13. Gage
Gage
T he keys to the swimming hole house felt heavier than they should have in my palm as Trace helped me out of his truck. Three days since my conversation with Jasper, and I still couldn't quite believe the inheritance was real, that I actually had the means to buy this place and make it mine.
"You sure about this?" Trace asked, eyeing the overgrown path that led to the front door. "It's going to be rough terrain with the crutches."
"I need to see it," I said, adjusting my grip on the crutches. "Need to know what I'm getting myself into."
The house looked smaller than I remembered, but maybe that was just perspective.
Eleven years of living in temporary spaces had changed my understanding of what constituted home.
But the bones were still good, the wraparound porch still graceful despite the peeling paint and loose boards.
The view of the swimming hole through the trees was exactly as I remembered it.
Perfect.
Trace helped me navigate the front steps, steadying me when my crutch caught on a loose board.
Inside, the house was a time capsule of interrupted renovations and abandoned dreams. Three different families had started projects here over the years, each leaving their mark before giving up and moving on.
But underneath the chaos, I could see what it could become. Original hardwood floors beneath layers of mismatched linoleum. Crown molding hidden under decades of paint. A stone fireplace that just needed cleaning to reveal its natural beauty.
"It's going to need a lot of work," Trace said, but there was something in his voice that sounded almost like admiration.
"That's the point."
We spent an hour walking through the rooms, Trace helping me navigate stairs and uneven floors while I catalogued everything that needed attention.
The kitchen was a disaster from the 1960s, the bathroom hadn't been updated since someone had moved it indoors, and there was evidence of water damage in two upstairs bedrooms.
It was perfect.
"I can see the potential," Trace said as we made our way back to the main floor. "But Gage, this is going to be months of work. Maybe a year or more."
"I have time."
Trace's phone buzzed with a text from Delaney, and his expression immediately shifted to concern so quickly that I couldn't stop myself from reading it over his shoulder.
Barrett's being fussy and I'm exhausted. Could you come help? Sorry to interrupt.
"Go," I said immediately. "She needs you."
"I can drop you off at the cottage first..."
"Actually, I think I want to stay here for a while. Look around some more. Xander can pick me up when he gets back from the clinic."
Trace hesitated, clearly torn between helping his wife and leaving me alone in a house that wasn't exactly handicap accessible.
"I'll be fine," I assured him. "Just sitting on the porch, maybe making some notes about what needs to be done first."
"Promise me you won't try to do anything physical. No lifting, no climbing, no testing the structural integrity of anything."
"Promise."
After Trace left, it was actually strange to find myself alone in the house Billie and I had dreamed about, even knowing that I'd finally bought it. The silence was profound, broken only by the sound of wind through the trees and the distant splash of water against the swimming hole's shore.
I'd been lying to Trace about just sitting on the porch.
There was something in the main living room that had been bothering me since we'd first walked through.
A modern addition that someone had tacked onto the original stone fireplace, cheap paneling that partially covered the beautiful stonework and destroyed the room's natural proportions.
It would only take five minutes to pull down.
Maybe less. And I'd already seen a crowbar in a previous owner's abandoned toolbox.
Before I could think better of it, I was attacking the paneling with the kind of focused intensity I'd been missing for weeks.
Physical work that required all my attention, that drowned out the constant noise in my head about forgiveness and family and second chances.
Even the gradually building ache in my body was familiar enough that I found a sick sense of peace in it.
The paneling came away easily, revealing the stonework beneath in all its natural beauty. But I didn't stop there. I kept pulling, kept tearing away everything that didn't belong, that had been added without respect for the house's original character.
My shoulder started to scream in pain after twenty minutes, but I pushed through it. My leg throbbed where the cast ended, but I ignored it. This felt too good, too necessary, to stop for something as trivial as pain.
With each piece of fake wood that hit the floor, I felt something loosening in my chest. Eleven years of guilt and self-punishment and carefully maintained isolation. Eleven years of running from everything that mattered because I'd been too afraid to believe I deserved it.
And I'd hurt everyone by doing it. All those nights of aching loneliness when I'd told myself that I was saving the people I'd loved and now I realized it was nothing but lies.
There was no saving people when you were the one torturing them.
When you were the one leaving them with questions, and doubts, and guilt.
No one won in this family. No one except her. And Regina would continue to win. Because even now, even after all these years, we were still trying to fix the fractured pieces of our lives and some things were so broken that there was no possible way they could ever be whole again.
I was so lost in the work, so focused on destruction and revelation, that I didn't hear the car pull up outside. Didn't hear footsteps on the porch or the front door opening.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Billie's voice cut through my demolition haze like a blade, and I spun toward the doorway so fast I nearly lost my balance. She stood there with her hands on her hips, her face flushed with what looked like equal parts fury and panic.
"Billie? What are you...?"
"You missed your appointment," she said, her voice tight with control that was clearly costing her effort. "I waited at the ranch for thirty minutes before Booker told me where you'd gone."
I looked down at myself, taking in the destruction I'd wreaked on the living room, the sweat soaking my shirt, the way I was swaying slightly on my feet. And then I felt it. The wetness on my cheeks that I hadn't even realized was there.
I was crying.
"Gage," Billie said, her voice immediately softening. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know," I said honestly, sinking onto the pile of debris I'd created. "I talked to my father yesterday. About Regina, about why she was the way she was. About things I didn't know."
Billie moved carefully into the room, stepping over broken paneling to settle on the floor beside me. Close enough to touch, but not quite touching.
"What did he tell you?"
"That he had an affair. That Regina's cruelty was revenge for something he did. That everything we went through as kids was collateral damage in their war." The words came out broken, fractured like the wood around us. "That none of us deserved what happened to us."
"Oh, Gage."
"And I don't know why I'm crying about it," I continued, wiping roughly at my face. "It's over. It's done. Regina's gone, we're all adults, we've all moved on. But hearing him say that what happened to us wasn't our fault, that we were just kids caught in something we couldn't control..."
"It changes how you see yourself," Billie said quietly.
"It changes everything." I looked around at the destruction I'd created, at the beauty emerging from underneath years of poor decisions. "I've been punishing myself for eleven years for something that was never entirely my fault. And I don't know what to do with that knowledge."
We sat in silence for a moment, surrounded by the debris of my emotional breakdown and the promise of what this place could become.
"Billie," I said finally, the words I'd been carrying for eleven years forcing their way out of my chest. "I need to apologize to you.
Really apologize, not just for leaving, but for how I left.
For disappearing without explanation, for letting you wonder what you'd done wrong when you'd never done anything but love me. "
She went very still beside me, and I forced myself to continue.
"I was wrong. I was eighteen and scared and I thought I was protecting you by leaving, but I was really just being a coward.
I'd lived with the truth of what I'd done to Trace for months and every time I looked at him I thought the guilt would kill me.
And I gave up. I just... I couldn't do it anymore.
I should have trusted you with the truth.
I should have fought for us instead of running.
I should have believed that what we had was strong enough to survive whatever Regina tried to do to us. "
"Gage..."
"I broke promises I'd made to you. I shattered dreams we'd built together.
I left you to pick up the pieces of a love story I'd convinced you was forever, and I did it in the cruelest possible way.
" The tears were coming faster now, eleven years of suppressed grief and regret pouring out of me.
"And I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry, Billie. "
She was crying too now, silent tears that broke my heart all over again.
"I used to come here," she whispered, looking around the room. "After you left. I'd sit on the porch and try to understand what had happened, why you'd changed your mind about us."
"I never changed my mind about us. I just convinced myself I didn't deserve us."
"I know that now. But then... then I thought I hadn't been enough. That teenage love was just fantasy and you'd grown up and realized it. That what I'd felt for you wasn't the same, wasn't enough."
I reached for her hand without thinking, and she didn't pull away. Her fingers were cold, trembling slightly, but she let me hold on.
"You were everything," I said quietly. "You were my best friend, my first love, my whole world. Leaving you was the hardest thing I'd ever done, and I've regretted it every single day since."
"I kept your letter," she said suddenly. "For eleven years. I told myself it was because I was angry, but really... I think I kept it because I knew it was the only honest thing you'd ever given me."
The knowledge that she'd kept my desperate, rambling goodbye hit me like a physical blow. "You shouldn't have had to carry that alone."
"We both carried a lot alone."
We sat there on the floor of our house, surrounded by the wreckage of my emotional breakdown and holding hands like teenagers who still believed in forever.
For a moment, it was like no time had passed at all.
Like we were still the kids who'd carved our initials in the oak tree outside, who'd planned our wedding in these empty rooms.
"I miss you," I said quietly. "Not just the romantic us, but you. My friend. The person who knew me better than anyone."
"I miss you too," she whispered. "I miss having someone who understood me completely."
"I know I don't have the right to ask for anything from you," I said, tightening my grip on her hand. "I know it's going to take time to rebuild trust, if that's even possible. But Billie... could we try to be friends again? Could we try to find our way back to at least that?"
She was quiet for a long moment, and I could see the war playing out across her features. Professional caution warring with personal longing, self-protection battling against the pull of shared history.
"We can try," she said finally. "We can try to be friends."
The relief that flooded through me was so intense it left me lightheaded. Not everything I'd lost was gone forever. Not every bridge I'd burned was irreparable.
"Thank you," I whispered.
"But Gage," she said, her voice firmer now. "Friends don't disappear on each other. Friends don't miss therapy appointments because they're having emotional breakdowns with power tools."
Despite everything, I laughed. "Fair point, although in my defense it was a crowbar."
"That's not winning you any points in this argument, you know," she said flatly, before adding, "But most of all, Gage, friends definitely don't try to renovate houses with broken bones."
"Also fair."
She squeezed my hand once before letting go, and I felt the loss of contact like a physical ache. But the warmth in her eyes, the absence of the professional distance that had been there for weeks, was worth everything.
"Come on," she said, standing and offering me her hand. "Let's get you cleaned up and back to the ranch before someone sends out a search party."
As I let her help me to my feet, surrounded by the destruction I'd created and the beauty I'd revealed, I felt something I hadn't experienced in eleven years.
Hope.
Not just for my recovery, not just for my place in my family, but for the possibility that some broken things could be made whole again.
That some promises could be remade, even if they had to look different than they had when we were young enough to believe in forever.