Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The numbers on Elise’s screen had stopped meaning anything an hour ago. She’d run the same payroll line three times and gotten three answers, and not one of them was the problem. The trouble sat where it had sat for two weeks now, a dull stone she carried everywhere and could not set down.
She’d had the hardest time keeping her mind off of Stephen and that was hard to admit. She thought she’d be able to compartmentalize a little better, but time had made it worse instead of better.
She looked up to clear her head, and Kelly stood in the doorway of the office, gone quiet in a way she didn’t wear often. How long she’d been there, Elise couldn’t have said.
Kelly crossed the room and perched on the corner of the desk the way she did when she meant to stay a while. “You’ve been somewhere else all morning, hon. You okay?”
Elise opened her mouth to give the easy answer, the one that kept the line moving. It wouldn’t come. She shook her head instead.
“No,” she said. “I’m not. Not the way folks mean when they ask.”
Kelly didn’t fill the quiet with anything.
She just waited, which was its own kindness, and after a moment the truth came up out of Elise on its own.
“I’m in love with him. There, I’ve said it out loud.
” The words trembled on the way out and then steadied.
“I’m in love with Stephen Garrett, and I walked away from him in a dark field, and I’d do it again tomorrow. ”
“I don’t regret standing up for myself. A woman who lets a man think the worst of her and stays is a woman who’ll be thinking small of herself by Christmas. I did the right thing.” Her voice cracked on the last of it. “But mercy, Kelly, I miss him something fierce.”
Kelly reached over and squeezed her wrist, hard, the grip of a friend who’d carry a thing for you if she could.
“Honey,” she said, and then her gaze went past Elise’s shoulder to the open doorway, and whatever she’d meant to say changed in her mouth.
A startled gladness came over her face. “Well. Would you look at that.”
Elise was confused at the sudden turn in the conversation.
“You’ve got a visitor.” Kelly slid off the desk and was gone out the side door before Elise could ask her not to be. She didn’t look behind her, but Elise caught the grin on her as she went.
Elise turned in her chair. Stephen stood in the doorway with his hat in one hand and a manila folder in the other.
No flowers, no big armful of roses to say with petals what he hadn’t the spine to say with his mouth.
Just the folder, and that quiet way he had of holding himself, and his eyes on her as though she were the one fixed thing in a moving world.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. Just seeing him in her doorway made the time apart feel longer than it had a few minutes ago.
“Elise,” he said. “I drove a long way to… to tell you something. I know words aren’t my strong point but I’d be obliged if you’d let me get it out before you throw me out.”
She should have said no. The smart thing, the safe thing, was to point him at the door he’d come in by. Instead she folded her hands on the desk to keep them still and said, “Say it, then.”
He stepped in and set the folder on the desk between them, and he didn’t sit. A man with a thing to prove stays on his feet. “Open it,” he said.
She did. Inside was no letter, no plea. A legal document, a few pages thick, the top sheet dense with an oil company’s name and a description of the acreage, his plain scrawling signature at the bottom.
It took her a moment to make sense of what she held.
A lease. He’d signed a lease on a piece of the Garrett land, and what was under it, to the very kind of company he’d been avoiding.
She looked up at him, half a protest already forming. “Stephen.”
“Let me,” he said, gentle, and turned his hat once in his hands. “I’m not showing you this to impress you with what I’ve got. I know now that money’s the last thing you’ve been after.”
“Okay. Thanks, I guess.”
He faltered but continued. “If a fat bank account had been the road to your heart, you’d have found it long before you ever met me.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m showing you because I’m done hiding behind that land.” His voice was low and even and it didn’t waver. “I’ve let people take me for a man with nothing, because nobody comes for what you don’t have.”
“I get that,” she said, starting to understand a little more about what was going on. She was willing to give him time to tell her the changes he’d made. She owed that to them both.
“I signed the lease because you showed me what it takes to quit being afraid.” He set his hat down on the desk, the way a man lays down a shield.
“I didn’t mean to push you into anything.” She frowned, worried that she’d tried to take control of something she had no business getting involved in.
“No. You never pushed me an inch. The night we, um… broke up…” His voice cracked slightly, but his gaze didn’t waver. “You chose your dignity over an easy peace with me. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”
“I had to.”
“I know. You see, I was more afraid of the getting hurt than I ever was of dying lonesome.”
She dabbed at the corner of her eyes. Allowing even one tear would show weakness. She wasn’t looking to seem hard, but she wouldn’t be a pushover, either. After all, she still wasn’t sure how much more he had to say.
“The doubt was mine,” he said. “Not yours. You never gave me one true reason to question you, and I did it anyway. That was my failing and my shame, and I own it.” He stopped.
The hat lay between them and his hands had nothing left to do, and that, more than any of it, told her what this was costing him.
“So, I’m asking for another chance, Elise. I don’t deserve one. But I’m asking.”
She made herself look at him, not at the words but at the man saying them. And the man was a mess. Finally quiet after more truth than she’d ever heard from him.
His weight shifted off one boot and onto the other as though the floor had gone uncertain under him.
His ears were red. Stephen Garrett, who’d faced down a thousand-pound bull without blinking, stood in her little office terrified she’d reject him.
This was no performance. A performer doesn’t sweat.
He came here scared, and didn’t back away.
Elise reached out and closed the folder and slid it to the side of the desk, out of the space between them. “I never cared about the lease,” she said. “I want that plain between us. The land never mattered to me, however many acres there are or whatever sits under them. That was never the issue.”
The shifting of his feet stopped and he stood solidly in front of her now.
“The only question I ever had,” she said, “is whether you’d let me in. Not the land. You. Whether you’d actually allow me to be in your life, or keep me on at arm’s length the way you’ve kept everybody else.”
“I want you in my life,” he said, and there was no hedge in it, no careful inch held in reserve. “I was so scared to let you in, but I’m done with that.”
He came around the corner of the desk, easy enough to give her room to stop him, and crouched by her chair so they were eye to eye. She didn’t try to stop him.
“I want to build something amazing on that land, Elise. Not hide on it.”
“That’s good.” She nodded.
“I want a life out there loud enough to fill all those empty rooms.” His voice dropped. “And I want you in every one of them. That’s the legacy I want. Not the oil. You, and a houseful, and a thousand years of Garretts who aren’t afraid of being loved.”
“You’ve thought about all this? And you’ve put it into words?”
“It’s about time, don’t you think?”
He reached into the folder one more time and drew out a last thing he’d tucked behind the legal pages.
A photograph, old and a bit crinkled of two people standing in front of the pond on the land that now belonged to him.
“My grandpa and grandma,” he said. “Earl and Ruth. This was their place. They were the finest people I ever knew.” His thumb moved over the old photo.
“I’d give about anything for them to have met you. ”
“I’d love to have known them. I’m sure they were wonderful.”
“They’d have loved you,” he said. “Grandma would’ve had you in her kitchen inside ten minutes, and Earl would’ve pretended to be indifferent and then talked about you for a week. They’d have loved you, Elise. Almost as much as I do.”
Elise took the photograph from him to get a closer look. Grandma Ruth had kind eyes. Earl stood beside her stiff and proud. She wondered if Ruth knew how much Earl loved her even though he probably never said it. She could see Stephen in the set of the old man’s mouth.
It was the picture that undid her. A man could rehearse pretty words, but he couldn’t fake the feeling she’d heard in the truth Stephen had just shared. Everything in her that had resisted him was washed away.
“Stephen.” She got his name out and had to stop and gather herself. “You didn’t have to sign away a piece of your grandfather’s legacy to get me to listen.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not to get you to listen. I did it to get myself to live, and you happen to be the woman I want in my life. So telling you about it was the most important part.”
She didn’t trust words anymore, hers or anyone’s. So she did the thing words couldn’t argue with. She took his face in both her hands, his cheek rough under her palms from a day without a razor, and she kissed him.
He went motionless half a heartbeat, a man who couldn’t credit his own luck, and then his arms came around her and drew her up out of the chair and into him, and he kissed her the way a man kisses the one woman he was sure he’d lost for good.
When they came apart she kept her brow against his and breathed him in and his hand lay warm and a little unsteady at her waist. “I’m still a little scared,” he murmured. “Reckon I’ll be scared and do it all anyhow, the rest of my life. That’s the deal I’m offering.”
She drew away enough to look at him, this big quiet man who’d been so sure the world would take anything he let himself love, and laid her hand flat against his cheek. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “You can stop bracing for it.”
“Reckon I will,” he said, the corner of his mouth tipping up. “Give me about fifty years and I might finally believe it.”
“I can work with scared,” she said, “so long as you don’t go quiet on me when it counts. The quiet nearly ended us and you just proved you don’t have to be silent.”
“I’ll talk,” he said. “Might take me a spell to get good at it, but I will.”
Out in the front office a door opened and shut, and Kelly’s voice carried down the hall, pitched loud and innocent, telling Robert he would not believe what was happening in Elise’s office and he’d best take the long way to the coffee pot.
Elise laughed against Stephen’s shoulder and it felt good to feel light and happy.
Stephen Garrett had finally said he loved her out loud, and then he’d kissed her in her own office in the middle of a workday. She held on, and let herself be held, and for once in her whole careful life she didn’t try to fix a single thing.