Jasper
Isat in the kitchen for a long time after she left.
The coffee pot was still half full. The two mugs were still on the table—hers on her side, mine on mine.
She had not finished hers. There was a quarter inch of cold coffee in the bottom of it and a smudge of lip gloss on the rim, and I looked at that smudge for longer than I should have, and then I looked at the river through the window, and still, I did not move.
I had not told her about the job.
Not a lie—I had not lied to her. But I had let weeks go by with the decision made, and every time I had sat across from her at the kitchen table or driven her back from the cabin or watched her in the shop moving through her evening like she was exactly where she was supposed to be, I had told myself I would tell her tomorrow.
Tomorrow had come and gone a lot of times.
The light through the kitchen window had flattened into late morning. I was here trying to figure out what I was going to say when I saw her next. Not an excuse. I was done with excuses.
I was supposed to be at the bar at noon.
I picked up my phone to call Paige and saw the text from Emmett. I had been too upset to even ask how she’d found out.
She answered on the second ring. “Jasper.”
“Hey.” My voice came out wrong. Not broken—just flat in a way I could hear and could not fix. “I need to take the day. I can cover tomorrow. Whatever you need this week, I’ll work it.”
A short silence. Paige had heard it too. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it yet.”
“Is Cara okay?”
“Cara is okay. She went home. She took my truck.”
Another silence. “Take the day,” she said. “Take tomorrow too if you need it.” She paused. “Call Hannah. Let her help you.” Then, lower, almost to herself, “I’ll call her myself. I know you won’t.”
“Thank you, Paige.”
She hung up.
I put the phone down on the table and looked at it. Then I looked at the mug again. The smudge of lip gloss on the rim. I reached out, turned the mug so I couldn’t see it, then sat there staring off into the distance until the phone rang.
Hannah.
I almost didn’t pick up. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let it ring twice. Then I answered. “Hey.”
“Jasper.” Her voice was already there—already at the place I hadn’t arrived at yet. “What’s wrong?”
“I just got off the phone with Paige.”
“I know, she called me. What is going on?”
I looked at the two mugs on the table. The one I had turned so I couldn’t see the rim. “I messed up.”
“With Cara?”
“Yes.”
“How bad?”
I thought about her face when she had looked at me. The way she had gone very still and then very quiet, and how her quiet was different from Paige’s quiet—softer and more private, the quiet of a woman who had decided not to let you see the full extent of what you had done to her.
I pressed my thumb against the side of my mug. “Bad. Pretty bad, I think.”
That was an understatement so profound it almost made me laugh, except nothing about any of this was funny.
I had done that. I had taken a woman who had spent her whole life being careful with herself, who had told me more than she’d told anyone, and trusted me.
I had told myself I would choose her if it came to it.
I had told myself a lot of things, and all of them had been, at their root, about me—about what I couldn’t face losing, about how good it felt to have her look at me the way she had been looking at me, and how badly I hadn’t wanted to change that look.
But I had changed it anyway. Just later, and worse.
There was a tightness in my chest that had been there since she walked out the door, the physical kind that didn’t have anything to do with breathing, the kind that just sat there and made everything feel slightly airless.
I kept replaying the moment her eyes had gone wet, and she’d looked away—not at me, away, because she hadn’t wanted me to see it.
Shame came. Grief came. Neither of them quite covered the weight of knowing you have let down the one person you most wanted not to.
She had said she wasn’t ending it. I held onto that.
Hannah did not say anything for a moment.
She had been the person on the other end of my bad calls since we were kids.
She had been the person I called from overseas when things went wrong in ways I could not say out loud, and she had learned over the years how to sit in the gap of what I wasn’t saying and wait for me to find my way to it.
“Come to lunch,” she said.
“Hannah—”
“You are not sitting in that cabin by yourself today. Mom is making pot roast. Come. You can tell me what happened. One o’clock. Don’t be late.” She hung up.
I sat at the table for another minute with the phone in my hand and the cabin quiet around me.
Then I got up and rinsed the mugs. I went into the bedroom, and I looked at the stack of books on the dresser—her books, every one of them, the books she had pressed into my hands one at a time before either of us had known what we were doing—and I could not stand looking at them, so I looked at the floor instead.
I changed into a clean shirt. I picked up my keys, hopped on my motorcycle, and drove to Willowmist Falls.
The road between the cabin and the Falls was a road I had driven a thousand times in my life.
I had driven it as a kid in the back of my parents’ car.
As a teenager, on the way to pick Hannah up from something.
As a Marine home on leave, changed in ways I did not have words for, watching the trees through the window like they might explain something.
I had driven it the afternoon I got back from my last deployment with my knee in a brace, and everything I owned in a duffel bag in the truck, and the road had been the same road it always was, and I had been grateful for that.
Today I drove it slowly. I was not ready to be anywhere I was going, but I was going there anyway, and the road was letting me take my time.
My mother met me on the porch. She did not say a word.
She came down the two steps and wrapped her arms around me and held on, one hand at the back of my head the way she had when I was small, and I stood there and let her because some things do not change, no matter how old you get or how far you go.
My mother had been married to an alcoholic and had held her family together through it with both hands, and by the time she was in her sixties, she had a finely developed understanding of when to ask and when to just hold on. She did not ask. She held on to me.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Come inside, honey. It’s gonna be okay. Connor is at work.”
Hannah was at the kitchen island with a glass of water. She looked up when I came in and read me across the room in about three seconds, took in everything my face was communicating, and did not say a word about any of it.
“Sit down,” she said. She got up and filled a glass with water, then slid it across the island. “Drink that.”
I sat. I drank the water. She watched me do it and said nothing, and I understood that she was waiting until our mother was not ten feet away at the stove to demand answers.
My dad appeared in the kitchen doorway a moment later, moving carefully because of his bad back.
His face when he saw me went soft in that way it had developed over his sober years—open and honest, the face of a man who had learned that showing up for his family was what he should have been doing all along.
He crossed the kitchen and put his hand on my shoulder and gripped it once, firmly, without saying anything, and then he went to the table and sat down.
That was my dad. He was back, and that was enough.
My mother put the pot roast on the table.
Hannah helped with the sides. I sat at the end of the table, across from my dad and next to Hannah, and my mother served me first without asking, because I had come in with a sad face and she was going to take care of me the only way she knew how—put food in front of me and be nearby while I ate it.
None of them asked about Cara, and I was grateful. I felt them not asking, felt their worry around the edges of the conversation, and I was grateful for that too.
About halfway through the meal, my dad set his fork down and looked at me across the table—the direct, considered look he had developed in his sober years, the one that still caught me off guard sometimes because it was so different from the man I had grown up with.
“You staying?”
My mother looked up from her plate. Hannah went very still beside me.
“Staying where?” I said, though I knew what he meant.
“Here. In the Falls. In the Hollow. Wherever you’ve landed. You staying, or are you going somewhere else?”
I had been expecting Hannah to pull me aside after lunch. I had not been expecting my father to put his fork down in the middle of the pot roast and ask me directly. I had not been ready for it, so I answered without the version I had been rehearsing.
“I’m staying.”
My mother let out a slow breath.
“I’m taking a job with Emmett. At his firm. His office is here in town, and I’d be his partner.”
Hannah set her fork down. She did it carefully, deliberately, and she looked at her plate for a moment before she looked at me. “Emmett?”
“Yes.”
“Emmett Harrington. Emmett, who used to eat cereal at this table before he could reach the counter without a stool. Who cried at our dog’s funeral and then denied it.”
“That’s the one.”
“Who now has a firm?” She said it in a tone I could not entirely read—something that was not quite surprise and not quite something else entirely, and she looked at her plate again briefly in a way she probably thought was neutral.
“I didn’t know that was something he’d done with himself.
Uh, I mean, I don’t really see him around town. ”
“He’s been building up to it for a few years. He’s done well.”
Something moved across her face that she pulled back before it finished arriving. She picked up her fork again. “Good for him,” she said, in a voice that was working very hard to be even.