Chapter 18 #2
I hesitate for a moment with my fingers hovering over the screen. I should say no. Keep my distance until I figure this thing out. I should stop digging myself deeper into this hole, I might have to climb out of.
Me: Yes.
Twenty minutes later, there’s a soft knock on my door. Wyatt is standing there in sweatpants and a T-shirt, his hair rumpled like he’s been running his hands through it all night. He looks worried. He looks tired.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
We stand there for a moment, neither of us moving, then he reaches out and pulls me into a hug. It’s not romantic. It’s not leading anywhere. It’s just comfort, his arms around me, his chin resting on top of my head, his heart beating steady against my ear.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on with you,” he says quietly. “And you don’t have to tell me if you’re not ready, but I need you to know that I’m here. Whatever it is, I’m here.”
My eyes sting with tears, but I refuse to let them fall.
“I know,” I whisper. “I know you are.”
We stand there in the doorway, holding each other, and I think about that email sitting on my laptop, about the choice I have to make, about the life I could have in Switzerland and the life I’m building here.
And I realize, with a clarity that suddenly terrifies me, that I’m going to have to choose not between two jobs, but between two versions of myself.
The Eleanor that I was raised to be, the polished, accomplished, impressive one, or the Eleanor I’m becoming, the messy, uncertain, and maybe real one.
We end up on the sofa, just sitting, not talking. Wyatt’s arm is around me, and my head is on his shoulder. The mountains are dark shapes against an even darker sky.
“I’m scared,” I say finally.
“Of what?”
“Of making the wrong choice, of messing everything up, of…” I stop and shake my head.
“Of what, Eleanor?”
I should tell him, right now. Just say the words. Why is this so hard?
I got a job offer in Switzerland.
I have to decide in a few days.
But the words will not come, because saying them means watching his face change.
“Of not being good enough,” I lie. “For any of this.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then he shifts and looks at me, cupping my cheek in his hand.
“You are good enough. You’re more than good enough. And whatever you’re scared of, whatever you’re not telling me, we’ll figure it out together. You just have to trust me.”
Together.
The word sits in my chest like a stone.
Because if I take this job in Switzerland, there will be no “together” anymore.
There’d just be me alone, in a beautiful city, doing a prestigious job that my mother would have loved.
There would be no more Wyatt with his blue eyes or Dolly with her big hair.
There’d be no more Saturday morning gardening or cheesy karaoke songs.
If I stay, I’m giving up everything I was raised to want for something that may not even work out. Something that has no guarantees at all. Something that requires me to trust that this life, this wildly uncertain life, is worth choosing.
“Wyatt,” I say, my voice breaks on his name.
“Yeah?”
Tell him. Tell him now.
But I can’t. Not yet. Not tonight.
“Thank you,” I say instead. “For being here.”
“Always,” he says.
I hate myself for this lie growing between us.
But I’m not ready to face the truth yet.
So I lean into him and let myself have this moment, and pretend just for tonight that I don’t have an impossible choice to make.
* * *
The next five days are a slow kind of torture.
I go through the motions, opening the bar, serving drinks, smiling at customers, closing up at night.
I garden with Meredith on Saturday morning.
She watches me with those knowing eyes, but she never pushes.
I have dinner with Wyatt on Sunday and laugh at his jokes, hold his hand, and pretend everything is normal.
But it’s not normal, and he knows it.
“You’re pulling away,” he says Sunday night, walking me to my door.
“No, I’m not.”
“You are. I can feel it.” He stops at the bottom of the stairs, not following me up like he usually does. “Whatever’s going on, Eleanor, whatever it is that you’re not telling me, it’s putting up a wall between us, and I don’t know how to get through it if you won’t let me in.”
My throat tightens like I’m being strangled.
“Wyatt—”
“I’m not asking you to tell me tonight,” he says gently. “But I need you to know that I see it, and it’s…” He stops for a moment. “It’s hard watching you disappear somewhere I can’t follow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just talk to me when you’re ready. Please.”
“I will.”
“October is almost here, Eleanor. If you’ve decided to leave, please don’t keep me in suspense.”
He leaves without kissing my cheek, without tucking my hair behind my ear, without any of our usual rituals. I stand at the bottom of the stairs and watch his taillights disappear down Mountain Road, feeling the distance growing between us with every passing second.
* * *
Monday morning, I draft another reply to Genevieve.
Dear Ms. Ashford,
Thank you so much for this incredible opportunity. I’m honored to be considered for the position. After careful consideration—
After careful consideration of what?
I delete the draft and start again.
Dear Ms. Ashford, I’m writing to respectfully decline…
but I can’t finish that sentence either, because declining means closing the door.
It means committing to this life in the mountains with absolutely no backup plan, no safety net, and no escape route.
I’m just not sure I’m brave enough for that.
Tuesday is my deadline. I wake up knowing I have to make the decision today. There will be no more stalling, no more drafts, no more lying awake at three in the morning running the same arguments in my head in circles.
I sit at my tiny kitchen table with coffee I can’t taste and my laptop open to Genevieve’s email.
Two hundred thousand dollars, living in Switzerland, the most prestigious etiquette position in the world, or a honky-tonk bar in Georgia, a town I’d never heard of a few months ago, and a man I’m falling in love with who deserves better than someone who can’t commit.
My phone buzzes.
Wyatt: Dinner tonight? I’ll cook.
I stare at the message.
Tonight. I should tell him tonight. Whatever I decide, he deserves to know. He’s been patient, so, so patient. And I’ve been lying to him through omission for almost two weeks.
Me: Yes. What time?
Wyatt: Seven. I’ll pick you up.
Me: I’ll drive myself. Need to run some errands first.
A pause, then—
Wyatt: Okay. See you at seven.
I can feel his confusion through the screen. I always let him pick me up. It’s one of our things. But tonight I need my own car, because if this conversation goes the way I’m afraid it will, I might need to leave.
I spend the day trying to work and failing spectacularly. I mess up three drink orders, count the register wrong twice, snap at Presley for something that isn’t her fault, and then have to apologize immediately.
“Okay, what is going on with you?” she finally asks at four o’clock, cornering me in the storage room.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just tired.”
“You’ve been ‘just tired’ for two weeks. That’s not tired, Eleanor. There’s something else going on.”
I lean against a shelf of liquor bottles and close my eyes. “I have to make a decision,” I say, “about my future, and I don’t know what to do.”
“About the bar? But that’s in October.”
“About everything.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “Does this have anything to do with why you and Wyatt seem to be weird lately?”
“We haven’t been weird.”
“You’ve been super weird. He barely looks at you when he’s here. You barely look at him. It’s like watching two people pretend they don’t know each other.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Well, it always is.” She crosses her arms. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. You don’t have to tell me. Whatever this decision is, make it for you, not for anyone else. Because at the end of the day, you’re the one who has to live with it.”
She leaves me alone in the storage room with the echoes of her words echoing in my mind.
Make it for you.
But that’s the problem. I don’t know who me is anymore. The me who was raised to want Switzerland or the me who’s learned to love Copper Creek. Are they even the same person? Can they be?
At 6:45, I drive to Wyatt’s cabin. The evening is warm, the kind of summer evening that makes you want to sit outside and watch the light change and look for lightning bugs. His truck is in the driveway, smoke rising from the chimney of his outdoor grill.
I sit in my car for a moment, trying to gather my courage.
Just tell him. Why is this so hard?
Whatever happens, you have to tell him the truth.
I get out and walk to the porch. Before I can knock, the door opens.
Wyatt is standing there in jeans and a soft gray T-shirt, a dish towel over his shoulder. He looks tired and worried, but beautiful.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Come in,” he says finally. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
He’s made steaks on the grill, baked potatoes, and a salad with vegetables from Meredith’s garden. We eat at his table by the window, and I try to taste the food, but everything is ash in my mouth.
“You’re not eating,” he says.
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Eleanor.” He sets down his fork. “Whatever it is, just tell me. Please. The not knowing is worse than anything you could possibly say.”
I look at him across the table, this man who caught me when I fell off a mechanical bull, showed me a secret waterfall, carved little animals out of wood because he needed something to do with his hands. This man who has been patient and kind and honest with me from the very beginning.
And I’ve been lying to him.
“I got a job offer,” I say.
He goes very still. “What kind of job offer?”
“A really good one.” I take a breath. “In Switzerland. Teaching at an etiquette school. It’s the most prestigious finishing school in Europe. Salary is two hundred thousand a year plus housing. It’s… everything I thought I wanted and everything my mother ever wanted for me.”
The silence stretches between us, like a wire pulled too tight.
“When?” His voice is flat.
“The email came two weeks ago.”
Something in his expression cracks. “Wait. Two weeks? You’ve known about this for two weeks, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“So you just kept it to yourself every time we had dinner together, every time we talked about the future, while I—” He stops and pushes up from the table so abruptly that his chair scrapes against the floor. “While I sat here falling in love with you, you were planning to leave.”
“I wasn’t planning to leave. I wasn’t planning anything. If I wanted to leave, I could’ve taken Gary Allen’s offer. I haven’t even decided anything about this job.”
“Haven’t you?” He’s pacing now. “Two weeks, Eleanor. Two weeks of you lying to my face. Two weeks of me knowing something was wrong and you telling me you were just tired. Two weeks of—” He lets out a harsh laugh. “Gosh, I am so stupid.”
“Wyatt—”
“I told myself it was different this time,” he says.
“That you weren’t going to do what Laney did.
That you actually wanted to be here, wanted this life, wanted—” He turns to face me, and the pain in his eyes makes my chest cave in.
“But you’ve had one foot out the door the whole time, haven’t you?
You were just waiting for something better to come along. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“From where I’m standing, it looks exactly like that. It looks like you were keeping your options open, stringing me along while you decided if Copper Creek was good enough for you. If I was good enough for you.”
“That’s not what I was doing.”
“Then what were you doing?” he demands. “Because I’d really love to understand how someone who supposedly cares about me could hide something this big for two weeks.”
“I was scared,” I blurt. “I was terrified, Wyatt. Because this job offer is everything I was raised to want. Everything my mother spent her whole life preparing me for. And turning it down means admitting that everything she believed, everything she taught me, was wrong. It means choosing a life that doesn’t make sense on paper, has no guarantees, that requires me to trust something I’ve never trusted before. ”
“Trust what?”
“That I’m enough. That this whole thing is enough. That I can build a life here without screwing it up.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his jaw tight. “And what have you decided? Are you taking the job?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You’ve had two weeks, Eleanor. Two weeks to think about it, and you still… don’t know.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple. Either you want this life, or you don’t.
Either you want us, or you don’t.” He crosses his arms. “I told you from the beginning I don’t do casual.
I can’t give my heart to someone who’s gonna leave.
And you said you understood. You said you were falling for me. You said, ‘I’m in it.’”
“I meant all of it.”
“Then how can you not know? How can you stand there and tell me you’re still deciding whether to move to another continent?”
I don’t have an answer, because he’s right. If I really wanted this, if I really wanted him, the choice should be obvious. So why isn’t it?
“I think you should go,” he says quietly.
“Wyatt—”
“I need space, Eleanor. Time to think. And you?” He shakes his head. “You need to make a decision. A real decision. Not because of me or the bar or anyone else. You need to figure out what you actually want.”
“And if I choose to stay?”
“Well, then we’ll talk. But right now…” He shakes his head again. “Right now, I can’t look at you without seeing two weeks of lies. And I need that to stop hurting before I can think clearly.”
I stand there for a moment, wanting to argue, explain, make him understand. But I can’t, because he’s not wrong. And even I don’t understand. I kept it from him. I lied. And no explanation will change that.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, “for not telling you sooner.”
“I know you are.”
But he doesn’t say it’s okay, because it’s not.
I pick up my purse and walk out the door. I pause at the threshold.
“I do love you,” I say without turning around. “I know I’ve never said it before, but I do. I just don’t know if that’s enough.”
I don’t wait for a response. I just walk to my car and drive away, leaving him standing in the door of his cabin.