Chapter 10
Callie
The deposition was supposed to end at four. It didn't. Opposing counsel kept fishing, the mediator called a recess, and my phone was at twelve percent.
Maisie's school pickup was at five-fifteen. It was now four-fifty. I was forty minutes from Copper Creek in no traffic, and this was not no traffic. Savannah was in the room with me. Bev was across the table. Theo was at the office but didn't have a car seat.
I had one person on my list.
One person I'd put there myself, on a porch, six days ago, while his shoulder burned warm against mine and the evening turned everything gold.
I stepped into the hallway, phone at nine percent, and called Clay Blackwood.
He picked up on the first ring. Not the second. The first.
"Callie."
"I need —" My voice cracked. I pressed my forehead against the cold hallway wall. "Maisie. School. I can't get there. Savannah's with me and the deposition ran over, and my phone is dying and I —"
"I've got her."
No hesitation. No questions about logistics or timelines or whether I'd tried anyone else first.
"The pickup code is —"
"Butterfly. Maisie told me three weeks ago. Unsolicited. She also told me her teacher's name is Mrs. Hannigan, and she thinks Mrs. Hannigan has a secret boyfriend because she smiles at her phone too much."
I laughed. It came out wet and ragged and not really a laugh at all. "Clay —"
"Go finish your deposition. I'll have her."
"I don't know when I'll be done."
"Doesn't matter. We'll be at your place. I'll figure out dinner."
My phone flashed the eight percent warning. "Thank you. I — thank you."
"Callie." His voice dropped. Warm. Steady. "This is what the list is for."
The line didn't go dead because I hung up. It went dead because my phone died, right there in the courthouse hallway, and I stood with it pressed against my ear for three seconds after, breathing in the silence where his voice had been.
Then I went back in. Did my job. Held the line.
I drove home with my hands tight on the wheel and my heart somewhere in the vicinity of my throat, picturing every worst-case scenario. I gripped the wheel tighter. Breathed. Counted exits.
I pulled into the driveway. Clay's truck was there. The porch light was on.
The house was quiet.
I stood at the front door with my keys in my hand and my heart hammering, because quiet and Maisie didn't go together. Quiet and Maisie meant something was wrong, or something was so right that I didn't have a framework for it yet.
I opened the door.
The kitchen smelled like roasted chicken.
Not store-bought rotisserie — actual roasted chicken, the kind that involved an oven and herbs and someone standing in my kitchen deciding that thyme was the right call.
The counters were clean. The dishes were done — not stacked in the drying rack the way I left them, but put away.
Maisie's backpack was hung on its hook. Her shoes were by the mat, laces tucked in the way I did them. Her lunchbox was open on the counter, rinsed out, the ice pack back in the freezer.
I pressed both hands flat against the counter and held on.
A light was on in Maisie's room. The door was cracked.
I walked down the hall on legs that didn't feel entirely reliable, pushed the door open, and —
Clay.
Barefoot. Faded grey t-shirt and jeans, the jeans worn soft at the knees.
Sprawled on the floor with his back against Maisie's bed, long legs stretched out across the purple rug, a book open in his hands.
He'd taken off his boots and left them neatly by the door — two enormous boots next to Maisie's tiny pink ones, a sight that did something I wasn't prepared for.
The bedside lamp was on, casting everything in soft amber.
Maisie was in bed, blanket pulled to her chin, stuffed horse tucked under her arm, eyes half-closed and dreamy.
She was smiling. The sleepy, safe, full-body smile of a child who had been fed and bathed and read to and tucked in by someone who'd treated every step of the process like it mattered.
Clay looked up at me. "Hey. You made it just in time for the end."
He held up the book. Charlotte's Web. The copy with the bent corner and the juice stain on page forty-seven that Maisie called "Gerald's birthmark."
"Chapter twenty-one," Maisie murmured. "Charlotte is saying goodbye. It's the saddest and most beautiful part. Clay does the voices, Mommy. He does a very good Charlotte."
"I do an excellent Charlotte," Clay said. "I've been told my Wilbur needs work."
"His Wilbur is squeaky," Maisie confirmed. "But we're working on it."
I leaned against the doorframe because my knees had decided they were done holding me up.
"Read the last part," Maisie whispered. "Mommy needs to hear it."
Clay looked at me. Checking. Asking, without words, if I was okay. I nodded, because if I opened my mouth, what came out would not be words.
He read the ending of Charlotte's Web . His voice was low and steady, and he read it like he understood every word — not performing, not rushing, giving the story the respect it deserved because the kid who'd asked for it deserved nothing less.
Maisie's eyes closed somewhere in the last paragraph, and her breathing evened out, and she was asleep.
Clay closed the book. Set it on the nightstand. Eased himself up — I saw the wince, the knee — and pulled the blanket up to Maisie's chin. Touched her hair. One stroke. Gentle, careful, like she was the most precious thing in the room, and he knew it.
Then he looked at me and tipped his head toward the hallway.
I followed him to the kitchen.
He didn't lean against the counter and look at me. He didn't launch into a speech. He opened the oven, pulled out a plate wrapped in foil, and set it on the table.
"Sit," he said. Not a question.
"Clay —"
"Sit. Eat. You've been running on courthouse adrenaline for four hours, and I can see your hands shaking from here.
" He pulled out the chair. "Chicken, roasted potatoes, green beans.
She told me you like green beans with garlic.
I didn't have garlic, so I used the stuff in your spice rack that I think is garlic but might be onion powder. She supervised."
I sat. Because my legs were done and because he'd pulled out the chair and because nobody — nobody — had ever heated a plate and said sit like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He poured me a glass of water. Set it beside the plate.
Then he sat across from me and watched me eat with the patient attention of a man who understood that feeding someone was its own kind of language. Thank you, Louisa Blackwood.
The chicken was good. The green beans were onion powder, not garlic, and they were still good.
"She was fine, by the way," he said. "In case you're running disaster scenarios while you chew.
" He leaned back in the chair, arms crossed.
"Picked her up at five-twelve. She came out of the school holding Mrs. Hannigan's hand and saw my truck, and her face did that thing — you know the thing, where her eyes go enormous, and she vibrates for about two seconds before detonation. "
I knew the thing.
"She informed me that she needed a snack immediately or she would 'perish' — her word — so we stopped for apple slices and peanut butter."
I laughed. It came out shaky but real. "That sounds about right."
I put my fork down. The plate was almost empty. My hands had stopped shaking. My eyes hadn't. Every time I blinked, I saw the boots — his and hers, side by side — and my eyes burned around something I couldn't name.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
He stopped. The humor left his face all at once.
"Because I want to," he said. Simply. Like it was that obvious. Like it should have always been that obvious.
He stood. Came around the table. And instead of standing over me, he crouched. Lowered himself until he was looking up at me, forearms on his thighs, his face level with mine. Eye to eye. The way you'd approach something easily startled.
"Because you called and I answered," he said. "That's it, Callie. That's the whole thing."
My hand moved before I decided to move it. Up from my lap, across the space between us, to his face. My fingers touched his jaw — the dark stubble there, rough under my fingertips, warm — and he went completely still. Not pulling away. Not leaning in. Just letting me.
I traced the line of his jaw to his chin.
His lips parted. My thumb found them — the lower one, the full one — and I drew it across slowly, feeling the shape of his mouth the way a blind person reads a word.
His breath caught. A muscle jumped in his jaw under my palm, but he didn't move.
He stayed crouched in front of my kitchen chair with my hand on his face and his eyes on mine, and he waited.
"Stay," I said. My thumb still on his mouth. "Not because I need rescuing. Because I don't want you to leave."
His eyes searched mine. Left, right, left — the same way I'd searched his on the hilltop.
"Yeah," he said. Against my thumb. I felt the word more than heard it. "I can stay."
We moved to the couch. He sat first, arm along the back, and I sat beside him — close but not touching. The lamp was on low. Down the hall, Maisie's nightlight glowed under her door. The house settled around us the way houses do at night, ticking and humming, making room.
"Tell me something," I said. "Something I don't know."
He turned his head on the cushion. "Like what?"
"Like — what were you afraid of as a kid?"
He thought about it. "Tornadoes. Momma had a storm closet, and every time the sirens went off, I'd carry Maggie down the stairs because she was too little to go fast enough. I was nine. I thought if I didn't get her there in time, it was my fault."
"You've been carrying people since you were nine."
He shrugged once, unbothered. "Runs in the family. What about you?"