Jasper
Ididn’t go home.
Instead, I turned toward town. I had only been to Emmett’s office twice before, both times just to drop something off, and I had never planned on coming today.
But I had been taking my time with this decision.
I made it in my kitchen this morning and confirmed it at my mother’s table an hour ago.
I wasn’t about to drive past his turn and head back to an empty cabin, where I would sit alone with it for another night.
The office sat above the old feed store on Willowmist Falls’ main street. The store had closed years ago, and the building had been divided into small commercial spaces. A modest sign by the stairwell read Harrington and Associates in plain black letters.
I climbed the stairs. My knee ached, but I ignored it.
At the top, the space opened into a small reception area with a simple desk, a couple of waiting chairs, and a low table stacked with a few magazines. Two doors led off the reception area, each opening into a private office. One belonged to Emmett. The other stood empty, waiting.
The single door to the main suite had a frosted glass panel. I knocked once and pushed it open without waiting.
Emmett sat at his desk in the larger of the two offices, sleeves rolled up, a case file spread before him. He looked up the moment I entered.
Emmett Harrington looked exactly the same as he had at eighteen, which had always vaguely annoyed me.
Same broad shoulders, same dark hair going slightly longer than regulation had ever allowed, same face that women in every town we’d ever been stationed near had found unreasonably compelling.
The Corps had put muscle on both of us, but it sat differently on Emmett—easier, like he’d been built for it, like the whole enterprise of being that size required no particular effort on his part.
He had the kind of looks that might have made him insufferable if he’d been a different type of man.
He wasn’t, which was the only reason I’d put up with him for twenty-odd years.
Recognition hit him, and he quietly closed the file.
He studied me, the same steady man who had slept on my parents’ couch time after time when we were kids, raided their fridge with me at two in the morning, and stood beside me through deployments, a field hospital, and the long, slow crawl back to civilian life.
He could still read my face like no one else.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m not staying long.”
“Sit anyway.”
I dropped into the chair across from his desk.
My chest was tight in a way that hadn’t eased since Cara drove away, and I pressed my feet flat to the floor and made myself focus on Emmett’s face instead of on the image that kept surfacing—her folding my shirt and leaving it on the bed, neat and deliberate, like she was trying to leave everything exactly as she’d found it.
Emmett leaned back, hands laced behind his head, and waited. He was good at waiting. Always had been.
“I’m in,” I said. “I know I told you I was, but I mean it now. I’m in. She knows.”
He didn’t move for a second. Then he lowered his arms and leaned forward, palms on the desk. “Jasper.”
“I’m in,” I said again, quieter. “I want the partnership. Start me whenever you want. I’ll keep working the bar until Paige finds someone—I won’t leave her without cover.
” I stopped. The next part was harder to say out loud than I’d expected.
“Cara left this morning. Not for good. She asked for room to think, and I’m giving it to her.
But I’m not sitting on this anymore. If she comes back—when she comes back—we’ll figure out what the job looks like together.
If she doesn’t—” The words snagged, and I left the sentence unfinished, because I had tried to complete it three times since she’d driven away, and I still couldn’t get there.
“She’ll come back,” Emmett said.
I swallowed hard. “She has to.” He watched me for a moment, reading the parts I wasn’t saying. “There’s one thing you need to understand before I sign anything,” I added.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not building my life around this job,” I said.
“I’m building the job around my life. Cases I can handle from here when possible.
Home every night, I can manage it. Long weeks when you need me, I’ll take them.
But I need to be a man who has a life, and the job fits inside it. Not the other way around.”
Emmett didn’t answer right away. Something settled in his expression—not surprise, more like recognition. “Jasper,” he said. “That is exactly how I have been running this firm.”
I looked at him.
“You remember Amanda.” It wasn’t a question.
He said it flatly. “We got married the year after I got out. I was still doing contract work, gone all the time. I told myself she knew what she was signing up for.” He turned his pen over on the desk once, twice.
“She did know. What I didn’t understand was that knowing doesn’t mean you can live with it.
She asked me for a long time to come home more.
I didn’t listen. By the time I finally understood she meant it, she had already stopped asking. ”
I stayed quiet. I knew the broad outline of this—the divorce, Emmett moving back here, starting the firm. We had never talked about the specifics. I hadn’t asked, and now that sat uncomfortably in my chest alongside everything else.
“I took time off. Sat in the house I’d bought for us and figured out what I’d lost. Then I sold it.
” He looked at me steadily. “Moved back here. Opened this place with one rule I wrote on a scrap of paper in my kitchen—I was never going to build my life around a job again.” He paused.
“Life ended up smaller than the one I’d been chasing.
But it was the one I should have been building all along. That’s the firm you’re walking into.”
Something moved through my chest at that. Not just what he was saying about the firm—what he was saying about Amanda. I thought about Cara at the kitchen table with her hands around her mug and the look on her face when she’d said you had all of those chances and felt the guilt settle deeper.
“I didn’t know that was why—”
“You didn’t ask.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
He looked at me with the patience of someone who had watched me be bad at this for a long time. “You are bad at asking questions when you are scared of the answers.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “We’re going to fix that.”
“Go get her back,” he said. “Give her a couple of days. Then go and tell her everything—not just the job, all of it. How you feel. What you want. No more holding back.”
“She asked for space.”
“She asked for space because you gave her incomplete information. Give her the full picture and let her decide with that.” He stood and came around the desk, extending his hand.
I rose and took it, and he held on longer than necessary, then pulled me into the half-hug we’d used since we were eighteen when words fell short—one hand on my shoulder, the other still clasped. “I’m glad you’re taking the job.”
“Me too,” I said, and meant it, even with everything else sitting in my chest alongside it.
“Monday,” he said. “Come in Monday. We’ll go through everything. Bring your questions.”
“I will.”
“Tell your mother I said hi.”
“I will.”
He paused, his tone shifting just slightly, almost casual. “How’s Hannah doing these days?”
“She’s good,” I said. “Keeping busy with the usual things. Why?”
Emmett gave a small shrug, but his eyes held a quiet steadiness. “Just asking.”
He let me go. I went down the stairs and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The light was fading, and the streetlamps had flickered on along the block. I stood on the curb for a long minute with my hands shoved deep in my jacket pockets, the cool evening air pressing against my skin.
I had done it.
I had told my family I was staying. I had told Emmett I was in. I had made the two decisions I had been trying to make for a long time in the span of a few hours, and both had turned out easier than I had feared, only because I had finally stopped trying to decide alone.
He’d been right the whole time. About Cara. About the job. About my family. About the life I had been piecing together without ever asking anyone what they thought of the pieces.
I climbed into the truck and drove back to the cabin.
I pulled into the gravel drive just as the sun slipped behind the trees.
The engine ticked as it cooled. I sat there with my hands still on the wheel, staring at the dark cabin.
It looked exactly the same as always. Nothing had changed, except that the woman who had been inside it this morning was gone.
I got out, went inside, and sat down at the kitchen table across from the chair where Cara had sat. I stared at the empty seat for a long time, my chest aching with a gnawing worry that refused to let go.
I didn’t call her.
Instead, I built up the fire in the stove, pulled a chair close, and sat with one of the short story collections Cara had given me. I read until the light faded completely, the fire burned low, and the only sound left was the river whispering outside.
At some point, I fell asleep in the chair.
I dreamed of her, like I always did. Tonight, she sat at her own kitchen table in that soft blue sweater, looking across at me.
In the dream, she didn’t speak, but her face wasn’t angry.
She simply watched me, calm and steady. I woke sometime in the middle of the night to a cold cabin, a stiff neck, and the dream still clinging to me.
I got up, fed the stove, and went to bed.
I didn’t call her. I didn’t text.
I lay in the bed we had shared, reached out, and rested my hand on the empty side of the mattress where she had been. My fingers curled into the cool sheet. Worry twisted deep in my gut, sharp, persistent, and impossible to ignore.