Chapter 16
Lark
The tile under my bare feet had been cold for six weeks. This morning, for the third day in a row, it wasn’t.
I stood at the kitchen counter holding my coffee cup with both hands, my hair still damp from a shower I’d taken in my own bathroom like a functioning adult.
Through the window, I could see Logan crossing the yard toward the barn, Tova trotting beside him with her tail swinging low and easy.
He’d been up before me. His mug was already rinsed on the counter, and the coffee he’d made was still hot in the pot.
Three mornings of this. Heat in the house, someone else’s coffee mug next to mine, a man who slept beside me and didn’t take up as much room as someone his size should have. I drank my coffee and watched him disappear into the barn and let myself have it for another minute before I followed.
The feeding rounds went the way they’d been going all week.
He handed me the buckets before I reached for them.
I tossed him the marker without looking up from the clipboard.
We moved around each other in the space between the kennels without bumping, a shorthand we’d built over weeks that had gotten smoother since we’d stopped pretending we didn’t want to be close.
“Birthday party’s confirmed for Saturday,” I said, checking the note on my phone between feed bins. “The Hadley family two counties over. Two ponies, the rabbits, Al Pacacino if he can behave himself, and Snowball for the petting area. The mom wants a farm experience for twelve six-year-olds.”
“Al Pacacino cannot behave himself. That’s his defining characteristic.”
“He can behave himself for three thousand dollars.”
Logan looked up from Duke’s bowl. “Three thousand?”
“Three thousand. Four hours, setup included, ponies and all.” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “And I got a second booking yesterday. Private event two weeks out. They want the full lineup.”
“Look at you, building an empire.”
“An empire of alpaca spit and rabbit fur. But it’s income, Logan. Real income. If I can book two or three of these a month, the mortgage payments are covered.”
He came over and took the clipboard from my hands long enough to look at my face. “You should be proud of this. You came up with it, and you made it happen.”
“We came up with it.”
“You came up with it. I said the words ‘mobile petting zoo,’ and you did everything else.” He handed the clipboard back and went back to the feed shelf. “I’m just the guy who carries the heavy things.”
“You carry the heavy things beautifully.”
“Thank you.” He winked at me, and I felt unmentionable places inside me tingle. “I’ve been practicing.”
Logan headed out to check on Duchess in the east paddock. She’d been favoring her left front hoof, and he wanted to take a look before we called the farrier.
My phone rang while I was restocking the cat food shelf. I pulled it out of my back pocket and checked the screen. Unknown number. I’d been fielding callbacks all week from event planners and parents I’d cold-called about the birthday party business, so I picked up without hesitating.
“This is Lark.”
A pause.
“Eleanor.”
My hand locked on the phone. The feed room went flat and airless, and the bag of cat food I’d been holding slid out of my other hand and hit the floor.
Six years of distance and that voice still reached into my chest and found the exact place where the damage lived.
“Carter. How did you get this number?”
“Your mother gave it to me. She’s worried about you, Eleanor. We all are.”
I didn’t so much as touch that. “What do you want?”
“I want to know how you are. That’s all. Is that so terrible?” Smooth and concerned and reasonable. The same voice that had convinced my parents I was the difficult one, while he disassembled my life. “Your mother mentioned you’re somewhere out west. Some kind of animal program?”
“I run an animal therapy and rescue operation.” I kept my voice level. I would give him nothing.
“That’s great. Good for you. Animals.” A pause that sounded like sincerity, practiced and polished. “Listen, I know things ended badly with us. I’ve had a lot of time to think since Catherine and I split.”
I pressed my back against the feed room wall and closed my eyes. I should hang up. But if I did, that would just make him more determined to say whatever he had to say.
“And the people I thought were in my corner, you’d be surprised how fast they disappear when things fall apart.
Friends I’ve had for twenty years won’t return my calls.
The guys I played golf with every Saturday for a decade, gone.
People I helped, people I loaned money to, people who sat at our table at Christmas. ”
He paused, and the pause was loaded with the expectation that I’d feel something about that our.
“I’m practically a ghost in my own life, Eleanor.
I come home to an empty house every night, and I sit there and I think about how I got here, and I just…
” He let the sentence trail off. “I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just telling you where I am.”
There it was. Carter Hollis, center of his own universe, expecting me and everyone else to orbit around him. Two marriages destroyed and somehow he was the one suffering. Somehow the story was about his pain, his loneliness, the friends who’d abandoned him.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”
“I want you to talk to me, Eleanor. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” His voice dropped, quieter. Wounded. “I just don’t understand what I did that was so terrible you can’t even have a conversation with me.”
My jaw locked. For three full seconds, I pressed my fingernails into my palm and let the sting of it keep me from saying something I couldn’t take back.
“Come home for a weekend,” he said, and his voice shifted into the generous register, the one that came with open hands and closed fists behind them. “Let me send you a ticket. First class. No strings, no agenda. I just want to see your face.”
“I’m not coming to New York, Carter.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m just asking for a conversation.
Is that so unreasonable?” His voice carried the careful hurt of a man who’d rehearsed this.
“I don’t think wanting to talk to someone you were married to for three years is some kind of crime.
Yet here you are, shutting me out completely.
I have to be honest with you, that feels pretty selfish, Eleanor.
I’m reaching out. I’m trying. And you can’t even give me ten minutes. ”
There it was. My fault. Always someone else’s fault. The silence was an invitation I refused to fill.
“All right,” he finally said, words clipped. Another pause, and when he spoke again, his voice had shifted, become lighter. “I can hear you don’t want to talk. I’ll respect that. I just hope whoever’s keeping you company out there deserves you.”
I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached.
Deserves you. As if he still got to fucking decide anything about my life.
“Lose this number,” I said and hung up.
I lowered the phone. My hand was shaking, but it wasn’t the trembling I’d felt in the overhang or the bank parking lot. This started in my chest and radiated outward into my arms, my wrists, my jaw, and it was hot.
I paced the feed room. I wanted to throw something. I wanted to scream until the walls shook. But of course, I didn’t. A Monroe didn’t do that sort of thing.
I’d spent my entire adult life burying this feeling, performing past it, because anger was what got you hurt in Carter’s house and what got you exiled in my parents’.
I just needed to bury it now too.
“Lark?”
Logan stood in the feed room doorway, one hand on the frame. He took one look at my face.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.” It came out like a blade, sharp and aimed at him because he was the only target in the room and the real target of my rage was on the other side of the country. “Can you just—I need a minute. I need you to not be standing there asking me questions right now.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t step back. He looked at me for three full seconds, and then he turned and walked out of the barn.
“Seriously?” I was after him before I knew I was moving, my boots hitting the gravel hard. “That’s your move? I say I need a minute, and you just walk away?”
Even I could recognize the absurdity of what I was saying, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
He kept walking. Past the house, around the side.
“Great. Perfect. That’s exactly what I needed right now, Logan, one more person deciding they don’t want to deal with me.”
I hated the words as they left my mouth. I hated that I was aiming them at a man who’d done nothing wrong because I couldn’t hit my real target. But the anger was a living thing inside me and it needed somewhere to land, and Logan was here and Carter wasn’t.
I needed to turn around. I needed to go somewhere else before I said anything worse.
I needed to find somewhere and scream until this ball of rage inside me dissipated.
But I knew I wouldn’t do that. So I had to find a way to push it all back down.
He stopped at the woodpile behind the kitchen. Logs stacked against the side of the house, a splitting stump set into the ground, the axe leaning against the pile. He picked it up, set a log on the stump, and positioned his feet.
“You pissed?”
I bit back a nasty comment and nodded.
“When I was a kid, my dad used to send me out to the woodpile when I was pissed about things I couldn’t control.
” He said it as if this were a normal conversation on a normal morning.
“Dad was a mechanic. Practical guy. Said anger was only useful if you turned it into something, and firewood was as good as anything.”
“I’ve never cut wood.”
“Well, you’re about to start.” He showed me where to grip, hands spaced apart on the handle. “You aim with your eyes, not the axe. Look at where you want it to land. Let the weight of the head do the work.”