Chapter 13
Levi
Iwas back home, midway through a Lord of the Rings binge, still in yesterday’s T-shirt, doing nothing in particular with my day off, and doing it badly.
Jude had left for his shift. The townhouse was quiet, the kind that usually didn’t bother me and was bothering me today for reasons I wasn’t examining too closely.
I was also watching my phone, which I wasn’t admitting to myself. The text that came through was short, as Matt Hartford’s texts always were.
Matt: Holloway’s. Whenever you can.
I turned the TV off, grabbed my jacket, and didn’t let myself think too hard about why my pulse had done something at the sight of his name on my screen.
The rain had let up by the time I parked on Main, leaving the street gleaming and grey-skied, the kind of Sweetbriar afternoon that smelled like pine and wet pavement and the cold sweetness that came down off the mountain when the clouds sat low.
I pushed through the heavy door into the warmth of the pub.
Savannah looked up from behind the bar when I came in, her expression doing the small lift it did when she recognized somebody she liked.
“Levi,” she said. “Day off?”
“Apparently,” I said, stopping at the bar. “Have you seen Matt?”
“Back corner.” She tilted her head in that direction.
“Been here about twenty minutes. Ordered coffee, hasn’t touched it,” she said it evenly.
She’d known Matt as long as any of us. She set two mugs on the bar and reached for the coffee pot without being asked.
“Take him a fresh one. That one’s probably cold. ”
“Thanks, Savannah.”
“Mm.” She was already moving down the bar, the kind of efficiency that came from years of reading rooms. I picked up both mugs and headed toward the back.
The corner booth was the one people used when they wanted to talk without being heard, set back from the main floor, with a high wooden partition on one side and a wall on the other.
Matt was in it with his jacket still on, both hands around a mug he wasn’t drinking from, staring at the middle distance with the look of a man running the same thoughts in circles and not getting anywhere new.
He registered me when I was two steps out, and something in his face rearranged itself into the version he showed the world—composed, present, in control of the situation. It was a good effort. It didn’t quite work.
“Hey.” He started to stand.
“Sit down,” I said, and slid into the booth across from him, pushing the fresh mug toward him and wrapping my hands around my own. “Savannah says that one’s cold.”
He looked at the new mug. Something moved through his expression that might have been gratitude, or might have been exhaustion, and was probably both. He pulled it toward him.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Of course.” I settled back, looked at him, and waited, because he was two years older and a hundred years more private, and he’d get to it when he got to it.
He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days and was pretending otherwise.
“She won’t come stay with me,” he said. “I’ve asked. Multiple times. She says she’s fine.”
“She would say that.”
“Yeah. Becca being Becca.” He set the mug down. “That’s why I’m not sleeping.”
I waited.
“Travis has been around,” he said. “Not doing anything. Not technically. Just—around. Driving past. Showing up in places he didn’t used to frequent.” His jaw tightened. “He followed her to the grocery store last week, said he was out of milk. That prick is lactose intolerant—”
“Did he speak to her?”
“He spoke to her.” The way Matt said it told me everything about what kind of conversation it had been. “Becca said he was polite about it. The smiling kind of polite that’s actually something else entirely.”
I knew the kind. I’d seen him operate enough times to have a clear picture of what that looked like.
“She’s not scared,” Matt said. “Or she says she’s not.
And maybe she isn’t—Becca’s got more spine than anyone I know, and Travis knows it too, which is its own kind of problem because it means he has to be careful about how he—” He stopped.
Picked up the mug again. Put it down. “I just want her somewhere I can account for her. Somewhere I know there’s somebody nearby if something changes. ”
I turned my own coffee mug in my hands and thought about what he wasn’t saying.
Because there was definitely something he wasn’t telling me.
Matt was worried about Travis, which was real and legitimate, but the edges of this conversation were ragged in a way that suggested Travis was only part of it.
“What else?” I said.
He looked at me.
“Matt. There’s something else going on, right?”
He was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that meant he was deciding something. Then he let out a slow breath and leaned back in the booth, and something in his posture changed—the careful, contained version of Matt Hartford giving way to something more tired underneath.
“She had a hard stretch before she came back,” he said.
“Harder than she’s told me, I think. I get pieces of it.
The job ending, which was apparently—it wasn’t just the job ending, there was more to it, I mean, you know our parents.
Travis was already—even before the breakup, he was—” He pressed his mouth together.
“She moved to that trailer with practically nothing, Levi. I mean that pretty literally. And she won’t talk about it, not the way I need her to, and I can see her holding it together by sheer force of will every time I look at her, and I know she’s not sleeping, and I know she’s barely eating, and I know she sits out there in that trailer alone and—”
He stopped.
“I can’t force her to come stay with me,” he said.
“She’d never forgive me for pushing that hard.
She needs to feel like she’s standing on her own.
I understand that. I just—” He looked at me directly, and there was something raw in his expression that I knew he rarely let anyone see.
“I need someone I trust close to her. Someone who’ll actually tell me if something’s wrong.
Someone who will step in like she won’t let me do. ”
The booth was quiet for a moment. Outside, the rain had started again, tapping at the window in that patient way it had in Sweetbriar, like it had nowhere particular to be.
“My parents have a trailer,” I said. “Sitting empty at their place.”
Matt looked at me.
“It’s in good shape,” I said. “I could borrow it. Move it into Riverside Pines for a while, take the lot next to hers if Aggie’s got it open.” I paused. “I’ve been meaning to get out of the townhouse anyway.”
I hadn’t been meaning to move out of the townhouse, but apparently, I’d do anything for Becca.
Matt was still looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Something that moved between gratitude and something more complicated. “This is good. A good idea. Just don’t make her feel—”
“Matt.” I met his eyes. “I’ve known Becca since we were kids. I know how to handle this.”
Relief spread across his face as he visibly relaxed into the booth’s cushioned seat.
He nodded, slowly and once, and then he picked up his coffee and finally drank some of it.
The tension in his shoulders didn’t leave entirely, but it shifted, redistributed, the way it did when a man handed part of a weight off to someone else he trusted to carry it.
“Thank you,” he said. Quiet and direct, and meaning it completely.
“Don’t mention it.”
“I mean it, Levi.”
“I know you do,” I said. “Don’t mention it.”
We sat there a few minutes longer, the way you did after a conversation like that, letting the air settle back into something ordinary. Savannah came by and refilled both mugs without asking and didn’t linger.
Matt drained the last of his coffee and set the mug down with the finality of a man closing something up. He looked steadier than he had when I’d walked in. “I’ll keep you posted,” he said. “If anything changes.”
“Do that.” I pulled on my jacket and stood. “And Matt.” He looked up. “She’s going to be okay. You know that.”
He held my gaze for a moment, and I could see him deciding whether to believe it or just accept it for now. He nodded once, the way he’d nodded when I’d told him about the trailer—slow and deliberate and meaning more than it looked like.
I left him there and made my way back through the crowd, lifting a hand to Savannah on my way past the bar.
Outside, the cold hit clean and sharp after the warmth of the pub.
I stood on the wet sidewalk for a moment, hands in my jacket pockets, the neon sign flickering orange in the puddles at my feet, and let the rain-washed air clear my head.
Then I walked to my truck, got in, and sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel before I started the engine.
Riverside Pines. The lot next to hers. A borrowed trailer, no guarantees, and the complete inability to do anything other than what I was already planning to do.
I called my mother and asked to borrow the trailer, holding the phone away from my ear as she excitedly said yes, then started asking questions I didn’t have answers for.
I started the truck and pulled out onto Main.
The townhouse was its usual organized chaos when I got back—Jude’s gear spread across the living room from a shift change, the remains of what had probably been a perfectly good lasagna hardening in a pan on the stove, a basketball game on the television that nobody was watching.
I started pulling boxes from the closet.
Jude appeared in the doorway with a beer in each hand, registered what I was doing, and leaned against the frame with the expression of a man who had questions but was choosing his order carefully. He looked at the box in my hands. He looked at the duffel I’d thrown on the bed. He looked at me.
“Are we moving?” he said.
“I am.”
“Where are we moving to?”
“Riverside Pines. I’m borrowing Mom and Dad’s trailer. Taking the lot next to Becca’s.”