Chapter 18
Kayla
The elementary school parking lot at three o’clock was a study in organized chaos.
Minivans angled into spots that weren’t really spots.
A crossing guard in a reflective vest waved traffic through the loop with the weary authority of a woman who had done this eight hundred times and would do it eight hundred more.
The September afternoon had that thin, bright quality that Colorado kept surprising me with—too warm for a jacket, too cool without one, the sky so blue and wide overhead it made my eyes ache.
I leaned against my car and waited. The Barley deadline was four days out, and I’d spent the morning inking finals until my hand cramped, but here in the afternoon sun with the mountains sharp against the horizon and the controlled mayhem of dismissal unfolding around me, the deadline felt like something happening to a different person.
The rest of me was occupied with a different kind of tension. The kind that had lived in my chest for two days now, since the night in my kitchen when Ben Garrison had kissed me like I was the only solid thing in a tilting world.
And then stopped.
I’d had two days to sit with it. Two days to turn it over, examine it from every angle, hold it up to the light, and look for the flaw I knew had to be there. And I’d found it, the way I always did. The explanation that fit the shape of every fear Craig Dutton had ever planted in me.
Ben was kind. Ben was decent. Ben tore down fences for little boys and crouched at eye level to talk to children who were scared. Everything he’d done could be explained as a man who cared about Jolly’s happiness and, by extension, William’s.
A man who was good to his neighbor because that’s who he was. Not because he wanted me.
I was the one who’d taken ordinary kindness and decided it was desire.
He’d kissed me because the night William had gone missing, I’d been crying and he was the kind of man who leaned toward someone in pain instead of away.
Honorable. Principled.
Then he’d come to his senses. He told me why he stopped, and it was decent and right and everything Craig would never have been.
But the stopping was the part that had stayed.
“Kayla Cafferty, you are staring into the middle distance like a woman in a prescription drug commercial.”
Trish materialized beside me with the speed and stealth of someone who had honed her approach skills on toddlers.
Her sunglasses were pushed up on her head, her tote bag was overflowing with folders and PTA paperwork, and her expression carried the particular energy of a woman who had arrived with an agenda.
“I’m watching for William.”
“You’re brooding. I know brooding when I see it. I married Gary. The man broods about lawn care.” She set her tote on the hood of my car without asking. “So. When is the hot dog guy taking you out?”
I closed my eyes. “Please stop calling him that.”
“He’s hot. He has a dog. I’m being efficient.
” She said it with the satisfaction of a woman who had coined a phrase and intended to use it until the end of time.
“Seriously, though. After the assembly? After the way that man looked at you in the gym like you’d personally invented oxygen. Something has to be happening.”
“Nothing is happening.”
“Nothing.”
“He hasn’t asked me out, Trish.”
She pulled her sunglasses off her head and stared at me. “I’m sorry. The man who tore down part of a fence for your son, brought you tea, and volunteered to perform for two hundred screaming children because you mentioned it in passing… That’s the same man who hasn’t asked you out?”
“That’s correct.”
“Is he in a coma?”
“He kissed me.” I said it fast, before I could talk myself out of it. “After the night William went missing. In my kitchen. And then he stopped.”
Trish went very still. Even the parking lot chaos seemed to recede slightly, the way the world did when Trish decided something required her full attention.
“Stopped why?”
“Because I’d had one of the worst nights of my life. And William was sleeping upstairs.” I shrugged, and the casualness of it cost me more effort than anything I’d done all day. “He was being responsible.”
“That sounds like a good man.”
“Or a man who realized he didn’t actually want to.”
Trish’s mouth opened then closed. She studied me for a long moment.
“Okay,” she said. “Walk me through the or. Because from where I’m standing, responsible and not-interested look very different, and you seem to be squinting at them until they blur together.”
I looked at the mountains. It was easier than looking at Trish.
“Think about it. Really think about it. He moves in next door. He’s got a dog my son falls in love with.
He opens the fence because of Jolly and William, not because of me.
He does the assembly because he’s a K9 handler and that’s what K9 handlers do for community outreach—it wasn’t some grand gesture. ”
“But…”
I held up my hand so I could continue. “And in my kitchen that night, I was a disaster. I was sobbing. He held me because that’s what a decent person does when someone breaks down in front of them. The kiss was an extension of that, and then he realized what was happening and pulled back.”
Trish was quiet. Listening the way she did when she was taking something seriously, which I appreciated and also hated because it meant she wasn’t going to dismiss what I’d said with a joke.
A joke would be so much easier.
“And the tea?” she asked.
“He noticed my order once. He has a good memory. He’s observant. That doesn’t mean—”
“Kayla.” She picked up her bag. “I hear you. It’s possible he’s just a really good neighbor with a dog who likes your kid. It’s also possible you’re building a case against something good because you’re scared.” She paused. “But I’m not going to say that, because I’m a supportive friend.”
“You literally just said it.”
“I said I wasn’t going to say it. Totally different.
” She squeezed my arm. “For the record, a man who stops kissing you because your kid is upstairs and you’ve had a terrible night is not a man who doesn’t want you.
That’s a man who wants to do it right. But what do I know.
I married to a guy who proposed at an Arby’s. ”
The school doors opened, and children began pouring out in the chaotic stream of backpacks and untied shoes and permission slips crumpled into pockets.
William appeared near the back of the crowd, walking with Theo, their heads bent together in the serious conference of six-year-olds discussing matters of critical importance.
“William! Over here, buddy!”
He spotted me and waved but didn’t break from Theo.
The two of them walked over together. Theo turned toward Trish, already talking about something that had happened at recess, and William arrived at my side with grass stains on his knees and a mood that was considerably better than the one I’d had all afternoon.
I was helping him get his backpack off when the sound of a truck registered. Not unusual in a school parking lot, except that I knew this engine. I’d been hearing it pull into the driveway next door for weeks now, and apparently my nervous system had cataloged the sound without my permission.
Ben’s truck pulled into the parking lot, a short distance from where Trish and I stood. Donovan was in the passenger seat. He gave an easy wave through the window.
Ben got out.
He was in jeans and a dark Henley, sleeves pushed to his forearms. He came around the front of the truck holding a to-go cup.
He walked over to me and held it out.
“Lemon ginger. Two sugars. Should still be warm.”
I took it. The cup was heated against my fingers.
“Thank you.” My voice came out smaller than I intended.
“We were at the coffee shop on Elm going over some reports. Figured I’d swing by and bring you this on my way to the station.”
He said it simply. Stripped to the facts of it, no decoration, no performance. He’d had coffee and thought of me and bought my tea and driven it over. That was all.
I filed it under observant. Under polite. The familiar categories where safe explanations lived.
But the tea was still heating my hands, and he was still standing in front of me, and the categories were getting harder to believe.
Trish had gone perfectly silent beside me. I could feel her watching without looking, her entire body radiating the controlled intensity of a woman exercising enormous restraint.
“Ben, this is my friend Trish. Trish, Ben Garrison.”
“The assembly guy.” Trish shook his hand with a friendliness that was, to her credit, only about twenty percent predatory. “My son Theo hasn’t stopped talking about Jolly. You made quite an impression.”
“Jolly did all the work.”
“So I’ve heard. From literally every child in the school.” She glanced at me, then back at Ben, and something shifted in her expression. A decision being made in real time, visible to anyone who knew where to look.
“You know what, this is perfect timing. Kayla was just saying she wanted to have you over for dinner tonight. As a thank-you. For the assembly and for helping find William.”
The parking lot noise faded. My heartbeat filled the space it left behind.
I had not said this. I had been standing here holding a cup of tea and trying to remember how to be a person, and now Trish Johnson had detonated a grenade in the middle of the school parking lot and was standing in the blast radius looking exceptionally pleased with herself.
Ben’s eyes came to me. Steady, direct, waiting.
“Yeah.” My voice worked. Barely. “If you’re free.”
“Seven work?”
Simple. Direct. He didn’t oversell it. Didn’t ask who else would be there. Didn’t turn it into something larger than the question required.
“Seven works.”
He gave a single nod. Then he turned and started walking across the lot to his vehicle.
Trish waited until he was back at his truck before she leaned in and said, at a volume that was not remotely as quiet as she thought it was, “I told you the hot dog guy wouldn’t say no.”
From the open passenger window of the truck, Donovan’s head swiveled toward us.
I watched his face cycle through confusion, comprehension, and then a delight so pure it practically glowed.
He looked at Ben climbing into the driver’s seat, looked back at us, and mouthed three words I couldn’t quite make out before the truck pulled away.
His wave through the window was considerably more enthusiastic than the first one.
“Trish. For crying out loud. Donovan heard you.”
“Good. Maybe it’ll get back to Ben and speed things up.”
I stood in the parking lot holding tea I hadn’t asked for but was enjoying, with a dinner I hadn’t planned, and the growing certainty that Donovan Hughes was never going to let Ben live down the phrase hot dog guy for as long as either of them lived.
“You’re welcome,” Trish said.
I turned to her. She wore the expression of a woman who had single-handedly solved a problem the rest of the world was too polite to fix.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“You can kill me tomorrow. Tonight, you have a dinner to cook.” She was already pulling out her phone.
“William’s sleeping over at our house. Don’t argue.
Theo will be thrilled, Gary will let them stay up too late watching cartoons, and you will have an evening without a six-year-old asking for water every eleven minutes. ”
“Trish—”
“This is happening, Kayla. Let it happen.” She tucked her phone in her pocket and picked up her tote. “Wear something nice. Not trying-too-hard nice. More like this-old-thing? nice. You know the difference.”
She collected Theo with one arm and headed for her car, already calling instructions over her shoulder about what William should pack for the sleepover. William looked up at me with confusion that I shared completely.
“I’m going to Theo’s house tonight?”
“Looks like it, buddy.”
His face split into a grin so wide it swallowed the confusion entirely. He jumped in the car and got situated in his seat, and I was left standing in the thinning parking lot with a warm cup of tea and a pulse I couldn’t get under control.