Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
ROSIE
A few days later
“Dad, I got it,” I said as I walked into the garage, where he was trying to heft something onto the top of a metal shelf.
My dad let out a grunt of frustration as he turned to face me and lowered his arms. “I should be able to do this.”
I glanced down to see that the wheels on the metal shelving weren’t locked into place. Leaning over, I quickly clicked the locks on the caster wheels before straightening. “Now you can,” I replied with a reassuring smile.
My dad chuckled. “I kept wondering why the shelf kept moving. Wasn’t thinking.” He quickly reached up and placed his box of fishing gear precisely where he wanted it on the top shelf, where it had been stored for as long as I could remember.
“Fishing lately?” I asked as we turned together and walked toward the door that led into the kitchen from the garage.
“Just went yesterday.”
“You did?”
My dad waggled his brows as he held the door open for me as I walked through. “You don’t know everything I do, Rosie.”
I rolled my eyes as I sat down in the chair by the kitchen table. “I don’t want to know everything you do, Dad.”
“Would you like some coffee?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Thank you, but no. I’m headed in to meet Tessa and McKenna for coffee before work.”
“Excellent. I’d ask for a ride, but Derek is picking me up.”
“I love that you and Derek are friends,” I said.
“Well, I’m the old wise one in our friendship,” he teased. His gaze sobered. “Pretty soon, though, Derek’s going to be all better. He’s not gonna want to hang with an old guy like me.”
I cocked my head to the side. “I’m fairly confident you’ll still see plenty of Derek. Maybe you got to know each other because you both hang around at the hospital together, but you’re pretty awesome. Plus, you know all the best fishing spots.”
My dad flashed me a grin as he sat down across from me and took a swallow of his coffee. “I know. I’m just teasing. Derek is a good egg. If your brother doesn’t wanna run the hardware store, and Derek’s feeling up to it, I might hire him when I’m ready to be done.”
“Speaking of Brent, where is he?”
My father’s eyes arced up to the clock mounted on the wall above the kitchen stove. “I don’t know. He’s not an early riser like you. Never has been.”
“Well, everyone has their own circadian rhythm,” I offered. I tried to ignore the worry that danced along the edges of my thoughts.
I didn’t like thinking about it, but I still sensed something was afoot with my brother.
I had no idea what or what to even do about it, even if I knew.
I also knew that it grated on my brother that I worried about him so much.
That was the downside to being the older sister with almost eight years between us.
I babysat for him a lot when we were growing up.
I shoved the worries away as soon as my brother’s voice came from behind me.
“My circadian rhythm is shifting,” Brent announced with a jaunty grin. He gave my father a squeeze on the shoulder as he walked by. “I have to get to work.”
“How is that going?” I asked, doing my very best to keep my voice casually curious.
He glanced over as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “It’s actually going great. I enjoy working with Kenan, and it’s never boring.”
The constant tension between my shoulder blades eased a tiny bit. My brother sounded legitimately motivated.
“Good to hear,” I replied.
My dad took a swallow of his coffee as he looked over at my brother. “He’s been saying this every morning since he started at Fireweed Industries.”
“What exactly do you do?” I asked as Brent sat in the remaining chair at the small round kitchen table.
“It’s different every day, which is why I love it.
The other day, we helped unload equipment for the brewery.
Some days, we do stuff at the warehouse, where they keep all the vehicles for road maintenance.
Sometimes, we’re at the headquarters doing odd jobs.
I show up, and Kenan either takes me along with him or sends me somewhere else to do something. It’s awesome.”
My dad’s gaze held pride as he looked over at my brother. “That’s a good place to get your foot in the door. Fireweed Industries is a big deal.”
Worry was like a vine tangled in my thoughts when it came to my brother. College had been hard for him. He’d partied hard and then dropped out. All things considered, it seemed like the best thing because otherwise, it was like tossing money into the wind to pay for it.
“I know,” Brent said. “I’m not under any illusions. It’s a big business, but it’s a family business. I like it and the pay is pretty good.”
Just then, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I slipped it out of my pocket and glanced at the screen. “Oh! I need to get going. I forgot I need to meet McKenna because she’s dropping her car off at the mechanic’s shop. Jack is out at a fire.”
I gave my dad a kiss on the cheek and waved to both of them before hurrying out the door. A short drive later, I slowed to a stop in front of McKenna’s driveway. She waited in her car at the end, as planned. She pulled out in front of me, and I followed her into town to the local garage.
A few minutes later, she hopped in my passenger seat. “Hey! Thanks for picking me up.”
“Of course,” I replied. “When will Jack be back?” Her hotshot firefighter husband was out of town dealing with a fire somewhere in the wilderness.
“Next week,” she said.
I smiled over at her. “You miss him?”
“Of course, I do. And it feels ridiculous. I mean—” She let out a quick sigh. “I’m used to being on my own.”
“But you’re in love,” I teased as I slowed to turn into the parking lot beside Spill the Beans Café.”
McKenna laughed softly. “True story. Who knew?”
“Everyone but you as soon as we saw you with him,” I replied.
My thoughts spun to Wyatt. I couldn’t help but wonder if anybody had similar thoughts when they saw us together. The intensity of my reaction to him when we happened to be in each other’s vicinity was startlingly powerful. I kept thinking it would dissipate
McKenna and I walked in together, hopping into the back of the line.
As if the universe knew I was thinking about Wyatt, the café door opened a moment later with the friendly bell chiming.
Before I even glanced in the direction of the door, my body knew Wyatt had just entered the café.
Goose bumps rose on the back of my neck with a little jolt of electricity zipping through my body.
I told myself I was imagining things, but then McKenna exclaimed, “Griffin! Wyatt!”
I could totally play it cool. No one needed to know what was going on with Wyatt and me.
But then, I wondered why I wanted to keep it a secret.
I worried that everyone would have an opinion, and if it didn’t work out, everyone would also have an opinion about that.
Maybe not everyone, but certainly our friends, most of whom were mutual.
And when he breaks your heart, how will you keep that a secret?
Even though I didn’t like to think about it, I knew why I let things die on the vine back when we had our week-long fling.
I hadn’t even had to avoid him then because he went his way, and I went mine.
He hadn’t been living here in Fireweed Harbor, so there was nothing to avoid.
Much as I tried to pretend it hadn’t been that good with him, that was such a lie.
That week had been insanely hot. All this time, I’d tried to convince myself it had been a fluke.
No one had measured up since then, not even close. Although it would’ve been easier if it was just the burning-hot chemistry, I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t want to be hopeful, but my heart sure did. Little drumbeats of hope and wishfulness got loud every time I let myself think too much about Wyatt.
You don’t know if it’s going to work out. You have perfectly good reasons for being careful.
Careful. That was what I told myself it was.
I’d been old enough to have a fairly vivid memory of what it had been like when my mother had died unexpectedly.
She’d gone to the hospital to give birth to my little brother and never came home.
What was supposed to be a joyful event had been devastating.
The grief had been a shock of such force, I’d felt knocked flat and hadn’t really known how to process any of it.
I’d also witnessed what it did to my father. He had been utterly distraught and trying to hold it together for me and his new baby boy.
My mother had spiraled into a medical condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) after she gave birth.
I only knew this because I came across my mother’s medical records when my father asked for help shredding old tax documents.
He must’ve forgotten they were there. I’d been in nursing school at the time and asked one of the OB-GYNs on staff about it.
DIC wasn’t specific to childbirth. In short, it was when all the complicated steps involved in blood clotting went haywire.
Blood could clot where it wasn’t supposed to and run freely where it should be clotting.
It could be triggered after major physical trauma of any kind, infection, and more.
Women with childbirth complications were at risk of DIC, and it could rapidly become a dire medical situation.
In the medical world, there was a phrase: All bleeding stops.
Either a person’s blood clots properly or a person lost enough blood to die.
In all cases, the bleeding stopped. Modern medicine was not magic.
If a person’s blood wasn’t clotting properly, medical professionals could only do so much to save them.
My mother had faced something that even the best hospitals and doctors in the world could only pray to stop.
No medical professional wanted to consider it, but in some cases, it could truly boil down to luck if someone pulled through. My mother wasn’t lucky that day.
She’d been able to hold my brother while she’d been dying, and I could only wonder what that must’ve been like for her. I was terrified that the same thing might happen to me. Even though I knew the chances were slim, and it was one of those fluke situations.
All this to say, I didn’t want to be distraught if I lost someone the way my father had. I was afraid to have a child. Statistically speaking, the odds were in my favor, but then we tended to forget just how dangerous having a baby could be in the modern era.
“Are you okay?” Tessa’s voice broke through my train of thought.
I glanced toward her. “Oh, yeah,” I said quickly.
I didn’t even know why my thoughts had detoured. That train of thought was a dead-end road I got stuck in sometimes, one where I couldn’t change anything that happened.
Wyatt was at the counter with Griffin, and McKenna was talking with him about something. I could feel Tessa’s gaze on me still. I glanced back in her direction. “What?” My tone was defensive.
Tessa’s brows hitched up slightly. “What’s with you and Wyatt?”
“What do you mean?”
She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling but then gave up, shrugging with a little grin. “Just that, it’s kind of obvious you two…”
“We what?” I willed the heat to dissipate from my cheeks to no avail because my face was on fire.
“You look at him a lot, he looks at you a lot, and it’s obvious you might like each other.”
The look on my face must’ve given away my distress.
Tessa took pity on me. “If it helps, I understand why you might not want to do anything about it or want to talk about it. I mean, if you are doing anything about it, or thinking about doing anything about it,” Tessa clarified when my eyes widened in alarm.
“That’s how I felt when things started with Adam and me.
We all share the same friends. And even if we didn’t, this is a small town.
Gossip is a real thing. If you’re hoping to keep things private, or see how they go, or get your heart broken privately—” Tessa cut off sharply.
I knew I must’ve looked horrified or maybe already distraught. She reached over and squeezed my hand across the table quickly. “Wyatt is not going to break your heart.”
I forced myself to breathe slowly. “How do you know?”
Tessa wasn’t one to gossip, so I decided to let down my guard a little.
“Because he’s a nice guy. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m certainly not expecting you to tell me now or even later.
But the whole family shares the same baggage.
You know it. Everybody deals with things differently, and I’m not sure how Wyatt has dealt with it.
But I know he’s a good man. Remember, he’s the one who helped McKenna be open about what happened to her with Jake. ”
All I could do was take in what she was saying because, at that moment, I heard McKenna’s voice behind us.
Tessa’s voice was low when she added, “We can talk anytime.”
The next few moments were a jumble as people pulled extra chairs up to the table.
The next thing I knew, Wyatt was sitting down beside me.
Griffin happened to take the chair across from me.
With my awareness that he knew about Wyatt and me, I tried not to look at him too much, or I’d get more self-conscious than I already felt.
This wasn’t the first time I had wondered why it was just Wyatt who drew me to him.
Every man in that family was graced with good looks.
They were certainly charmed when it came to what nature bestowed.
When I looked at Griffin, it was with an objective appreciation.
Not one single spark fired inside me, and my pulse beat at a regular speed.
But the second I even thought about looking at Wyatt, along with merely having him seated beside me, my pulse kicked along faster and faster.
Relieved by the distraction of conversation with others, I was able to wrangle my pulse at least sort of under control and felt proud of myself. I could handle being with Wyatt in public.
Until I felt his palm slide onto my thigh, his touch warm and sure. I was caught between two competing impulses — the urge to brush his palm away to get my hormones to chill out and the urge to savor his touch. I loved it so very much when he touched me.
“How are you doing, Rosie?” Wyatt's voice was low and rumbly.