CHAPTER 14 #3
He should have denied it. A decent man would have said affection was simple, that a child could love more than one person without anybody losing. He believed that for other people. For Beau, he measured every new closeness by the chance it might turn into absence.
"I think about that too," he admitted.
Wren's face softened with pain. "I know you do."
"She lost her mama."
"I know."
"I can't let her get attached to somebody who might leave."
The second the words left him, he hated how they landed. Wren flinched, small but real, and the chapel seemed to draw all the warmth out of the air.
"That was fear," he said before she could build a wall from it. "It wasn't fair."
She looked at him for a long moment. "It was honest."
"Honest can still cut wrong."
"Yes," she said. "It can."
There was more under that. He heard it this time. Accusation sat close to it. A tiredness. A grief old enough to have roots.
Colt hung the wet towel over the back of a chair someone had left near the wall. His hands wanted work. There was none left that mattered.
"What did I miss?" he asked.
Wren went very still.
The question escaped before he could plan for it. He had spent eight years planning nothing around her except distance. Then she had come back with old letters in her eyes, and the ground under his certainty had started giving way.
"Back then," he said. "What did I miss?"
The color left her face in pieces.
"Colt."
"I thought I knew. You left. You chose Austin. Then you didn't answer."
She wrapped her arms around herself. The gesture made him want to step closer and stop at the same time.
"I thought you didn't want me to answer," she said.
He stared at her.
"What?"
"I thought..." She closed her eyes. "I thought you had decided I was a complication. That I was some girl making your life smaller when you had real things to handle."
"I wrote you."
The words came out rougher than he intended.
Her eyes opened.
For one breath, the storm seemed to stop outside the chapel.
It did not, of course. Rain still beat the roof.
Wind still pressed at the door. Water still traced the limestone and chilled his shirt at the shoulder seam.
But inside him, something went quiet in the hard way a pasture went still before cattle broke.
Wren's mouth parted. "You wrote?"
"Yes."
Her hand moved to the pocket of her damp dress and stopped there, pressing against the fabric as if something under it had burned her.
He took one step toward her. "You didn't get it."
The words landed as certainty.
She shook her head once, barely.
The old hurt in him did not know what to do with that. It had been stacked too long, one rail over another, building a fence around every tender thing. If the first rail was wrong, if the first day had been wrong, then the whole line needed walking.
Wren's eyes shone, but she did not cry. "I found something."
"What?"
"A letter. " Her voice thinned. "Your letter. And a note. It was in a ribbon box at Sudie's. I read it before the picnic."
His pulse beat hard in his throat.
Since then she had carried it. Since then she had looked at him knowing something had been stolen from both of them.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't know how to say it without making everything worse."
"Wren."
"And because I was ashamed. " That came out in a rush, raw enough to strip the varnish off every polite excuse between them.
"Because I believed what I was told. I believed it because part of me wanted to believe there was a clean reason to go, and because I was young and scared and proud, and because Odette--"
She stopped.
The name struck the chapel floor like a dropped tool.
Colt knew Odette's polish, her measuring glance, the way she could turn concern into a saddle and cinch it tight. He had never liked her, but dislike was a small word beside the look on Wren's face.
"What did she do?" he asked.
Wren shook her head, but not in refusal. In fear of the answer. "She had the letter. Or she knew about it. I don't even know the order yet. There was a note in her hand, and I think she--"
His phone rang.
The sound split the room wide open.
For a second he froze. Wren's unfinished sentence hung between them, bright and terrible. Then the ringtone came again, and Colt's body knew before his mind caught up. Beau.
He pulled the phone from his pocket. Junie's name lit the screen.
Wren saw it too. Everything in her face changed.
Colt answered. "Junie?"
The feed-store hum he expected was not there. Only storm noise, a door shutting, and Junie's voice pitched low. "Colt, she's awake. Bad dream. She's asking for you."
He was already reaching for his hat. "Is she hurt?"
"No. Scared. She said Harlow couldn't find the stars."
The chapel, the letter, Odette, Wren's white face, the years cracking open under his boots - all of it stayed. None of it mattered more than Beau needing him in the dark.
"I'm coming," Colt said.
Wren stepped back from the door before he asked. "Go."
He shoved his tools into the bag without fastening it, grabbed his keys, and went out into the rain.