
Delilah takes a shaky breath.
“The first time—when I was seventeen—my mom said things about you. That you weren’t going anywhere. That you had small-town dreams and I should focus on college instead of some boy who played guitar on the boardwalk.”
I knew Eleanor hadn’t approved of me. I hadn’t realized the words had cut that deep.
“That’s why you left?”
“Partly. Mostly I was seventeen and scared and didn’t know how to fight for what I wanted.” She wipes her cheek again. “But the second time—when I was twenty-seven—that was different.”
This is the one I need to understand. The one that shattered me.
“What happened?”
“I overheard you.” Her voice drops. “You were talking to someone—Mike, I think. You said you wanted to make it big, but you couldn’t leave. Not when you finally had me.”
The words hit like a fist to the chest.
I remember that conversation. I was explaining why I wasn’t going to LA for the audition Mike had set up. I’d said exactly what Delilah described, because it was true. I couldn’t leave her. Not again. Not after waiting ten years to get her back.
“You heard that,” I say slowly, “and you thought—”
“I thought I was your anchor.” Her voice cracks. “First your dad kept you here because he was sick. And then me. I couldn’t be the reason you never chased your dreams. I couldn’t be the thing that held you back from becoming who you were supposed to be.”
“So you left.”
“So I left.” She laughs, but it’s bitter.
Broken. “I told myself it was for your own good. That you’d finally go after what you wanted if I wasn’t there to weigh you down.
And I was right, wasn’t I? I left, and you became famous.
You wrote songs that the whole world loves.
You became exactly who you were supposed to be. ”
I stare at her.
All these years. She thought she was holding me back?
“Delilah.” I reach across the table and take her hands. She goes still, but she doesn’t pull away. “You want to know what really kept me in Twin Waves? When we were seventeen?”
She nods.
“My dad was sick. Sicker than anyone knew. He made me promise not to tell people how bad it was—he didn’t want to be the guy everyone pitied at the grocery store.
” Levi’s jaw tightens. “Every open mic, every demo I recorded, every time someone said ‘you should get out there, send your stuff to a label,’ I couldn’t.
Because my father was dying, and he’d already lost one person who was supposed to love him enough to stay. I wasn’t going to be the second.”
Her face crumples. “Levi—”
“Your mom didn’t know. Nobody knew. Dad didn’t want people treating him differently.” I squeeze her hands. “When you came back at twenty-seven, Dad had just died. I was grieving and lost and trying to figure out who I was without him. And then you showed up, and it was like—”
“Like what?”
“Like the universe was finally giving me something good.” I shake my head. “I wasn’t staying for you, Delilah. I was staying because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. You were the first thing that made me want to stay for the right reasons.”
She’s crying now. Really crying. Michelle has completely abandoned any pretense of not watching, and I don’t even care.
“But you said you couldn’t leave while you had me—”
“Because I didn’t want to. Not because you were holding me back.
” I lift her hand and press my lips to her knuckles.
Just briefly. Just enough. “You were the reason I started writing again after Dad died. You were the reason I had something to say. And yeah, when you left, I poured all that heartbreak into music. But I would’ve traded every single song to have you stay. ”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean every word.”
We sit there in the morning light, hands intertwined, twenty years of misunderstanding finally crumbling between us.
“There’s more in the box,” she finally says. “A tape. You wrote me a song when we were seventeen. I never heard it.”
I’d forgotten about the tape. Or maybe I’d made myself forget, like everything else.
“Do you have something to play it on?”
“My mom has an old boom box.” Delilah looks down at our hands. “I want to listen to it with you. Tonight. After I close the shop.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Seven o’clock? Mom’s house?”
“I’ll be there,” I say again, because apparently I’ve lost the ability to say anything else.
She squeezes my hands once, then lets go. “I have to open the shop.”
“I know.”
“We’ll talk more tonight.”
“Yeah.”
She gathers the box—carefully, like it’s precious now instead of dangerous—and stands, pauses, and looks back at me.
“Levi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. For all of it. For running. For not telling you why. For everything.”
“I know,” I say. “We’ll figure it out.”
She nods once, then walks out. The bell chimes behind her.
Michelle appears at my elbow approximately two seconds later. “Well. That was intense.”
“You were listening.”
“Obviously.” She starts clearing my untouched coffee. “Seven o’clock, huh? That’s a long time to wait.”
“Tell me about it.”
The next eleven hours are the longest of my life.
I try to write. Nothing comes. I try to play guitar. My fingers won’t cooperate. I try to read, but I’ve read the same paragraph six times and I still don’t know what it says.
At noon, Dean shows up at my rental with Rex and a suspicious expression.
“Jo says you had breakfast with Delilah.”
“News travels fast.”
“News travels at the speed of light in this town. You know that.” He drops onto my couch while Rex immediately starts investigating the kitchen for unattended food. “So? What happened?”
I tell him. Not everything—some things are private—but enough. The time capsule. The letters. The misunderstanding that’s been festering for a decade.
Dean listens without interrupting. When I finish, he lets out a low whistle.
“She thought she was holding you back.”
“Yeah.”
“And you never told her about Dad.”
“Nobody knew about Dad until the end. He didn’t want—”
“I know. I know.” Dean scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s just...you two have been torturing yourselves for ten years over a conversation you should’ve had when you were twenty-seven.”
“Thanks. That’s helpful.”
“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to point out that you’re both idiots.” He says it with affection. Mostly. “What happens now?”
“I’m going to her mom’s tonight. We’re going to listen to a tape I made when I was seventeen.”
Dean winces. “A tape? Like, a song?”
“Yeah.”
“A song you wrote when you were seventeen?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it...good?”
I think back. Seventeen-year-old me, hunched over a guitar in my bedroom, trying to put feelings into words for the first time. “Probably not.”
“This should be interesting.”