Chapter Three – Rowan #4
She steps inside, the soft click of the latch louder than it should be, and I’m left on the porch with the taste of lime and the word soon humming in my chest.
I watch the square of light take her, then go dark, then flare again when she remembers to blow out the candle, then go dark for good.
I should go to bed. Instead, I do the porch check I always do—gate latched and feed bowl turned upside down because otherwise the opossums leave me thank-you notes.
The yard holds the day’s heat like a story it plans to tell in pieces.
I stand in it and try not to replay every moment where my hand could have been a little braver and wasn’t.
Inside, my phone buzzes on the table. Unknown number . I let it go dark.
Across the yard, the cottage curtain flashes pale once, twice—the quick pulse of a phone lighting up and going still. A minute later, it happens again. Not frantic, just insistent. The cadence of people who confuse access with care.
I don’t have to see the name to guess the sender. Crew’s told enough stories about the machine to know how it talks: holds placed, flights booked, “confirm by 9 a.m.” disguised as options. The kind of message that treats a woman like a calendar slot.
I stay put. I don’t tap on her door. I don’t add my worry to her pillow. The frogs take the night back, the creek hums its low note, and the porch boards cool beneath my boots.
I turn my own phone face down and make a promise that sounds a lot like a prayer.
I’m going to let her choose. And if choosing needs a picture of what staying looks like, I’ll keep it simple—coffee on the porch, a light left on, and a quiet place where nobody wants a piece of her she’s not willing to give.
Morning settles easy—the kind of blue that means the heat will take its time. I have feed dust on my forearms, and the horses are talking low when my phone buzzes in my back pocket.
“Wright,” I answer, shoulder to the stall door.
“It’s Carl,” comes the familiar rasp. “Your pop star’s spaceship took more than a love tap. Front lower control arm’s bent, hub assembly’s chewed. Parts are on order—Thursday if the truck’s kind. I can temp-align her if she’s desperate, but I wouldn’t send my worst enemy past thirty on it.”
“Thursday’s fine,” I say. “Appreciate you.”
I hang up as Ivy steps into the barn aisle, hair in a loose braid, and my spare chore gloves tucked in her back pocket like she’s been doing this her whole life. She strokes Butterscotch’s ridiculous forehead, gets sneezed on for her trouble, and just… laughs.
“News?” she asks, wiping her cheek with the hem of her T-shirt, unbothered.
“Carl says parts by Thursday. He’ll call if it’s sooner.”
“Thursday,” she repeats, like she’s rolling the word around to see if it fits. “Okay.”
Bailey’s text pings a second later—three exclamation points and a “kidnap Ivy for town?” like it’s a federal order. One that means she’s already pulled into my drive. Ivy reads over my shoulder and grins.
“I’ll be back by lunch,” she says, already backing toward the door. “No, by two. Fine, three. Bailey’s persuasive.”
“Be careful of her ‘just one more stop,’” I warn. “That’s how you lose entire afternoons.”
“Noted.” She tips her chin at me. “Try not to miss me.”
I don’t answer that. She goes anyway—bare legs, sun, and the flash of that smile thrown over her shoulder like she trusts I’ll catch it.
The farm goes quiet once the truck carrying them rattles down the lane.
Quiet in the way that makes the windmill creak sound like company.
I work the way I always do—fence line, mineral blocks, a new section of drip line in the garden—and catch myself looking for her twice.
Three times. I tell myself I’m only checking the time by the angle of the sun.
My ex, Marissa, ghost-walks through my head once—just a shadow, the shape of a lesson: what you think you know about a person can be a story they sold you. I shake it off the way you shake sweat from your brow.
By early afternoon, I’m under the oak with a coil of wire and a stubborn hinge when Dad calls.
“Boy,” he starts, which is how you know you’re about to get a mix of love and a lecture, “your mama says Hadley saw that singer at the market. She buying honey or buying your silence?”
I grit my teeth, keep my voice flat. “She bought a hat. Honey, too.”
He snorts. “You know how this looks, Rowan. Folks talk. I just don’t want you in a position where you’re cleaning up glitter and a mess at the same time. Again.”
“I’m not in a position,” I say.
“She’s a nice girl, probably,” he continues, which is how he softens the edge, “but these visiting types—”
“She won’t stay,” I snap before I can keep it holstered. The words come out harder than they felt in my head, designed to shut a door and succeeding all the way. “She’ll be back on stage soon enough, basking in the cheers and adoration of her rabid fan base.”
Silence on the line. Wind through the oak leaves. And—too late—footsteps on gravel behind me.
“Alright, then,” Dad says after a beat, as if he didn’t hear the way it scraped me raw to say it. “You bring the brush mower up later?”
“Yeah,” I say, and hang up.
I turn.
Ivy stands at the bottom of the porch steps, a paper-wrapped bunch of sunflowers in her arms, Bailey’s taillights just disappearing at the end of the lane. Her braid’s fuzzed from the heat, her cheeks flushed, and there’s a carefulness to her face I haven’t seen since the ditch.
“Hey,” she says, and the word is normal. Everything under it isn’t.
“Hey.” I nod at the flowers. “Those for Butterscotch? She’ll try to eat them.”
“For the cottage,” she says, voice lighter than her eyes. “It needed color.”
I mean to say something that fixes whatever I just cracked. Instead, I hear myself go practical. “Carl called. Thursday’s the day.”
“Good.” She presses the flowers closer, like they could take the weight I just put on her chest. “That’s… good.”
The rest of the afternoon goes like a day with a limp.
We put grain away. I pretend not to notice how she sidesteps my hands.
She tells me about a bookstore cat that hates everyone but adopted her for ten minutes.
I tell her the gate on the east paddock still catches if you don’t lift as you swing. Normal words. Not-normal air.
We split leftovers at the porch railing.
She eats slowly, smiling when I tell her that at the End-of-Summer Barbecue last year, the kettle corn vendor flirted with me once, and I still bought two bags out of fear.
The cicadas tune up; the light leans gold.
If I reach six inches, I could tuck the one wild piece of hair back behind her ear. I don’t.
“I’m going to finish a thing for work,” she says when the plates are clean. Noncommittal. Soft.
“Okay,” I say, because I don’t push caged animals or people pretending not to be.
She carries the vase of flowers from the porch to the cottage like a bride might carry a bouquet—careful, steady, the act conveys most of the message.
Her door clicks. The porch swing carries my weight like it always does, but I can’t make it groan the way it usually does.
I can’t lure it into telling me what to do next.
I sleep, but only because the body insists.
At first light, I make coffee without thinking, two cups, mine black, hers with cream and sugar. The oak dew ices my boots as I cross the yard. I knock lightly and push the cottage door with my knuckles the way I always do.
It opens quietly.
No boots by the mat. No tote dropped carelessly by the couch. The air holds last night’s cool and the faintest thread of her perfume like something someone should apologize for.
On the arm of the couch is my navy hoodie, folded clean. On the cushion is a torn page from one of those fancy notepads I don’t own.
Rowan—
Thank you for the roof and the quiet. Thank you for being kind when you didn’t have to be.
I don’t want to be a problem you have to solve. I’m going to give you your space back and take care of mine.
—Ivy
I read it twice. Three times. The coffee goes cold in my hand, and I don’t notice until the chill hits my skin.
She left the sweatshirt. Left the flowers in a Mason jar vase on the table, bright and defiant and already losing a petal. The bed’s made, hospital-corner neat, like a salute.
I stand there like a post somebody never got around to pounding into the ground. Then I do what I always do when the floor moves under me: I move.
Carl picks up on the second ring. “She swing by?” I ask, trying for even but tasting rust anyway.
“Car wasn’t ready, but said she’d find a way to handle it. Took an early cab into the city,” he says, oblivious to what that sentence does to me. “Bailey dropped her off. She said to tell you thanks. I told her you’re as stubborn as a mule and to text you anyway.”
“Did she?”
“Don’t reckon so,” he says gently.
I hang up and brace my hands on the worn counter like it’s the only thing that will hold me up.
“She won’t stay,” I’d said yesterday, all sharp edges and defense.
She heard me.
Of course, she did.
I look at the note again, at the careful way she avoided saying what she didn’t want me to hear: that I took something easy and made it hard, that I made myself safer by making her small. The kind of math I swore I didn’t do.
The sun pushes through the east window and lands on the folded sweatshirt like a spotlight. I pick it up, press my thumb to the collar where her perfume still clings, and feel something in me shift off its bolt.
I’m not going to chase her yet—not to punish or perform or prove some point to my dad. But I’m not going to let her think that sentence I threw like a shield is the truest thing I have.
I set the sweatshirt on the back of a chair she dragged close to the window because she liked to sit there and watch the field wake up. I rinse the Mason jar and change the water on the sunflowers because that’s what you do when you’re holding something that wilts without care.
Then I do the only thing I know how to do with my hands when my head is a fight: I go to work. And every task I pick up, every board I straighten, and every bucket I fill turns into a quiet plan for how I’m going to fix the thing I broke without asking for it to be easy.
She won’t stay, I’d said.
Not like that, no.
But if she comes back, it won’t be because I made the world smaller to keep myself from being hurt. It’ll be because I learned how to make room.