Chapter 22
Levi
My shift ended at five.
The thing I hadn’t let myself say out loud—not to Jude, not even in the quiet of my trailer at two in the morning when I was staring at the ceiling and lying to myself about why I couldn’t sleep—was that I had loved Becca Hartford for most of my life.
Not in the way you love someone when you’re young and don’t know what the word actually means.
In the way that compounds slowly over years, growing heavier and more specific, until it isn’t just her you love but the particular way she tilted her head when she was deciding whether to trust something.
The way she laughed at herself before anyone else could.
The way she said “I’m fine” in exactly the tone that meant she wasn’t, and expected the whole world to believe her anyway.
I’d loved her through Travis, which was the worst of it—the quietest, most useless kind of love, the kind that had nowhere to go.
I’d loved her through every polite, careful conversation we’d managed over the years while we pretended we were just two people who happened to share a history and a zip code and a set of friends who kept putting us in the same room together.
I’d loved her through all of it.
But what had been building between us lately was different.
Not because the feeling had changed. Because I finally had something I hadn’t let myself have before.
Hope. Real, specific, evidence-based hope.
The kind that came from watching her lean her forehead against my chest in the dark.
From hearing her say, “I don’t want to run away from you anymore,” as if it had scared her to admit it.
From waking up beside her, finding her in the kitchen, and her handing me a cup of tea.
Hope was a dangerous thing to let in. It made everything hurt more when it went wrong.
And I was terrified—quietly, bone-deep terrified—that if I reached too hard, I’d break the fragile thing we’d only just started to build.
That she’d look at me one day and see the same thing everyone else had seen when they got too close, that I wasn’t enough to hold the weight she carried.
That I’d fail her the way so many people had already failed her.
That I’d become another name on the list of people who promised to stay and didn’t.
And underneath that was the thing I didn’t let myself say out loud even to Jude.
What if I wasn’t right for her specifically?
Not whether I was good enough in some general sense—I’d moved past that years ago.
But Becca had spent years with someone who made every decision for her, who read her need for comfort as permission to control, who had turned her tendency to accommodate into a lever.
What if steady looked the same to her as stuck?
What if the things I thought were patience and care were, to someone who’d been through what she’d been through, just a quieter version of the same trap?
I didn’t know how to ask that. I didn’t know if asking it would help or hurt. I just knew it sat in me, and that I’d rather be afraid of the right things than certain about the wrong ones.
But there was another fear underneath all of it, one that was harder to look at because it was less about her and more about me.
I wanted to be chosen. Not needed, not defaulted to, not arrived at because everything else had fallen away, and I was what was left.
I wanted her to look at the full picture—her life, her options, the wide open space of who she was becoming—and choose me anyway.
Deliberately. The way you chose something you actually wanted rather than something you’d simply gotten used to.
I’d spent years being the reliable one, the constant, the person she and everyone in my life could count on, and I didn’t resent any of it.
I’d have done it all again without question.
But I was tired of wondering whether what she felt for me was real or just the reassurance that came from someone always being there.
Those were not the same thing. I knew the difference. And I needed her to know it, too.
That was what I couldn’t say out loud. Not yet.
Maybe not for a while. But it was there, sitting alongside everything else, the quiet insistence that whatever this became, it had to be mutual.
All the way through. Or it would hollow me out in ways I wasn’t sure I could come back from.
And I’d rather know that now than find out later.
I pulled into the Stop & Go lot.
She was waiting outside, jacket on, bag over her shoulder, and she looked up when my truck pulled in with the expression of someone who had been trying to look like they weren’t watching for me.
She hadn’t spotted me yet through the windshield glare, and I was glad for it.
Glad for the extra second to just look at her.
The way the light caught her hair, that gorgeous brown.
The line of her jaw, the curve of her mouth, the way she held herself straight-backed but not rigid.
She was beautiful. She was always beautiful, but there was something about catching her unguarded like this, before she noticed me, that hit differently. My pulse did something reckless.
Then she met my eyes through the windshield. And that expression shifted into the one she only wore for me, and something low in my chest pulled tight in a way that had nothing to do with ease and everything to do with wanting.
I leaned across and pushed the passenger door open before she reached it.
She climbed in, tucking her bag at her feet, and for a second neither of us said anything. The heater was running. The radio was low. The late light came through the windshield at an angle, catching in her hair.
“Long day?” I asked.
“It was actually a good day,” she said. “Elizabeth invented a new sandwich. She called it the Seasonal Pivot.”
“What was it?”
“Brie and fig jam with ham on sourdough.” She paused. “It was incredible. I’m furious about it. I don’t need to be addicted to anything else in that place.”
I smiled and put the truck in reverse. “Food first?”
“First?” She glanced at me sideways. “Matt texted you.”
“He did. Podcast tonight, right? Go live about something random. But only if you’re up to it.”
She nodded once, slowly, looking out the window at the passing storefronts. “I’m going to do it,” she said. “I’ve decided. I just need to not think about it too hard between now and then.”
“Then we get takeout,” I said. “And we don’t think about it until you’re ready.”
She turned back to look at me. “Okay,” she said. “Thai?”
“Sounds good,” I agreed.
We picked it up on the way home, the bag warm between her feet on the floor of the truck, the smell of lemongrass and coconut filling the cab.
She talked about Elizabeth and something Aggie had said at knitting, and I listened, drove, and let the ordinary ease of the ride home do its work.
Every time she laughed at something small, every time she turned to smile at me, I felt like a current under my skin.
I kept my hands on the wheel. I kept my breathing even.
But inside, I was already counting the minutes until we were alone in her trailer with no interruptions and no excuses left.
By the time we pulled into the campground, the worst of the tension had left her shoulders.
The campground was settling into its evening rhythm when we climbed out.
I carried the food, she unlocked the door and held it open, and I ducked through into the warmth of the trailer, setting the bag on the counter while she hung her jacket on the hook.
We moved around each other in the small space without bumping into things, the easy choreography of people who had been navigating each other’s presence for years, and I tried not to let it show how much I liked it.
How natural it felt. How much I wanted it to keep feeling that way.
She looked beautiful.
She always looked beautiful to me, but sometimes it hit differently.
Sometimes my eyes weren’t quite ready for it, and this was one of those times.
The warm light of the trailer caught in her hair, her sleeves pushed up, reaching into the cupboard for plates with the unselfconscious ease of someone who wasn’t performing anything for anyone.
She looked like every version of herself I’d ever loved, all at once.
I had to actively remind myself how to speak.
“Wine?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Please.”
She poured two glasses and set them on the small, scarred table. I got the food out of the bag. She found forks. We sat down across from each other, and for a moment neither of us said anything, just the quiet work of opening containers and passing things back and forth.
She was nervous. I could see it in the way she kept straightening things that didn’t need straightening, the way her eyes went slightly distant between sentences.
Becca, who had faced down Travis without flinching, who had rebuilt her entire life in a trailer park with duct tape and stubbornness and sheer will.
Becca was nervous about tonight. About what she was going to have to say out loud.
I didn’t push. I let her talk about whatever she wanted. She told me about the knitting circle’s plan to descend on the town council, about Elizabeth’s increasingly creative sandwich specials. And more and more I fell under her spell, trusting that this was going to work between us.
This. This was what I’d missed most, I thought, watching her laugh at something I said.
Not just the wanting her—though that had never gone anywhere—but this specific warmth.
The way being in her presence had always felt like thinking out loud in the company of someone who understood the language of my soul.