Chapter Twenty-Two
Lydia
“You’re glowing.”
I dropped onto Riley’s worn-out couch, a little stunned, breathless, and very transparent.
“Am not,” I mumbled, tucking my legs under me and pulling the blanket over my lap to hide the fact that I had dressed up for a casual dinner . “It’s just warm in here.”
“It’s seventy-two degrees, and you look like you walked out of a Hallmark movie. But, like, the kind where they have sex,” she added, sipping her coffee with far too much smugness.
“Riley,” I groaned, throwing a pillow at her. “It was dinner . With a man who is, ninety-eight percent of the time, a grumpy badger in flannel and hates my guts.”
“And the other two percent of the time?” she asked, catching the pillow with infuriating ease.
I didn’t answer.
Because if I said the other two percent makes me feel like the floor’s about to give out from under me , I’d never hear the end of it.
Instead, I stared at the ceiling like it might help me process what just happened.
The way he looked at me when I walked into the café? Like I’d knocked the wind out of him. Like he didn’t know what to do with me but was ready to try anyway.
It rattled me.
Everything about that dinner had rattled me.
“He asked me why I came to Reckless River,” I said finally.
Riley didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“I told him a little about my mom,” I continued, voice softer now. “About how everything felt too fast and loud after she passed. That this town… this building… it felt like a place I could breathe again.”
When I glanced at her, Riley’s expression had shifted. Not smug. Not teasing. Just quiet and knowing.
“And?”
“He listened.” I exhaled slowly. “He didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t crack a joke or say something dismissive. He just… listened. ”
“That’s big for him.”
“I gathered.” I let the silence stretch before admitting, “It’s terrifying.”
Riley tilted her head. “Because you like him.”
“I don’t know what I feel,” I lied.
She arched an eyebrow.
“Okay, I know some of what I feel. But the rest?” I shook my head. “He’s so gruff one minute and then so…” I trailed off. “Real.”
“Callum’s always been real,” she said. “Even when he doesn’t want to be.”
I fiddled with the hem of the blanket. “Why doesn’t he want to be?”
Riley was quiet for a long moment. And then she said something that made the room tilt just a little.
“Because the last time he let someone in, it ended in tragedy.”
My stomach flipped. “What?”
She nodded, expression somber. “You don’t know about Lucy?”
“No. Who’s—” I cut myself off, dread blooming like ink in water. “Wait. You mean a girlfriend?”
“Wife,” Riley said quietly. “Technically. Though they were never legally married. Lived together for years. Practically married in everyone’s eyes. They opened the bar together.”
“Oh,” I breathed.
“She was sick. Cancer. Came on fast. She didn’t tell many people at first, but Callum knew. He took care of her. Never left her side.”
I couldn’t speak.
“They were young. Too young. And he stayed until the very end, but when she passed…” Riley’s voice caught a little, and I realized this wasn’t just gossip for her. She’d lived this too. “He changed. Went from light-hearted and wild to… well. The man you met. His dad also passed and...” She didn’t finish
I stared at the floor, stunned.
The weight in Callum’s eyes.
The guarded way he held himself back, like one wrong move would shatter the whole world again.
It made sense now.
More than I wanted it to.
“That’s why he’s like this,” I whispered. “Why he lashes out. Why he doesn’t let anyone in.”
Riley nodded. “He doesn’t believe he can survive another heartbreak.”
“And yet he—” I stopped. “He kissed me. He asked me to dinner.”
“Because even his most broken parts still want to be whole.”
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting when I came here tonight. Comfort, maybe. A space to vent. Some tea and sarcastic commentary. I hadn’t expected a bombshell that rewired every interaction I’d ever had with him.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” I admitted, throat thick.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Riley said gently. “But if you’re going to keep spending time with him, you deserve to understand why he acts the way he does.”
I blinked hard, the image of his face across the table still vivid in my mind. The way he’d said I’m trying . The way his eyes had flicked down to my mouth, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss me again or apologize for the last one.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I asked.
“Because Callum wouldn’t want you to know,” she said simply. “And this town, underneath all its gossip and small-town chaos, still protects the people it loves.”
That was the part that really undid me.
Because now I knew.
Now I saw him not as the difficult, stubborn bar owner trying to keep me from changing things, but as a man who’d lost more than I could imagine and still got up every day to run the thing built out of a love he no longer had.
No wonder he was always angry. Always guarded.
No wonder he looked at me like I was dangerous.
Because I was.
I represented change. Possibility. Risk.
Hope.
And maybe that was the scariest thing of all.
My heart hadn’t settled since Riley said the word wife .
Not ex. Not girlfriend. Wife, in every way that counted.
I was still holding my untouched drink. Riley had curled her feet up beneath her, legs crossed on the cushion, like she’d settled in for something she knew I wasn’t prepared for.
I wasn’t.
Not even close.
I stared into the mug and tried to reconcile the man I’d been kissing in my imagination with the man who had once watched someone he loved waste away right in front of him.
My chest tightened.
“His wife…” I repeated softly, still struggling with the word. “God, Riley.”
“I know,” she said, voice gentle. “And I wasn’t trying to drop a bomb. I just thought… if anyone deserves the whole picture, it’s you.”
I nodded slowly.
But it was hard to breathe through it.
I remembered the way Callum looked at me when I talked about my mom. How still he got. How his gaze locked on mine like he understood something deeper than he could say out loud.
Of course he did.
Grief recognized grief.
And maybe that was the terrifying thing…that we were more alike than I realized.
“He’s not easy,” I murmured.
“Nope,” Riley agreed. “Never has been. He’s stubborn and reactive and a royal pain in the ass when he wants to be.”
“And still…” I trailed off.
“And still,” she echoed.
There wasn’t a word for the pull I felt toward him. It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t lust. Though, let’s be honest , that was definitely part of it. It was something raw and reluctant. Like finding a locked door with a light under it and knowing, without ever opening it, that what was on the other side could change everything.
I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
“I didn’t know,” I said quietly. “I mean… I knew something had shaped him. You can’t be that closed off unless you’ve lost something important. But I didn’t know it was all of that. ”
“It was Lucy,” Riley said, her voice softening, “and then his dad. Back to back.”
I blinked. “What?”
Riley nodded. “His dad got sick about six months after Lucy passed. Not the same thing…heart failure, I think. But it was too much at once. Callum was already carrying the weight of watching Lucy fade, and then to lose the man who basically raised him to be who he is? It gutted him.”
I swallowed, hard. “How do you come back from that?”
Riley smiled sadly. “You don’t. Not fully. But you rebuild. Slowly. Quietly. With your hands and your work. That’s what he did with the Rusty Stag.”
I let out a slow breath and sat back against the couch.
No wonder he was fighting so hard to keep things the same. It wasn’t just about the bar.
It was about the people he lost.
The memories that lived in the creaking floorboards and the low hum of the jukebox.
Every loose nail and sticky drawer was a tether to someone who wasn’t there anymore.
I felt like an intruder.
No—worse. I felt like a wrecking ball disguised as a landlord.
“What am I doing?” I whispered. “Coming in here like I have any right to change things. Like I’m supposed to fix something that’s not broken. No wonder he’s been pissed since day one.”
“You’re not a wrecking ball,” Riley said firmly, nudging me with her foot. “You’re trying to build , not tear down.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” She gave me a look. “Lydia, no one else has cared this much. Not even the Ludlowes. They were sweet, sure, but they were hands-off. You’re already here. You’re already in it. You’re showing up for people, the building, and this town. And you’re doing it while carrying your own grief.”
I didn’t know what to say.
So I just sat there, my heart cracked open like a raw nerve.
“I just don’t want to screw it up,” I said finally.
Riley smiled. “Then don’t. And start by giving yourself some grace. You’ve been through hell too, you know.”
It was the first time someone had said it so plainly.
That I wasn’t just new here, or ambitious , or the landlord. That I was a person who had lost something big and hadn’t known how to carry it until now.
“Thank you,” I whispered, eyes burning again. “For… telling me all of this. Even if it hurts to hear.”
“You deserved to know. Callum might be a brick wall sometimes, but under all that broody alpha male stuff is a man who’s been wounded more than once and still shows up daily to keep a bar running for a town that doesn’t even realize how much it leans on him.”
“And now I’m the woman trying to change his world.”
“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “Or maybe you’re the one person strong enough to change with it.”
I stared at her, stunned.
But she just smiled again, like she hadn’t just casually turned my world on its axis.
“You’re scary good at pep talks,” I muttered, brushing a tear off my cheek.
“I know,” she said, grabbing the remote. “It’s my second most valuable skill after caffeinating the masses.”
I laughed softly, finally sipping the drink I’d forgotten, and leaned back against the couch.
Maybe I didn’t know what would happen next.
Maybe I’d still screw things up with Callum Benedict and wind up heartbroken and overwhelmed.
But at least now… I understood.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the first step to not walking away.