Chapter 14
Fourteen
Griffin
She’s asleep before I make it back from the bathroom.
I check on her before I sit. It’s an old habit, and something I’ve been doing every thirty minutes since the hotel floor. I can’t seem to turn it off. She’s on her side, hair still damp from the shower, one hand under her cheek. She looks younger when she’s asleep. She looks like herself.
I pull the chair to the window and sit with the dark outside and the quiet of a small town.
I should sleep. Tomorrow is going to require functioning brain cells, and I’ve been running on fumes since the church, but my head won’t go quiet.
I don’t let myself think too hard about the last hour. The bathroom floor. The way she came apart, like something that had been held together past its limit.
I think about bridges instead.
That first year away—the first time I truly stepped out from under the shadow of my past—was the loneliest year of my life.
I remember the biting wind of the New York winter, the way the cold felt like it was trying to hollow out my chest. I’d spend twelve hours on-site, buried in blueprints and the smell of wet concrete, and then I’d go back to a studio apartment alone.
I missed the noise of the Callahan house.
I missed the way Piper’s violin would bleed through the walls when I was supposed to be studying with her brother.
Out there, on my first solo project, I realized that building something meant more than just steel and tension.
It meant knowing what you were willing to leave behind to see it stand.
I proved I could survive without them, but as I look at Piper now, breathing softly in the shadows, I realize just how much I missed them. How much I missed her.
My phone screen lights up on the arm of the chair, shaking me from my thoughts.
Unknown number.
I take the phone into the bathroom and close the door before I answer.
“Hello?”
“Put her on the phone.”
I go still.
Ezra’s voice is a little loose at the edges, the kind that comes from drinking several drinks and the confidence of a man used to people following his orders.
My jaw clenches so tight I’m surprised I don’t crack a molar. “She’s asleep.”
“I don’t care. Wake her up.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Not going to do that.”
There’s a long breath, then the sound of a glass being set down. “Listen, I don’t know what she’s told you, but I need to speak to my fiancée.”
I glance at the engagement ring on the vanity. She never put it back on.
“She didn’t tell me anything. She doesn’t need to.”
“Then you don’t know the full picture.” His voice settles into a casual tone, like we’re two reasonable men having a conversation, like this is just a misunderstanding to clear up. “I know this looks bad. I know how she operates.”
“Do you?”
“She does this. The drama. The running. You think this is the first time she’s done something like this? This is Piper. You know her. She can be unstable.”
I look at the wall and pray—for Piper’s sake—for patience. “Is that so?”
“She’s been this way our whole relationship. I’ve been managing it. I don’t expect you to understand the whole—”
“What’s her favorite song?” I ask.
“What?”
“Her favorite song. You’ve been together three years. What is it?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“What does she order when she can choose the restaurant herself?”
“Griffin—”
“What was her favorite solo? What did she perform?”
Silence.
It’s the silence of someone who doesn’t have the answer. He knows it and is deciding what to do about that.
“She’s a musician,” I say. “That’s her whole thing. You were with her for three years. What was the piece?”
“Schubert something,” he says, and the something does all the work.
“Brahms,” I say. “Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major. She’s told the story of that performance at family dinners too many times to count. It was the first time she performed in front of a crowd that size without getting sick first.”
Nothing from the other end.
“But sure,” I say. “Tell me about how you know her.”
“You know what.” His tone shifts. It’s sharper now. The pleasantness is gone. “You’ve got a hero complex and a very convenient opportunity. I get it. We all see what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“You’re playing the good guy.” He laughs, but it’s humorless. “She’s vulnerable, she’s emotional, and you’re right there. I know exactly what this is.”
“Then you’re not worried.”
“I’m not. She’ll be home in two days.”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, definitely,” he says with full confidence. “She doesn’t make it on her own. Never has. She needs someone telling her where to be and when, or she falls apart. She’s not exactly self-sufficient. That’s just the truth.”
I’m standing completely still.
In all of this, not one thing, not a single thing he’s said about her has been said with love or a shred of fucking kindness.
“You know what’s interesting,” I say. “You’ve been talking about her for five minutes, and you haven’t said one good thing.”
“Because she just tanked our wedding.”
“Before today,” I continue. “What’s good about her. Right now. One thing.”
The silence is longer this time.
“She’s beautiful,” he finally offers, and it sounds like something he found in a drawer.
Anyone with eyes could give me that answer.
“Okay.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. I’ve got what I need.”
“She’s a lot to deal with.” There’s something in his voice now that drops the act.
This is the real deal. “You’ll figure that out.
She’s needy. She overthinks, and she makes everything harder than it needs to be.
I’ve put up with that for three years. You’ve had her for eight hours and you’re already locked in a hotel room with her, so good fucking luck. ”
I say nothing.
“Enjoy her while you have her. She’s a little boring in the sack, but she’ll do you for the night.”
There it is.
I stand in the bathroom of a hotel in Opal Creek and let that sentence sit in the air for exactly one second.
Then something in me goes very, very quiet.
“I need you to listen carefully,” I start. “Because I’m only going to say this once.”
“Oh, here we go—”
“Speak about her like that again, to me, to anyone, to yourself in a room alone, and I will make it my personal business. I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No. It’s a fact. You’ve spent the last five minutes telling me she’s unstable, she can’t function on her own, she’s difficult to deal with, and now she’s boring to sleep with. That’s the woman you wanted to spend your life with?”
Silence is the only response I get.
“You don’t deserve to be in the same room as her. You definitely don’t deserve to be on the phone at—” I check my watch, “—one in the morning talking about her like she’s an inconvenience you’ve been tolerating.”
“You don’t know anything about our relationship.”
“I know she cried for an hour on a bathroom floor tonight. I know she scratched at her own arms because she couldn’t stand being in her skin. I know she still had good things to say about you while she was doing it. I know she asked me if she should call you because she was worried about you.”
Nothing.
“Does she know you talk about her like this?” I ask. “Or does she only get the version you want her to see?”
Still nothing.
“Don’t call this number again,” I warn. “When she’s ready to talk to you, she will. That’s her choice.”
“She is my—”
“Not right now, she’s not.” I keep my voice level. “Goodnight.”
I hang up and stand in the bathroom for a moment. The adrenaline surges through me, and I breathe through it the way I’ve learned until the noise in my head calms down.
Then I think about what he said.
All of it.
She’s unstable. She doesn’t make it on her own. She’s difficult. She’s boring. She’s a lot to deal with.
Behind all of that is the career she paused, the dress she wore because she was told to, the fact that she spent three years shrinking herself into a shape that still apparently wasn’t good enough, and this is the man who was keeping score.
Has he been doing this the whole time?
If he’ll say all of that to me—Noah’s best friend, someone she knows, a person with a direct line back to her family—what does he say when there’s nobody to hear it?
What does he say to her face?
I turn off the bathroom light and step back into the room.
Piper is still asleep with one hand under her cheek. Her hair is still damp on the pillow.
She’s been carrying all of it. Three years of being told who she is by someone who just proved he doesn’t know a single true thing about her.
I sit back in the chair.
I’m not going to sleep for a while yet. That’s fine.
Outside, Opal Creek is quiet.
I stay where I am.
∞∞∞
I wake up at three in the morning, and the lamp in the corner is on.
It takes me a second to place the room.
Right. The Opal Inn.
Piper is curled up in the armchair by the window, her feet tucked underneath her, a hotel notepad resting on her knee.
Her pen is scribbling rapidly, scratching across the paper.
Tears are falling onto the page, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them away.
Her hand is too busy trying to keep up with everything pouring out of her.
She’s wearing the oversized shirt she bought today, her hair a mess, one knee pulled up to her chest. No makeup or performance—just a woman with a notepad and a pen, trying to clear something from her mind.
It knocks me back, the way it does sometimes, the sheer distance between who someone is now and the kid you first knew.
I was eleven the first time I met Piper. She was the skinny kid sister who opened the front door with a violin bow in her hand. She didn’t smile. She just looked at me, looked at Noah behind me, and said, “Shoes off,” before disappearing back into the house.
I’d looked at Noah. He’d just shrugged.
She was just a kid then, but she’s not a kid anymore.
Tucking a stray hair behind her ear, she writes another line, then stops. Her pen starts tapping against the margin in a rhythmic pattern.
I know that tap. I’ve watched her do it for years, working through a melody or a thought while the conversation moved around her. Donna used to reach out and touch her shoulder when she did it, and Piper would surface. They’d share a look, and she’d come back to us.
Donna always knew how to bring her back.
Ezra, on the other hand, seems to have spent three years trying to lock her away. I think she’s currently trying to find the key.
She’s quiet for a minute, then a breath catches in her throat. She leans her head back against the chair and stares at the ceiling.
“What do I do?” It’s just a whisper to the ceiling, to the room, to the ghosts of the decisions she made today.
She doesn’t know I’m awake. If she did, she’d fold it all up. I know that about her, too. I’ve seen her composure snap back into place the second someone looks her way. She learned somewhere how to make her distress disappear the moment it risked being witnessed.
The question still hangs in the air.
What do I do?
I could answer. I’m good at the practical. I could give her a framework, a list of structural repairs, a sequence of steps to move her from this wreckage to stable ground. That’s what I do with complicated things.
But there’s nothing I can tell her that she doesn’t already know, and I have a feeling she’s spent a long time with someone else answering every question for her.
What to wear. When to speak. What to want.
The last thing she needs is another man with a ready-made answer.
So, I close my eyes.
I leave her with the notepad and the question.
The pen starts moving again after a minute. I stay perfectly still and let her have it.
All of it. Unwitnessed. Uncollected.
Hers.