Chapter Eighteen – Rowan
The morning feels off-balance before I even open my eyes, like the house shifted half an inch in the night and none of the floorboards told me.
I reach to the right out of habit and catch an armful of cold sheet.
The space she’s been warming for a week—gone.
Not gone-gone, just… up before me. Which shouldn’t rattle me. It does.
Coffee drifts down the hall the same way fog lifts off the creek—slow, patient, inevitable. I pull on sweats and the first T-shirt on the chair, scrub a hand over my jaw, and walk toward the smell.
She’s there. Barefoot. My hoodie sleeves shoved to her elbows, hair knotted up like she did it in the dark and didn’t care if a halo fell out of it. She knows where the mugs live now. The filter. The drawer that sticks. She moves around my kitchen like she’s always had the map.
“Morning,” she says, voice smoked with sleep.
“Morning.” I try to keep my own voice from showing all the things it wants to carry. It comes out steadier than I feel.
She slides a mug across. Our fingers don’t touch, but it feels like they do. She finally looks up and smiles, soft and crooked, but it doesn’t quite make the last step to her eyes.
There’s a pressure pattern you learn from weather. Heavy air, a hush in the trees, birds that choose not to waste energy—storm logic. The kitchen has that quiet now. It’s not the good kind. It’s the kind that means something’s coming.
“I need to head to Nashville,” she says, not sprinting, not hedging—just laying the truth down on the counter between us like a set of keys.
“Two, three days. There are meetings I can no longer postpone, fittings, and a film project. I fought for all of it to be in Nashville, not LA or New York. It’s… the least loud.”
The coffee turns bitter on my tongue. Not her. The idea of the machine that chews up people I love and spits them out shiny and tired.
“How long?” I ask, because practical questions give your hands something to hold.
“Quick,” she says, and then, quieter, “I’ll come back.”
Something under my ribs braces like I’m setting a post. I nod. “I believe you.” And I do. That’s the terrifying part.
She searches my face. “I don’t want you to think I’m running.”
“I don’t,” I say, and I mean it. “I think you’re doing your job. I also think I’d be lying if I said I like the way my stomach dropped when you told me.”
Her exhale catches. She comes around the island like she’s approaching a skittish horse, then stops when she’s close enough that I can see the gold flecks in the brown of her eyes.
“Come with me,” she blurts, like the thought surprised her too.
“Just… for a couple of days. Keep me honest. Remind me where I’m going back to. ”
The word lands and rings. Come. There’s a kid part of me that wants to say yes so fast I forget to pack.
There’s a man part of me that looks past her shoulder at the chores board: vaccinations tomorrow, feed delivery window, the far north fence that finally sagged like it’s tired of pretending it’s not weak at the corner.
I picture us on a plane, her hand under mine when it climbs, her head on my shoulder while I pretend I’m not a man who hates leaving the ground.
I picture a hotel hallway with a camera flash blooming like summer lightning in a bad place.
I picture her squeezed between handlers and stylists and a mother who likes control more than she likes sunrise, and I’m a wall in a room that needs one.
It would be easy to go because I want to. It would be hard to go because I’m a person other people count on. The balance of that is adulthood and I hate it.
I set my mug down, palm flat to the counter to stop the urge to reach for her and say yes to everything.
“I want to,” I tell her, and the wanting is the truest thing in the room.
“Every part of me wants to. But if I go, I won’t do it halfway.
And right now we’ve got the feed truck at ten, Jasper’s shoe to reset, and Bailey’s third-grade crew coming to read under the sycamores at noon tomorrow.
If I bail because I can’t stand the idea of you walking into noise without me, that’s me making my fear your job.
I don’t want to do that to you. Or them. ”
She takes that in. Doesn’t flinch. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” Then she steps into me like the answer was a place, not a word. Her hands smooth down my ribs under the cotton, around my back, palms warm. “Then let me make this easier.”
“How?”
“Rules,” she says. “We write them right now.”
“Rules,” I repeat, because I’m a man who likes fences when they’re put in right. “Say them.”
“One,” she starts, eyes steady, “I call when the plane lands. Not a text. Your voice or mine. Two, if I start to drown in noise, I tell you before I’m fully under, not after.
Three, you don’t sit here and invent stories about me in a dress on a step-and-repeat I didn’t even go to.
You call me. You say, ‘Tell me where you are and what you can see.’ Four, if you want to come later, you come.
If you don’t, I walk back to you, and we keep the porch light rule. ”
I huff. “Porch light rule?”
She smiles, and it finally reaches her eyes. “You told me once you can tell whose lights are on because they’re up late on purpose and whose because something’s wrong. Your house feels like the first one. Keep it on. I’ll find it.”
I do reach for her then. My hand cups her jaw because that’s where I feel her breath when she laughs. “Five,” I add. “We say the thing. Not the version that hides our soft parts.”
“Deal,” she whispers, and then she kisses me like she trusts me with something irreplaceable. It’s not a goodbye kiss. It’s a keep-this-in-your-pocket.
She pulls back and frowns at my mouth like she’s doing math. “You’re thinking.”
“I am.” I tip my forehead to hers. “About a talisman. Something of mine you take. Something of yours you leave. So neither of us can weasel out and pretend we imagined the last week.”
She laughs, soft. “Bossy.”
“Prepared.”
I tug the leather cord from my neck, the one with the tiny brass acorn my granddad carried as a pocket charm while he rebuilt this place with his hands and stubbornness. “He said it meant patient strength,” I tell her, thumb worrying the warm metal. “Also meant ‘don’t be an idiot about winter.’”
She goes very still, like I just handed her a baby bird. “Rowan…”
“I want you to wear it,” I say, and my voice lowers, not on purpose. “For luck. For reminding. For me being with you, even when I’m not wearing my worst button-down in a Nashville conference room.”
She slides her hair aside, and I knot the cord at the back of her neck, my fingers clumsy the way they get when I’m doing something that matters. The acorn settles just above her pulse. It looks right. It looks like the room breathed out.
She rushes toward the couch, shuffling through the pages of the notebook she carries with her everywhere, then returns with her eyes darting around nervously.
She lifts her hand and settles something in mine in return.
A guitar pick, edges worn smooth, a tiny silver star stamped dead center.
“First song I wrote for me,” she says. “The day I played it without asking if it would trend. I’ve kept this with me ever since for courage. ”
“It worked,” I say, because I’m not shy about naming bravery when I see it.
“Keep it,” she says. “For the days you forget you have enough.”
We spend the next hour doing the most domestic things I’ve ever wanted.
Packing without fanfare. Folding the hoodie she steals because it smells like my soap.
She writes a list where I’ll see it without making a production of it: Butterscotch—AM bottle on the hook (don’t forget to warm); Mrs. Carmichael—market eggs; Bailey—text her about rain plan.
She adds a dumb little drawing of a chicken and then pretends she didn’t.
I want to ask her to stay. I don’t, because a relationship, or whatever it is we’re doing, without trust is just another fence that bends the wrong direction.
Instead, I make her an egg sandwich the way she likes it and wrap it in wax paper for the road and tuck a note inside that says, Rule #5. Say the thing. You’ve got me .
She sees me tuck it. She pretends not to.
She pops the hatch on her car, and I set her bag inside, palms lingering on the edge of the trunk while I ignore the stupid, selfish urge to scoop her up and carry her back into the house like we’re the only two people left who know how to be quiet together.
Instead, I touch the acorn at her throat and feel the beat under it answer my thumb. “Call me when you land.”
She nods. “I will.”
“Say the thing,” I remind her.
“I love how you stay,” she blurts, then laughs, embarrassed and not at all. “I love that you are the same in a storm as you are when the kitchen’s clean. I love that you made me a sandwich like it’s a spell.”
None of this is casual. I lean in and kiss her like the porch light’s already on. When I let her go, it’s not with fear. It’s with a plan.
The car door shuts. Gravel hisses. The taillights blink at the end of the lane like two eyes checking if I’m watching.
I am.
I go back inside and flip the porch light on even though it’s full morning and ridiculous.
Rules are rules.
I make the day honest. That’s what you do when you want to spiral—you make the list and you do the list so your brain can’t draft disaster scenarios in the idle space between fence posts.
Feed. Water. Check the west line. Run Jasper on the hill and not because I’m trying to outrun a feeling.
I sharpen the loppers. Oil the chainsaw.
Set out the shade tents for Bailey’s readers tomorrow.
Measure the blanket space under the sycamores, test the old speaker, and ensure the volume tops out under the threshold the school nurse wrote down for me.