11. Taylor
CHAPTER 11
TAYLOR
“ I ’ll take Toby for a walk, if you’d like,” Taylor said.
Kane looked up from the novel he was reading. He had been at the house for a week now, with no sign of readiness to leave, and Taylor had noticed that he rarely went out of the house. He’d been into town a couple times to meet with Thomas Greely, but mostly the two men conducted their business over the phone.
Despite knowing that she had no reason to be, that they had had no assurance that Greely would have been able to track Kane down, Taylor couldn’t help but feel guilty that Jason’s funeral had already taken place by the time Kane learned of his death. She had assured Kane that it had been a beautiful service, that they had followed Jason’s wishes to the letter and that the town’s love for him had been clear, but she knew it was a cold comfort to have missed that opportunity to say goodbye.
While there wasn’t a great deal she could do to help Kane in his grief, one thing she could do was help with the dog. Kane hadn’t been willing to take Toby out on long walks, and it was obvious that the dog was used to that sort of thing. Taylor had taken him out a few times, but it clearly wasn’t enough — Toby’s runs around the yard had taken on a frantic nature, as if he had so much pent-up energy that he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“You don’t have to do that,” Kane said. “Take him for walks all the time.”
“I feel like someone should.” She hesitated. “I don’t mean that in a harsh way. You know what your dog needs better than I do. I just worry, seeing him all cooped up like this. He seems like he’s going a little stir crazy.”
Kane sighed. “You’re probably not wrong,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a relief for him, being somewhere with a big yard so that he could run free a little more than he has in the past, but he’s more used to the prolonged exercise periods than I realized. He’s not enjoying this.”
“Let me take him out.”
“You really don’t mind doing that? You shouldn’t feel like you have to.”
“No, I know I don’t have to,” Taylor said. “I like Toby. I have a good time with him. But only if you don’t mind.”
Kane sighed and set his book down. “I’ll go with you,” he suggested.
“Wait, really? You never leave the house if you can help it.”
“We won’t be going right into the heart of town or anything like that.”
“No. We can stick to the country roads.”
There was a moment of silence between the pair of them, and Taylor wondered whether he was thinking the same thing she was — that the shortest and most accessible country road from here would lead right by the Chesterfield farm. She wondered whether there might not be a part of him that would want to see it, even after everything that had happened — but she wasn’t going to be the first one to raise that question. Let him bring it up, if that was something he wanted.
“We can walk down Highway Nine,” she said.
The look of relief on Kane’s face made it clear that she hadn’t been the only one thinking about the farm. “Sounds good,” he said. “I drove in that way. It still looks just the same as I remember it from when we were kids.”
“Yeah, not much has changed out that way.” She grabbed Toby’s harness and fastened it onto him.
Kane shook his head. “I can’t get over the way he just stands there and lets you do that.”
“Why shouldn’t he let me put his harness on him?”
“It isn’t that he shouldn’t,” Kane said. “He just usually wouldn’t. He doesn’t like anyone putting his harness on. He puts up with me doing it, but if it’s anybody else, he usually just runs away and acts like he thinks it’s a game. He’s great at playing innocent. You can’t let him trick you with that. He knows exactly what he’s doing when he pulls those tricks. But he doesn’t try with you. You two get along really well.”
“Well, he’s easier to get along with than you are,” Taylor noted.
Kane snorted.
“Maybe he lets me harness him because he knows I’m the one who walks him here,” Taylor suggested.
“I guess he must,” Kane agreed.
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“No, not at all,” he assured her. “It’s nice seeing the two of you bond. Did you think it would bother me?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe you wouldn’t want to see your dog getting close with someone else.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not a monster, Taylor,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked. “I didn’t say you were a monster.”
“No, you didn’t, but… I get it. You think the worst of me. Because of how we left things all those years ago. I guess you’ve probably been building up some idea of me in your mind ever since then, right?”
She couldn’t honestly deny it. “I didn’t know what to think,” she admitted. “The way you just left…”
“Well, that’s what it is at this point,” he said, his tone rather brusque, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to talk about the past. “But I’m not some creep who doesn’t want his own dog to be happy. I might be a little bit of a jerk here and there, but I’m glad Toby has a friend.”
“Even if it’s me?” She smiled as she said it, hoping he wouldn’t take the comment overly seriously.
Fortunately, he laughed. “I don’t know what you think I have against you,” he said. “We haven’t spoken in years, and it’s not because I had some personal grudge against you.”
“Isn’t it?”
He looked at her oddly, as if surprised that she had even asked the question. But surely he remembered the conversation the two of them had had the day he had left town? Taylor had assumed it had stayed with him even more powerfully than it had with her.
Now, though, she thought… that was far from being the only thing that had happened to Kane that day. Maybe he had dwelled more on bigger things, like the fire and the fact that he had run away from home. In fact, now that she thought about it, it was crazy to imagine that she had been at the forefront of his mind during all of that. Of course she hadn’t. Of course he found it weird, now, that she would even suggest he had a personal issue with her.
To smooth over the awkward moment, she said, “I thought you might be upset because our father left me a share of the house, that’s all.”
“Oh, that,” Kane said. “Well, I guess it’s up to the old man what he wants to do. It means a hell of a lot of paperwork for us, but of course I don’t blame you for any of that. I know you didn’t ask him to leave you the house.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Did you know he was going to do it? Put your name on it?”
“I did,” she admitted. “He told me as much before he died. He said your name and mine would both be there. I didn’t try to talk him out of it because he was so ill then, and because… well, because talking about you was always a bit of a sore subject, and I didn’t want to upset him while he was weak. It felt to me like he was clinging to a fantasy that you would come back at the last minute, that he would get to see you one more time. I didn’t know how to tell him that it seemed almost impossibly unlikely that that would happen, so I just sort of pretended along with him.”
Kane’s face darkened, and he turned away. Was it grief? Or something else? Taylor couldn’t be sure.
“I would have done the same thing,” he said after a moment. “Of course you didn’t want to cause him any unnecessary pain. You did the right thing by letting it be our problem to deal with instead of making him make a decision. That shouldn’t have been the last task of his life, and I’m glad it wasn’t.”
Taylor nodded, glad to see that the two of them saw eye to eye on the matter — but a little surprised as well. It was the first time since Kane had walked back into her life that she’d felt as if the two of them were in full agreement about something. Even Toby felt like a point of conflict, since she had never been sure whether or not she was supposed to be taking him out for walks — but that was resolved now too, she supposed, since Kane had expressly given his permission for her to do it.
And today he was coming with her. There was something about that that felt like progress. As if she’d gotten more than just his permission to interact with the dog — she had gotten his blessing. It felt like he wanted to see her become friends with Toby, which wasn’t something she had anticipated at all.
They set off along Highway 9, making small talk. It was a two-lane highway, and might not have been the ideal place for a walk, but the speed limit here was low, and cars were incredibly rare. Even as teenagers, they had been safe to walk on this road. No one had ever heard of an accident happening to a pedestrian here.
Still, Taylor kept a tight grip on the leash as they walked. She didn’t think there was cause to worry. Toby was an obedient dog, and he was great on the leash. But she wouldn’t have wanted to find out the hard way that she was wrong about that.
As they walked, she and Kane fell into easy conversation. It was nothing too deep. They didn’t talk about the past, and they didn’t talk about what had happened to his father. But today, for the first time, it felt as if there was no tension and no bad history between the two of them. It felt as if they could just talk to one another like old friends.
He asked after their other friends, and she was able to tell him things he hadn’t known — that Maddie and Bradley had gotten married a few years back, that almost everyone they had once spent time with had been there, and his face had been the one that was noticeably missing. She didn’t tell him how they had all avoided saying his name, but how it had been clear by the tension in the air that everyone was thinking it. He didn’t need to hear that, and it would only make things more awkward if he did.
Still, by the time they made it back to the house, something had shifted between the two of them. Taylor could feel it. She was more comfortable with him now than she had been since he’d come back, and for the first time, sharing a house with him seemed like something that could be achieved without too much struggle.
She smiled at him as she let Toby off the leash. The dog immediately went to his water dish, took a long drink, and then flopped down on the floor, finally worn out.
“That was fun,” she said. “Maybe we should make it a regular thing.”
And she thought he would refuse, but instead, he smiled back. “Maybe we should,” he agreed. “I think Toby would appreciate it, anyway.”