16. Orion
— ? —
Orion
I’d been planning this for three days.
Restrained myself from doing the “throw money at it until it’s impressive” approach I would have used before. Just quiet research. Late nights on my phone while Alex slept. Driving out to check a location and making sure it was right.
Because this couldn’t be about me. It had to be about her.
She was in the kitchen washing bottles when I finally worked up the nerve to ask.
“Hey.”
She looked up. There was still wariness in her eyes when she looked at me. Still that careful distance. But it was softer than it used to be. Less like a wall and more like a window she hadn’t quite decided to open.
The morning light caught her just right, and I had to look away for a second. Even exhausted, even in yesterday’s clothes with her hair escaping its bun, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I’d spent two years taking that for granted. Never again.
“Hey.”
“I was thinking.” I shoved my hands in my pockets like a teenager asking someone to prom. “Would you want to take a drive with me? Just an hour or so. Alex can come.”
Her eyebrows rose. “A drive where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Orion. I don’t want surprises.” Her voice carried a warning.
“Not that kind of surprise.” I held up my hands. “It’s not an over-the-top gesture. I promise. Just somewhere I want to show you.”
She weighed it, and I could watch her doing it. The risk of disappointment versus the curiosity of what I might be planning.
“Fine,” she said finally. “But if this is some kind of trick to get me to look at real estate or accept a car or anything like that, I’m walking home.”
“It’s not. I swear.”
“From Dripping Springs? That’s a forty-mile walk.”
“I have comfortable shoes.”
Something warm flickered in my chest. There she was. The woman who’d made me laugh at a gala full of people trying too hard, the one who’d looked at me like I was just a person instead of a portfolio.
She shook the water off her hands and went to get Alex ready. I grabbed the keys to my truck and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
This mattered more than any deal I’d ever closed.
I headed west out of Austin toward Dripping Springs, past the city sprawl and into the Hill Country where the land opened up into rolling fields and old oak trees. Gianna sat in the passenger seat with Alex in his car seat behind us, watching the scenery slide by with a curious expression.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Almost there.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
She huffed but didn’t push further. I caught a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. Just a hint. But it was there.
I wanted to reach over and touch her hand. Wanted it so badly my fingers ached with it. But I kept them on the wheel where they belonged and reminded myself that patience was the only currency I had left.
The turnoff was easy to miss if you didn’t know what you were looking for. A dirt road that hadn’t been maintained in years, overgrown with grass and wildflowers. I’d driven out here twice already to make sure my truck could handle it.
“Where are we?” Gianna sat up straighter, looking around.
“You’ll see.”
The road wound through a stand of old oaks before opening up into a wide field. The grass was tall, almost to my waist in places, dotted with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes. In the distance, a line of trees marked where a creek probably ran during wetter months.
I pulled the truck to a stop and cut the engine.
Gianna was staring out the windshield with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Come on,” I said. “There’s something in the back.”
I got out and walked around to the truck bed. I’d set it up earlier that morning. A thick blanket spread across the bottom. A cooler with her favorite sparkling water and some snacks. And a small Bluetooth speaker, already connected to my phone.
She came around the side of the truck with Alex in her arms. Saw the setup.
“Orion, what is this?”
I took a breath. Pressed play on my phone.
Patsy Cline’s voice drifted out of the speaker. “Crazy.” That slow, aching melody that sounded like heartbreak and hope all wrapped together.
Gianna went still.
“You told me,” I said quietly. “Our first year together. We were lying in bed after that trip to your parents’ house, and you couldn’t sleep, and you started talking about your grandmother.”
Her eyes were wide. Wet.
“You said she was your mama’s mother, the Texas side, the reason your mama has opinions about this state at all.
She used to bring you here every summer when you were little.
To this field. You’d come out at dusk and watch the fireflies come up, and she’d play Patsy Cline on this old portable radio she had.
You said it was the safest you ever felt. The most loved.”
A tear slid down her cheek.
“You said you hadn’t been back since she died. That you couldn’t bear to see it without her. But sometimes you’d hear this song on the radio and it would take you right back.” I swallowed hard. “You said you wished you could show it to your kids someday.”
She was crying now. Tears streaming down her face while she clutched Alex against her chest.
“I found it,” I said. “Took me a while. You didn’t remember the exact location, just that it was somewhere near Dripping Springs with a creek and old oaks. But I found it.”
She looked around at the field. At the tall grass swaying in the breeze. At the trees in the distance. At everything she’d lost and everything she’d been afraid to return to.
“I can’t believe you remembered this,” she whispered.
“Three years of you telling me things,” I said.
The words came out rough. “I kept all of it. I just never did anything with it. It sat in me like money in a vault, earning nothing, helping no one. That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Not that I forgot. That I knew and it didn’t change anything I did. ”
She stepped away from the truck and walked into the field. The grass brushed against her legs, and Alex made a curious sound at the new sensation. She stopped about twenty feet away and just stood there, looking out at the horizon where the sun was starting to sink lower.
I stayed by the truck. This was hers. This moment, this place, this memory. I’d brought her here, but I wasn’t going to walk into the middle of it and make it about me.
Patsy Cline kept singing.
I understood the feeling.
Gianna stood in the tall grass with our son in her arms, and I watched the woman I loved reconnect with something she’d thought she’d lost forever.
Her shoulders shook. She was crying, but it wasn’t the angry crying or the exhausted crying I’d seen over the past weeks.
This was something else. Something that looked like grief and gratitude all tangled together.
After a long time, she turned around.
“You listened,” she said, and her voice broke on the words. “You actually listened.”
“I’m trying to.” I pushed off the truck and walked toward her, stopping a few feet away. Close but not too close.
She looked at me the way she had across a crowded room three years ago, before either of us knew what we were starting. The eyes that had slowly gone flat over the course of our marriage as I taught her that nobody was looking.
They weren’t flat now.
They were luminous. Looking at me like maybe, just maybe, I was still someone worth seeing.
It took everything I had not to close the distance between us. Not to cup her face in my hands and kiss the tears from her cheeks and promise her things I hadn’t yet earned the right to promise.
“My grandmother would have loved Alex,” she said softly. “She would have spoiled him rotten.”
“Tell me about her.”
So she did. Standing in that overgrown field with the sun going down and Patsy Cline playing and our son between us, she told me about her grandmother.
About the firefly summers. About the way she smelled like lavender and fresh bread.
About the stories she used to tell and the songs she used to sing and the way she made Gianna feel like the most important person in the world.
I listened. Let her words paint a picture of a woman I’d never met but who had shaped the woman I loved.
The fireflies started to come up just as the sun hit the horizon.
First one. Then another. Then dozens, hundreds, tiny lights blinking in and out of existence all around us. Alex’s eyes went wide.
Gianna laughed. And the sound of it cracked something open in my chest.
“They’re still here,” she whispered. “After all these years. They’re still here.”
“Some things last,” I said. “Even when you think they’re gone.”
She looked at me. Really looked at me. And just then, something in her expression shifted. The beginning of forgiveness.
She didn’t reach for me. Didn’t close the distance between us. But she let me stand beside her as the sun went down and the fireflies rose up and Patsy Cline sang about crazy love.
And when her shoulder brushed against mine neither of us moved away.
For the first time in months, the distance between us felt like something that could be crossed.
Not today, maybe not tomorrow.
But someday.
And I would wait as long as it took.