Chapter 27
LILY
Fall arrives in Harbor Hill, the trees turn gold and rust along the roads. Erin's shop windows shift from summer wildflowers to autumn arrangements. The air smells like salt and woodsmoke, that particular October scent that means the season is settling in for good.
I've been here eight months now. I've built something here that I love fiercely, something that feels more like home than anywhere I've ever lived.
For me and Callahan, it's been four months of locked doors and late nights and secret trips to cities where no one knows us. Four months of falling asleep in hotel rooms with his arm heavy across my waist and waking up to room service and his face on the pillow next to mine, instead of alone.
He's come with me to every med school interview. Stanford, for one, required lying to his father about a fishing trip, Zuri covering for us without asking questions, because Zuri is the kind of friend who knows when not to ask.
There are no more interviews. No more reasons to travel together. The clock I've been ignoring, the one that's been ticking quietly in the background of every stolen night and secret morning, will become impossible to avoid.
I went to Chicago alone last week. It was getting too obvious otherwise, too many trips, too many coincidences, too many times Rome almost caught us in a lie we couldn't explain away. So I went alone, and I told myself it would be fine. Three days. I could handle three days.
The trip itself was fine. The friends were fine. The dinners, the city, the interview. All fine. I was the disaster.
We've spent every free second on the phone. Texting him from cabs, calling him at midnight from a hotel stairwell because I missed his voice and couldn't wait until morning.
He sent me pictures of his day, so many snapshots, each of them captioned something about me.
What got me the most was a picture of the couch at his house, of the spot I usually sit.
Callahan
I miss seeing you right here
I sent him a photo of the deep-dish pizza I ordered because I knew he didn't like them.
His reply came back in seconds:
Callahan
I show you nice things and you show me disgusting.
I laughed so hard my friend asked if I was okay.
I was not okay. I am not okay. I am so deep in this thing that three days without him made me physically restless.
My skin itched. The bed felt wrong, too big, too empty, too cold on the side where he should have been.
I kept reaching for warmth in the middle of the night and finding nothing but sheets.
Now I am back, and no plans of leaving for a while.
The Holt house smells like coffee and sawdust, the twin fuels Will runs on, scents that have seeped so deeply into the walls over the years that I think the house itself might run on them, too.
Callahan is at the kitchen counter with a mug in both hands, his gaze fixed on the workshop door.
The door is cracked open. Through it, I hear Will's voice. It’s conversational, the cadence of someone catching up with an old friend, pausing in the places where responses would go.
I've heard him do it before, but never close enough to make out words. It's always been the murmur of it, the rhythm, the sense of a man having a conversation with someone I can't see.
I come up behind Callahan and wrap my arms around his waist, pressing my cheek to his back between his shoulder blades. His free hand comes down to cover both of mine against his stomach.
"I'm worried about him," he says quietly.
"I know."
"He's been doing it more. Or I'm noticing it more, I don't know." He sets his coffee down on the counter, now both hands on mine.
“It used to be just at night, in the workshop. Now it's all the time."
I press closer, and his heartbeat is steady against my ear. A little fast, maybe. Or maybe that's mine.
"I don't know how to bring it up without making him feel like I think he's lost it," he continues, troubled. "He'll be mortified. He'll shut down and I'll never hear him talk about her again, and that might be worse."
"We'll figure it out," I say into his back.
"I'll help. We can talk to him together, feel it out. See if there's anything to actually worry about or if this is just who he is."
He turns in my arms, leaning back against the counter, and pulls me into him. His chin rests on top of my head and I fit there, tucked under him, like this is where I was always meant to be.
"He talks about her to me all the time," I tell him. "When you're not here. Stories, memories, things she used to say. He doesn't talk to her when I'm around, but he talks about her constantly, and that feels different."
"Different how?"
"Talking about someone you've lost is how you keep them alive. It's healthy. It's good." I pull back enough to see his face. "He loves her and he wants to share her with people, and that's a man who's processing his grief, not losing his grip."
His hand comes up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and his face is tired. I suspect I'm as much to blame for that as his father is. We keep stealing hours from sleep because we can't stand to waste any of our time together on something as ordinary as rest.
"The talking to her part, I don't know yet," I admit. "But we'll figure it out. Together."
He doesn't answer right away. His thumb traces the shell of my ear, his thoughts somewhere far away.
"I don't talk about her," he says finally. "My mom. Not the way he does. He can just say her name and tell a story and smile about it, and I can't do that. I hear him do it and I want to, but when I try, everything locks up."
"That's okay."
"It's been eleven years."
"There's no timeline on that, Callahan." I reach up and touch his face, feeling the tension there. "Grief doesn't expire."
He nods, his eyes dropping to somewhere around my collarbone, and I decide not to push.
"Come on," I say, taking his hand. "Let's go sit with him."
The workshop is cold, the air thick with sawdust and the rich, living smell of wood. Will is at the bench with a piece of walnut clamped in a vise, a chisel in his hand, old country music playing low on the radio.
He brightens when we enter, his whole face opening like a door swinging wide.
"Well." He sets the chisel down and wipes his hands on a rag.
"My favorite people. Both of you here at the same time. What a day."
The warmth of his words is soothing. Callahan pulls over the old wooden chair for me, and takes the folding chair for himself.
Callahan leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, his eyes on his father's hands. His face is so still, which tells me he's listening harder than he looks.
"My Anna used to keep me company.” He glances at his son, a look passes between them that I can only witness, not understand
"Your mother could sit still longer than anyone I ever met," Will says. "And that made the time go so fast."
"Is that why you talk to her?" I ask gently. "To make the time go by?"
Something complicated crosses his face, surprised maybe, because no one has ever confronted him with it.
"Time's not going by fast enough," he says, simple. "Not until I can see my Anna again."
I swallow hard because Will deserves my presence, not my tears. He studies Callahan, then me.
"I know what you two are doing," he patiently says. "You don't need to worry."
"Dad," Callahan starts, but is quickly interrupted.
"I'm not losing my mind." Will holds up a hand. "I know she's gone. I've known she's gone every single morning for eleven years. I wake up and the bed is empty and I know."
He pauses, rubbing a thumb along the edge of the bench.
"But when I'm in here, working, I can picture her on that stool right there.
I can't see her, but I know where she'd be sitting, and I know what she'd say to anything I told her, because I knew that woman all of my life and she was the most predictable and surprising person I ever met. Both at the same time."
He drops his gaze to the stool where I'm sitting, and his brown eyes, Callahan's eyes in a different shade, crease at the corners with something that isn't quite a smile.
"I know she's dead and she's not here," he says, choking on the word dead. "But she's here." He puts the tip of four fingers right over his heart. "So I talk to her. And she talks back. In here, where it counts."
Callahan clears his throat. He's still leaning forward, hands still clasped, and I see the effort it's taking him to hold himself together.
"Eleven years is a long time, Dad." He is struggling so much. "Most people would have moved on. Remarried."
Will takes a few seconds to answer, his eyes somewhere past both of us, somewhere we can't follow.
"God put me on this earth to love her, Cal,” he says. "And I'm not done yet."
I hear a short, hard exhale that sounds painful from Callahan. I reach over without looking and find his hand on his knee, and squeeze. He squeezes back tightly. I let go right after, hopefully passing it as a friendly gesture rather than what he and I are.
Will picks up his tools with a quick glance at our hands, and turns back to his work. His shoulders settle, his hands go to work, and the rhythm resumes like the conversation has been folded neatly and put away for safekeeping.
"Thank you for sitting with me," he says, like we've given him a gift instead of the other way around. We also understand the conversation is over.
We're at the door when Will speaks again.
"I know you understand me, son. Like father, like son. Remember that."
Callahan's hand tightens on the doorframe, and I feel the stillness roll through him, feel the way those words land somewhere he doesn't seem to like.
Will's already back inside whatever conversation he's having with the wood or Anna or both.
Like father, like son.
A Holt man loves once. Loves so completely and permanently that eleven years of absence doesn't loosen the grip. Loves with his whole self, and doesn't stop just because the world takes the person away from him.
Callahan will love someone like that one day. The realization hits me like a blade, the taste metallic and sharp. He will find someone, someday, and he will love her the way his father loves Anna. With everything he has. With everything he is. For the rest of his life and beyond it.
And I will be somewhere else. In some city, in some hospital, building the life I've been working toward since I can remember while he will be here, in Harbor Hill, loving someone who stayed.
"You okay?" he asks gently, watching my face.
I smile because it's better than crying. "Perfect," I lie. "Long day."
He doesn't push, just pulls me into his side and presses a kiss to the top of my head, and I let him, even though every cell in my body is screaming at me to tell him the truth.
I have no right to fall apart over any of it. We agreed to this, we both knew this was temporary. I don't get to change the rules now just because I'm in too deep to see the surface anymore.
Right now I'm here, with him, in his kitchen, his arm around my shoulders, his heartbeat steady under my ear. That will have to be enough.