Chapter Five
Rowan
A woman named Carol comes in around noon for a small wildflower piece on her wrist, something to mark six months sober, and halfway through the outline she nods toward the window, boarded up with plywood standing in for glass until the replacement comes in Monday.
"That the trouble everybody's talking about?" she asks. "Heard a Reaper's been parked out front nights."
"Something like that." I keep my eyes on the linework, voice even, practiced at keeping my face doing one thing while my insides do another.
Larkspur's small enough that gossip moves faster than I can control it, and I've had a version of this conversation four times already this week, with the mail carrier, with two regulars, with the woman who runs the diner.
"None of my business, I know." Carol watches the needle work a second, then adds, quieter, "For what it's worth, my ex and I split over something a lot like what people are saying about you two.
Six years apart before we figured out how to be in the same room without it turning into a fight.
Didn't work out for us in the end. But I always respected that he showed up and did the work anyway, even when it went nowhere. Some men don't even bother trying."
I don't have an answer for that, not one I'm willing to say out loud to a client with an unfinished tattoo on her wrist, so I just nod and keep working, and Carol lets it drop, and by the time she leaves an hour later with a clean, careful piece of wildflowers healing under plastic wrap, I've had entirely too much time to sit with what she said.
My lawyer calls a little after three, while I'm between clients, to remind me the separation paperwork's been sitting unsigned on her desk for going on six weeks now, gentle but persistent the way good lawyers are about things that generate billable reminders.
"No pressure," she says, which is what people say right before applying some.
"Just don't want it sitting there so long you lose momentum, if a formal divorce filing is still the direction you want to go.
Things get more complicated the longer a separation drags without movement, especially with shared property involved. "
Shared property. I think of the folded photocopy, still tucked in a drawer at the register where I moved it after Wyatt left that first morning, both our names circled in red, and I tell her I'll look at it this week, which is what I've told her for six weeks running.
"Rowan." Her voice softens slightly, the professional distance cracking just enough to let a real person through.
"I'm not trying to push you toward anything.
I just want you making the choice on purpose, whatever it ends up being, instead of by default because the paperwork got buried under everything else going on right now. "
I tell her I understand, and I do, and I still don't sign anything that afternoon, and I don't examine too closely why.
He's outside when I lock up at nine, sitting on his bike across the street in the shadow between the streetlights, not pretending to do anything but exactly what he's there to do, which somehow makes it easier to have him there than if he'd tried to make it look casual.
This is night three. Three nights of Wyatt parked across the street until I go up to the apartment and my light comes on, three nights of him not knocking, not texting, not making it my job to manage his presence in any way beyond the bare fact of it existing.
I told myself the first night I'd hate it.
By the third, I mostly just note it the way I'd note weather, a fact about the evening rather than an event in it.
Deb, predictably, does not share my restraint about noting it.
"He's been out there since six," she says, watching me count the drawer instead of watching the window, which is its own small kindness I appreciate more than I let on.
"Didn't move for dinner. I brought him a plate around seven because leaving a man to starve on principle felt like it was making a statement about me more than about him. "
"You fed him."
"I fed a Reaper doing security detail on my best friend's shop. That's just basic hospitality, Ro, don't read anything into it."
"I'm not reading anything into it."
"You're absolutely reading something into it, I can see your jaw doing the thing.
" She snaps the register drawer shut and leans against the counter, arms crossed, studying me with the particular patience of someone who's decided not to push tonight but wants me to know she noticed anyway.
"How's it going, having him around again? Three days in."
"It's going." I count the last of the twenties, rubber-band the stack, slide it into the deposit bag. "He does what he says he'll do. Shows up when he says he'll show up. Doesn't push."
"That surprise you?"
It does, actually, more than I want to admit out loud, even to Deb.
I spent eight months building a very specific picture of who Wyatt was capable of being when nobody was checking his work, a picture built entirely out of five months of lies I never saw coming, and some stubborn part of me expected this arrangement to reveal cracks fast, expected him to get bored of the tedium, to start showing up late, to start testing the boundary I drew the morning of the window.
He hasn't. He shows up early, actually, sits where I can see him but never where I have to interact with him unless I choose to, and twice now he's caught something before I even noticed it, a car idling too long across the street the first night, a man who walked past the shop slow enough on night two that Wyatt was already texting Preacher about it before I finished locking the second bolt.
Deb studies me a moment, weighing whether to push further tonight. "You want my honest opinion?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Never have." She almost smiles. "I think three days of a man showing up on time doesn't undo eight months, and it definitely doesn't undo five months before that.
But I also think you're smart enough to know the difference between forgiving him and just gathering data, and right now you're doing the second thing, not the first. Nothing wrong with that.
Just don't let anybody, including yourself, tell you that gathering data means you've already decided something. "
"I haven't decided anything."
"I know. That's my whole point."
I test him anyway, small things, the way you test a floor you're not sure will hold your weight.
Wednesday, I caught him just as he was settling onto the bike for the evening and told him, flat, no please attached to it, that the alley door had been sticking and needed checking before I trusted it to lock properly overnight.
"Now?" he asked.
"Now."
He didn't argue, didn't ask why I hadn't mentioned it earlier in the day when he could've fixed it in daylight, just walked the length of the building, found the hinge loose exactly where I said it would be, and had it fixed with a screwdriver out of his saddlebag inside of ten minutes, no complaint, no comment about the late hour or the tone I'd used asking.
I watched him do it from the doorway, arms crossed, half hoping for some flicker of irritation I could point to and use, and got nothing but a man doing a job competently and quietly, exactly the way he used to before any of this, back when competent and quiet were just things he was instead of things he was working hard to prove.
Thursday I told him not to walk me to my car, that I'd been parking myself for eight months and didn't need an escort now.
He didn't argue. Just stood there and watched from the doorway until I was safely inside, close enough to help if something happened, far enough to respect exactly what I'd asked for.
It's a strange kind of test, watching a man pass every single one of them and still not knowing what to do with the fact that he's passing.
Thursday plays out clearest in my memory, maybe because it's the one that actually surprised me.
I came out the back at closing, keys in hand, dark enough by then that the streetlight over the alley had already kicked on, and Wyatt was there before I'd even reached for my phone flashlight, not hovering, just present, leaning against the brick a respectful distance from my car.
"I've got it," I said, keys jingling as I unlocked the door.
"I know."
"You don't need to walk me over."
"I'm not walking you over." He didn't move from the wall, hands in his jacket pockets, watching the mouth of the alley instead of me. "I'm standing here. There's a difference."
I almost laughed, the sound catching in my throat before it fully arrived, because it was such a precise, careful distinction for a man who used to just do things without explaining himself, back when doing things without explaining himself was closer to the whole problem.
I got in the car, started the engine, and he didn't move an inch until my headlights swept over him on my way out of the alley, just stood there watching until I was clear, exactly the way he said he would.
I sat at the stop sign at the end of the block longer than the intersection required, watching him in my rearview mirror walk back to his post outside the shop, and I hated, a little, how much that small, precise restraint had rattled something loose in me that eight months of careful distance had worked hard to keep bolted down.
"I keep waiting for him to slip," I tell Deb, the words coming out before I've fully decided to say them.
"Some small thing. An excuse. A complaint about the hours, or a comment about how I'm making this harder than it needs to be.
Eight months of not trusting a single thing that comes out of his mouth, and some part of me is just waiting for proof I was right not to. "
"And if he doesn't slip?"