Chapter 8
EIGHT
DANIEL
News in small towns traveled faster than the known laws of physics agreed was possible.
I’d been back at the station for about four hours when Cord found me under the engine doing a routine check that didn’t require my full and undivided attention, which was fortunate because my full and undivided attention was somewhere else.
For two full days, it kept returning, without permission, to a hospital room and a ring and ten seconds that had been supposed to be three.
“So,” Cord said, from somewhere above and to my left.
“Nope,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You have a voice that says things before your mouth does. Hand me that wrench.”
He handed me the wrench. My brief hope that he’d depart was dashed when he crouched down, resting his forearms on his knees.
He had that look he’d gotten since Lucy.
The one that was equal parts genuine happiness for whoever was in front of him and barely concealed delight at having company in the situation.
That should’ve clued me in.
“Donna Briggs called her cousin,” he said. “Her cousin goes to First Methodist. Half of First Methodist apparently goes to the Piggly Wiggly on Monday morning.”
I set the wrench down and stared at the underside of the engine as if there were some explanation for the fact that small towns were very efficient, completely uncontrollable games of telephone, run by people who—usually—meant well.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Chief knows.”
I closed my eyes. “How bad?”
“Moose cried a little.”
I came out from under the engine.
Jarrod Sato was six-foot-four and built like a small mountain.
He’d once walked into a sliding glass door he’d closed himself thirty seconds earlier.
Just now, he stood in the bay doorway with the expression of a man who was genuinely moved and was not embarrassed about it one iota. “Meatball,” he said with feeling.
“Moose.”
“You got married, man.”
No point in lying about it now. “I did.”
“To Ellie.”
“Also correct.”
He crossed the bay in three strides and pulled me into a hug that could’ve saved me a visit to the chiropractor, which was how Moose expressed most things he felt strongly about.
I let it happen. When he released me, he held me at arm’s length with the solemn sincerity of a very large, very clumsy man who took friendship seriously.
“I always knew,” he said.
“Everyone apparently always knew,” I said.
“We did though,” Cord insisted from behind me.
“There was a bet,” Moose said.
I turned to glare at Cord.
Cord held up both hands. “It was before my time. The bet predates me. I want that on the record.”
“How long has there been a bet?” I demanded.
“Since midway through your sophomore year,” Moose said. “Twitch has the sheet. He’s been managing it. You should know that Donkey had you married by last Christmas, so he’s out, and I had you at—” He stopped. Did math. “Huh. I’m out too. Rico had this quarter, actually.”
“Rico,” I repeated. Rico was our newest paramedic. He’d been on the crew for eight months and had evidently assessed the situation faster than people who’d known me for years. I was going to need a moment with that.
“Five hundred dollars,” Moose said with genuine admiration. “He’s going to be insufferable.”
From the common room, I heard Twitch, who’d no doubt been listening from a distance and decided that distance was no longer necessary. He materialized in the doorway with a folded piece of paper that appeared to be a spreadsheet, printed out and annotated with genuine care.
“Okay,” he said, looking at me with bright, focused energy, “I need to know the exact date for settlement purposes. Because what we have is the date the license was filed, but I figure we’re going for the date of the ceremony—”
“Kyle.”
He looked up from the spreadsheet. “What?”
“I’m not helping you settle a bet about my own marriage.”
“That’s fair. I’ll ask Ellie.”
“You will absolutely not ask Ellie.”
He folded the spreadsheet with the philosophical acceptance of a man accustomed to minor setbacks and tucked it in his pocket. “How’s Gus doing?”
The shift was so abrupt it took me a second to follow it. That was Twitch — chaos up top, genuine underneath. “Better than expected,” I said. “Still a long road.” Which was better than the alternative.
He nodded. Some of the brightness dialed down. “Good. I’m glad.” A beat. “Also, I’m stoked you finally married her because the pining was getting hard to watch.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Meatball.” The pitying shake of his head made him seem somehow both twenty-four and ancient. “We share a building. I see things.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, which was its own kind of answer, so I picked up the wrench and turned back to the engine.
The problem with not denying it—with saying I did and also correct instead of it’s complicated or it’s not what you think—was that I couldn’t.
Not without the risk of it getting back to Gus.
Huckleberry Creek was not a town that kept secrets, as the last twenty minutes had conclusively demonstrated, and the last thing I needed was for someone to mention to someone who mentioned to someone who stopped by the hospital that the whole thing was a performance staged for a dying man’s peace of mind.
So I’d smiled and accepted the spine-rearranging hug and said nothing that wasn’t technically true, and it was fine.
It was fine.
Except that it wasn’t, because with every I always knew and every you two finally and every variation on the theme that the crew kept producing, I felt the strange and inconvenient truth of it settling a little more solidly in my chest. The ribbing was landing differently than it should have.
It should have seemed like something to manage.
Instead, it felt like being seen. Like the crew was saying something accurate about a thing I hadn’t yet let myself fully consider.
Powell Ferguson appeared in the bay doorway late in the afternoon and looked at me like a man who’d recently survived his own romantic catastrophe and had developed opinions as a result.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Donkey.”
“I had you by Christmas.” He shook his head. “Lost fifty bucks.”
“I’m devastated for you.”
“No, you’re not.” He leaned against the door frame with ease, the picture of a man with nowhere pressing to be. “She good?”
He meant Ellie. He always cut to what mattered. “She’s managing,” I said. “Gus is improving.” We didn’t know yet whether that was a false hope or not. We hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it was the real deal because that seemed like tempting fate.
He nodded. “Good.” A pause. “You good?”
A deceptively simple question. One I’d asked him myself during the ten years he’d spent in an all-out war with Jess Donnegan—mostly on her side—before he’d figured out what he’d done wrong back in high school. I wasn’t quite sure if I was happy he had the chance to return the favor.
“Working on it,” I said.
He nodded again, like that was sufficient, because it was, and pushed off the door frame and went back toward the gym.
I let the station noise wash over me—the clang of equipment, the low murmur of the television in the break room, the distant thud of someone dropping weights in the gym—and kept my hands busy with the wrench while my mind stayed stubbornly elsewhere.
I thought about the kiss.
Specifically, I thought about the moment it changed.
The precise second when the plan folded in on itself and something unscripted and unplanned took its place.
I hadn’t been confused about what that something else was.
That was what I kept returning to. Not the kiss itself, but the absence of confusion.
There had been no scrambling, no internal alarm, no what am I doing.
There had been recognition. The clarity of a thing you’ve been not-looking-at for so long that seeing it directly is startling only in how deeply unsurprising it is.
Her hand finding my lapel without deciding to. The slight, involuntary catch of her breath. The way she’d been wholly, completely present. Not performing, not managing, just there. The way I had to remind myself why stopping was the right thing to do, and then make myself do it anyway.
I turned the wrench over in my hands and thought about twenty-three years of being her person.
Of showing up without being asked. Of knowing which booth she’d pick in any diner and what she did with her hands when she was nervous and the specific, helpless little giggle that came out only after one too many glasses of wine.
I thought about the ring I’d been carrying in my jacket pocket for four years without ever sitting down to examine the why of it, and the way it settled onto her finger like it always belonged there. As if her hand had simply been waiting.
Gus had been saying it for a decade. He’d made it a dinner table routine, a running joke—a way of needling us that we’d both gotten very practiced at deflecting with eye-rolls and subject changes and the cheerful, well-worn ease of people who’d had a lot of practice not hearing something.
We’d treated it like weather. Like background noise.
But the thing about Gus was that he had never, in all the years I’d known him, been wrong about something that actually mattered.
I set the wrench down on the bench and stared at nothing in particular.
I was starting to think he wasn’t wrong about this one either.