Chapter 7
LILY
The text comes the day after the hospital. Short, polite, a command dressed up as a suggestion.
Callahan
Dad's home. Surgery went well. I've taken leave so he's covered. You don't need to worry about it.
You don't need to worry about it? Like I could turn that off. Like I could sit in my apartment or trim flower stems and drink coffee and think about literally anything else. Like guilt came with an off switch and I'd just misplaced the instructions.
Easy for him to say. Easy for everyone to say. They didn't understand. I am going to be a doctor. The whole point is to be the person who fixes things, not the one who broke them.
And I had broken something. Maybe not done so directly, but close enough that it didn't matter. Close enough that every time I closed my eyes I saw him falling, heard the sound of it, felt the specific horror of watching something happen that I couldn't stop.
So I come the next day. Then the day after. Then the day after that. Five days pass, and somewhere along the way it quietly becomes part of my routine. Me in Callahan's house. Him hating every single second of it.
First time I came around, I'd pictured something small. A cozy cottage, maybe, or a craftsman bungalow with creaky steps and a sagging porch. Something that matched the quiet grief I imagined living inside those walls.
I was wrong. The house is bigger than expected. Newer. Clean lines and fresh paint, a wide porch with solid railings. Not a single board that looks weathered. The yard is tidy, the path clear, none of the gray after-snow slush that March usually leaves on everyone else's property.
And in the back, nearly as big as the house itself, sits a workshop with wide doors and good windows. Will's kingdom, I presume.
The first time I show up, Callahan answers the door like I've come to serve him legal papers. He goes still when he sees me. Jaw tight, eyes harder.
"I told you..."
"I brought soup." I hold up the container. Vera had actually made it, but he doesn't need to know that.
That becomes the pattern every day since. I show up, Callahan looks like he wants to object. I bring something every time. Soup. Muffins from Poppy. A book I think Will might like. The objection dies before it reaches his mouth. He lets me in and I sit with his dad while Callahan hovers.
"Cal, can you please take a walk?"
Will's voice carries from the recliner, fond and exasperated in equal measure.
"I'm not hovering."
"You've refilled my water three times in twenty minutes. The glass was full the first time."
I glance toward the kitchen doorway, where Callahan stands with a dish towel in his hand, looking like a man caught doing something he can't quite explain. His hair is pushed back, rumpled from running his hands through it too many times.
He's wearing a t-shirt that has no business fitting the way it does across his shoulders and chest, worn thin enough in places that I can see the outline of muscle underneath. Gray sweatpants sit low on his hips.
I take my time getting my eyes back to his face because I'm only human and Callahan Holt is built like all my fantasies combined.
"I'm being helpful," he mutters, leaning against the doorframe like he belongs there.
"You're being neurotic."
Will shifts in his recliner and winces. The cast runs from his ankle to just below his knee, propped up on a cushion. I've already drawn a small bird on it in pen. He told me yesterday that it was the best thing about the whole ordeal.
"Go for your run," Will continues, gesturing vaguely toward the front door.
"I don't need to run."
"You need to run. You've been pacing this house like a caged animal for five days and it's making me tired just watching you." Will raises his eyebrows at me. "Tell him."
"Go for your run, Callahan."
A giggle slips out before I can stop it, because Callahan's face is doing something incredible. He has a face built for disapproval. The kind of expression that should make a person want to apologize. Somehow it only makes him more attractive. It's deeply unfair at this point.
Callahan glances between us, clearly outnumbered, and accepts defeat with a long exhale.
"Fine." He tosses the dish towel onto the counter. "Thirty minutes."
"Please, take forty."
"Thirty, you ungrateful old man." Callahan points at his father, one finger, no room for negotiation. "Do not move from that chair."
"Then go. Run. Come back when you've stopped vibrating."
Callahan leaves a few minutes later. The front door closes harder than necessary. Will settles back in his recliner and sighs, satisfied.
"He's been like this since he was around seven.
" Will's gaze drifts to the door, fondness softening his expression.
"Any time something goes wrong, he hovers.
When his mother got sick with the flu, he slept outside our bedroom door for three nights before we found out.
Just lay there on the hallway floor with a pillow and a blanket. "
I press my lips together to keep from smiling. "That's sweet, though."
"It's sweet until you're a grown man trying to pee in peace and your grown son is standing outside the bathroom asking if you need anything." He cuts me a sideways look. "Thank you for coming, by the way. He won't say it, but he needs the break."
"That's literally why I'm here."
"Thank you. I mean it."
And just like that Will talks and I listen.
He tells me about the town, how it used to be a fishing village before the summer people found it.
The year the harbor froze and the whole town walked across it to the island for a picnic.
He tells me about Callahan. Mostly small things, harmless details a father remembers that a son would die of embarrassment to hear.
Callahan at six, refusing to wear shoes for an entire summer. Callahan at ten, building a birdhouse so perfect Will kept it in the workshop as a reference piece.
Callahan at sixteen, driving to the next town to buy his mother flowers for her birthday because he wanted to pick them himself and Harbor Hill didn't have the ones he wanted.
Will starts laughing before he even gets to the next one.
"When he was eleven," he leans forward, like the story needs the distance closed, "the boy came to his mother and me with the most serious face you've ever seen on a child.
Sat us down at the kitchen table like he was about to deliver a business presentation.
" He adjusts his cast on the cushion, already chuckling. "Said, 'Mom, Dad, I think I am gay.'"
I sit up straighter. "Shut up, he did not."
"He absolutely did. And his mother, God rest her, she kept a perfectly straight face and said, 'Okay, sweetheart, tell us about it.' And Cal said, 'There's this man. He's the most beautiful person I've ever seen and I think about him all the time and I think that means I'm gay.'"
"Who was the man?"
Will grins wide. "Barack Obama."
I press both hands over my mouth. The laugh that comes out is not cute. Not remotely dignified. A honking, helpless sound that makes my whole body shake. I'm never going to recover from this information. Never.
"The boy was obsessed," Will continues, clearly delighted by my reaction.
"Had the posters on his wall. Watched every speech.
Cried during the inauguration. His mother sat with him through the whole thing, and when it was over Cal looked at her and said, 'That's the best man in the world,' and she said, 'He might be, baby. '"
Wait. Was Callahan gay? Was that what this was? Was that why he flinched every time I said his name, couldn't look at me, left rooms when I entered? Was there nothing to fight at all?
Had I spent seven months reading desire into a man who was simply, fundamentally, not interested in women?
My stomach drops. "I didn't know Callahan was gay."
Will waves a hand, still grinning. "Oh, turns out the boy is perfectly straight. But the love for Obama was real. Lasted years."
Relief hits fast while Will looks pleased with himself.
"He's always been the best son." He tells me fondly. "Quiet about the things that matter most. He'll move mountains for you and never mention it."
I tuck all of that away somewhere deep and safe. Will talks about the workshop after that. A commission waiting for when the cast comes off. The grain of a piece of cherry wood he'd been saving for something special.
"You'll have to come with me to the workshop when I'm back on my feet." He pats the arm of his recliner like he's already planning it. "I'll show you the cherry. You'll understand when you touch it."
"I'd like that."
Callahan comes through the front door breathing hard. Cheeks flushed, hair damp at his temples. His t-shirt is darker across his chest and shoulders, clinging in ways that should be illegal. He stands in the hallway pulling out his earbuds, and for a second, he doesn't see me watching.
So I watch. The sweat has turned his gray shirt almost translucent across his collarbones. It clings to him, to the flat of his stomach.
His forearms are bare where he'd pushed his sleeves up, sheened and veined, and I understand — viscerally and without warning — why Erin once went completely incoherent trying to describe this exact phenomenon.
His eyes lift and find me. I don't look away.
I should. I'm a guest in his father's house, a woman with no claim on him, and the polite thing would be to find something else to focus on.
Instead I hold his gaze one beat too long, let my eyes drop to the rise and fall of his chest before dragging them back up.
The flush on his neck deepens and that panicked look has returned.
He clears his throat. "I'm going to... ehm, shower."
"Yup," I say, too quickly. "Definitely shower."
My face is on fire and it shows, because he blinks at me once before he turns and walks down the hallway. The bathroom door clicks shut. The shower comes on, and I stare very hard at Will's bookshelves and think about absolutely nothing.
"I've seen subtler car crashes," Will chuckles behind me.