Chapter 2
CAL
Ihave a clear, boring system. Wake at six. Coffee, black, standing at the kitchen counter because sitting feels like wasting time. Check on Dad. He's already in the workshop by then, door cracked, radio on low, talking to Mom like she's sitting on the stool by the window.
I don't interrupt. Just listen long enough to know he's okay. Whatever version of okay he's been running on for eleven years.
Then the firehouse. Twelve-hour shifts, sometimes twenty-four. I like the structure. The job tells me where to stand, what to carry, when to move. Leaves little room for thinking about anything else.
After shift: pub with Ramsey. A beer, maybe two. Home by ten. Chat with Dad. Shower. Sleep.
Days off are spent with Dad or around town doing whatever needs doing. Fixing Mr. J's porch railing. Helping Ramsey. Dropping supplies at the firehouse. Harbor Hill is small enough there's always someone who needs a hand, and I'm always available.
The system works. It worked through every out-of-town weekend I never talked about. Through every woman whose last name I didn't learn on purpose. Through all of it, it was consistent and mine.
Then a girl walked down a staircase last summer and I forgot my own name.
Six months ago, Lily Moreland said "I'm not everyone" when I first met her, and I've been trying to get my footing back ever since.
I'm a grown man, a firefighter. Someone who's carried unconscious people out of burning buildings without flinching. And I was rattled for seventy-two hours because a twenty-one-year-old said my full name in a nice way. If the guys at the firehouse found out, I'd have to move states.
Rome had spotted enough from one interaction to pull me aside afterward. Stay away from my baby sister, he'd said, with emphasis on baby and her young age of twenty-one thrown at me repeatedly.
I had promised easily. Because she wasn't staying, and I was sure it was nothing.
She was just the most beautiful person I'd ever seen in my entire life, but so what?
Beautiful people exist. They walk around in the world all the time and other people manage to function normally around them.
I could be one of those people. I could look at her and feel nothing and go back to my system and forget she ever existed.
She went back to Chicago, I went back to my life. Everything was going great, and with a little time I would have forgotten all about her. Then she moved here.
First time I saw her again was at Erin's shop. I stopped in to grab flowers for Dad. He likes them in the kitchen and workshop, says Mom always kept flowers there and the house feels wrong without them. I've been picking them up every week for years now. It's part of the system.
I push open the door and she's behind the counter, not Erin. The air leaves my lungs in a way I'm going to say didn't happen.
Long brown hair, waves and waves of it, spilling over one shoulder and almost down to her waist. The kind of hair that looks like she just woke up and also like she could be in a shampoo commercial, thick and wild and catching the light from the window in a way that makes me forget I'm here for flowers.
Freckles are scattered across her nose and cheeks like someone flicked a paintbrush at her. Those full lips, soft pink, slightly parted as she concentrates on the stems in her hands.
And then her eyes, the ones that were the hardest to forget. Gray, pale and striking, the color of storm clouds or winter mornings or something equally stupid and poetic that I am not going to say out loud.
She's wearing an oversized sweater slipping off one shoulder, exposing the strap of something underneath and a stretch of bare skin I lose my mind over.
She's wrapping stems in brown paper, humming off-key to something I can't hear, completely unaware that I've stopped functioning at the sight of her. Again.
Her gaze lifts when the bell chimes and her whole face opens.
"Callahan."
Six months and I'd almost convinced myself I'd exaggerated how beautiful she is. Built it up in my head into something bigger than it actually was. I hadn't.
"Hey," I manage. Thank God. "I didn't know you were in town."
"I moved in last week," she smiles, setting down the scissors. "Across the street." She points over my shoulder. "The apartment with the big window. Third floor."
"Right." I let the door close behind me. Take a step in. Normal steps. Regular human steps. "That's, uh. Great."
"Is it?"
The tilt of her head and the gleam in her eyes tells me she is enjoying my non-functioning brain a little too much. It's the same smile from the stairwell, the one that made me forget how to introduce myself.
I need to say something normal, something that won't make me sound like a stuttering idiot, which I am not.
"Flowers," I say. "For my dad."
"Sure." She comes around the counter, close enough now that I can smell her shampoo or soap or whatever it is. Clean and warm and something sweet underneath I can't name and am not going to try.
"What does he like?"
"Anything. He's not picky."
She pulls stems from different buckets. Yellow ones, white ones, something with small purple buds she holds up to the light and considers before adding.
She takes her time, turns each stem, checks petals.
She's careful with them in a way that makes me look at her hands.
Then makes me stop looking at her hands.
"He keeps them in the kitchen," I offer, for no reason. She didn't ask, and I sure as hell didn't have to say a word.
"That's sweet."
She adds another stem, tucking it into the arrangement. "My mom used to keep flowers on every surface. Our houses or tents looked like a botanical garden."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. She'd bring back cuttings from whatever country she was in. Half of them died on the way back, but she didn't care."
She smiles at the memory, a little distant. "She'd stick them in water and hope for the best."
She considers the bouquet in her hands.
"Give me a sec to remember how to ring it up."
"Put it on my tab."
She stops, bouquet still in hand, smile different from the stairwell one. "You have a tab at a flower shop?"
"Erin keeps a running one for me. I'm here every week."
She files it away, the fact that I buy flowers every week, and I wish I'd said literally anything else.
I pull a ten from my wallet and drop it in the tip jar.
Her eyes move from the jar to me. "That tip is too big for what you got, Callahan."
"Inflation."
She leans against the counter. "That's not how inflation works."
She narrows her eyes at me, and I should leave. Should take the flowers and walk out and drive home and go back to my system.
Instead I stand there, holding yellow flowers in brown paper, letting a twenty-one-year-old girl stare me down across a counter full of dahlias.
I leave before I can say anything as stupid as everything else I've ever said to her. I sit in my car for a full minute before starting the engine, flowers on the passenger seat.
The problem is that Lily is everywhere after that. Tuesday I'm at Ramsey's house, dropping off shelves he asked me to help install. She's on the couch, painting her toenails, barefoot and carefree. She waves at me while inspecting her nails.
"Hi, Callahan," she calls without looking up.
I nearly walk into the doorframe.
Thursday is group night at the pub. Ramsey and Poppy on one side of the booth, Erin and Rome on the other, Lily tucked next to Erin. I slide in beside Ramsey because it's the only seat left, which puts me directly across from her.
I'm close enough to see the freckles on her nose and smell whatever she smells like. Feel it when her knee almost touches mine under the table.
She doesn't say much to me. She talks to Erin, to Poppy, is intrigued by something Ramsey says. Every now and then her eyes find mine over the rim of her glass for maybe half a second before she smiles and glances away.
Rome hasn't said a single word to me all night that wasn't strictly necessary. He doesn't need to. The man communicates entire paragraphs with his stare. Every time Lily speaks, Rome's eyes move to me. Not to her. To me, as if making sure I'm not looking at her the way he suspects I am.
I'm not. I'm looking at a very interesting knot in the wood paneling behind Erin's head. My beer. The table. Anything except the girl four feet away with freckles and gray eyes.
I last about forty minutes before making an excuse about an early shift and leave. Ramsey gives me a puzzled look on the way out. I don't return it.
Saturday I see her at the grocery store. She's there in Converse and a mini skirt in February, gold earrings catching the fluorescent light. She's arguing with a cantaloupe. Actually holding it up and frowning at it like it could tell her if it was good or not.
I turn around and go down a different aisle, and stand in front of canned beans way too long, pretending to read the sodium content on kidney beans while waiting for her to leave produce.
She doesn't leave. When she moves on to avocados, I leave the store without buying anything.
Sunday is at Ruth's Diner. She's in the window booth, chin in hand, reading something on her phone. Ruth is hovering the way Ruth does, refilling coffee, talking too loudly about something I can't hear through the glass.
She says something that makes Lily throw her head back and laugh. Even through the glass I can hear it, or I imagine I can. Hard to tell at this point.
She actually lives here now and my system doesn't account for this.
The following week I am at the pub with Ramsey, just the two of us. No group night, no Rome and no Lily. I can relax for the first time in days.
Ramsey leans back, beer in hand, watching me with that look. The one that says he's about to be annoying about something.
"Man, stop checking the door. She's not coming."
"I'm not checking the door."
"You check it about three times a minute since we got here."
"I'm aware of my surroundings," I say flatly. "It's a professional habit."
"You're a firefighter, not a Secret Service agent."
I take a sip of beer. Ramsey keeps looking at me, just sitting there, calm, waiting for me to crack.
"She's Rome's sister," I offer, as if that explains anything.
"I know who she is."
"She's also twenty-one."
"That has been said once or twice, yeah."
"So you understand why I'm not looking for her."
Ramsey sets his beer down. "Cal, you are so far past looking it's not even funny. You damn near walked into a doorframe at my house last time."
"The doorframe was in a weird spot."
"That house is made to Rome perfection. You're just full of shit."
I keep my eyes on my beer.
"How long are you going to do this?" he asks.
"Do what?"
"Pretend you don't lose brain function every time she's within fifty feet of you."
"I have excellent brain function at all times, thank you."
"You stood in the bean aisle at the grocery store for ten minutes on Saturday." He raises an eyebrow. "You don't even like beans."
I stare at him. "How do you know about the bean aisle?"
"Poppy saw you. She said you were reading the back of a can of kidney beans like it was going to give you the answers to life." He grins. "She texted me about it. With a photo."
Mental note: never go to the grocery store again.
"Again, she's twenty-one," I repeat.
"I heard you the first time."
"And she's Rome's sister."
"Also heard that."
"So this isn't a conversation we need to be having."
Ramsey is a gloating bastard. "You're doomed."
Yeah. I suspected as much myself.
"I'm fine."
"You're doomed, and you're going to be a disaster about it, and I'm going to have to watch."
"Wow, thanks for the support."
"Anytime," he says cheerfully, raising his beer.
I don't clink it. Ramsey drinks anyway, looking way too comfortable for a man watching his best friend's life fall apart in slow motion.
"Just so we're clear," I say. "Nothing is happening."
"Sure."
"I mean it, Ramsey."
"I believe you."
His face says he doesn't. His posture says he doesn't. He's already pulling out his phone, probably to text Poppy that he doesn't.
I finish my beer and set the glass down harder than needed. "I'm going home."
"Tell your dad I said hi."
"Yeah." I pull my jacket off the back of the booth. Ramsey's still sitting there, relaxed, legs stretched out, looking like a man with no problems in the world. Must be nice.
"And Cal?"
I stop halfway out of the booth.
"Maybe don't go to the grocery store for a while."
I don't dignify that with a response. Ramsey's laughing before I hit the door.
Dad's in the workshop when I get home. Door cracked, radio on. I can hear him before I see him, the low murmur of his voice under the sound of sandpaper on wood.
"... turned out nice, didn't it? The grain on this one. You'd like it. You always liked the maple."
I stand in the hallway and listen. Dad does this very often, talks to her while he works. Tells her about his day, the wood, whatever he's seen or heard or thought. Eleven years of one-sided conversations with a woman who died in her sleep from an aneurysm nobody saw coming.
They were high school sweethearts. Twenty-something years together before she was gone. He's spent eleven years since in this workshop, sanding furniture and talking to her ghost.
I love my father more than I know how to say.
He's a good man. The best man I know, probably.
Patient and gentle with things as well as people.
Remembers everything, asks about your day, actually listens.
He raised me alone after she died, though I was eighteen by then.
Never complained, never fell apart where I could see it.
Though he did where I couldn't. He just got quieter, pulled the world smaller. The house, the workshop, the wood. That and talking to a woman who can't hear him.
I used to think it was sad, and now I don't know what it is. Devotion, maybe. Love and grief braided so tight you couldn't pull them apart without losing both. I never want to understand that from the inside.
I go to bed and stare at the ceiling. I don't think about freckles or brown hair or how she owns my name by now.
I don't think about her arguing with a cantaloupe in a mini skirt in February either. That one especially, I think about the least.
Six months of nothing, she undid it in a week.