CHAPTER 10 #2
Colt looked toward his truck. It sat at the square's edge beside the feed store, doors facing the lights, windows down to the cooling night. He could see it from here. Junie's chair was already folded by the front bumper, because Junie had planned this before asking him.
"Door open," he said. "You stay with her."
"I said I would."
"If she wakes -"
"I'll call your name before she finishes inhaling. " Junie softened it with a look. "Go be twenty feet away, Colt. She is safe."
He hated needing the reassurance. He accepted it because Beau's eyelids were drooping and her head had grown heavy against him.
He carried his daughter to the truck. Wren did not follow. That mattered. She stayed by the dance floor, talking to Della, giving him the boundary he had asked of her days ago and maybe the one he had not known how to ask tonight.
Beau was asleep before he laid the star quilt over her. Harlow's quilt caught the dance lights in little pale points, the stitched stars soft from years of washing. Colt stood by the open door a moment longer than needed, one hand on the roof, watching his daughter's face settle into rest.
"She'll be fine," Junie said from the folding chair.
"I know."
"No, you don't. But you can act like you do for ten minutes."
He glanced at her.
Junie looked toward the dance floor. "Della is trying to make a wedding out of a town that wants a trial. Help her out."
Colt closed his hand once against the truck roof. "I am helping."
"Then dance when the bride asks, and do not look like the gallows have music."
That almost got a laugh out of him. Almost.
When he returned, the caller had stepped back, and the fiddler had taken up something slower. A few couples drifted onto the planks. Della and Ruston moved together at the center, forehead nearly touching, wedding nerves softening into something private. The town watched them kindly for once.
Wren stood alone near the edge, arms folded against the night.
Colt stopped beside her. "Beau's asleep."
"I saw. Junie has the chair angled like a guard tower."
"She'd enjoy hearing that."
"She knows."
The slow music stretched between them. Fiddle rosin carried in the air, sharp and clean under the crushed smell of oak leaves.
Colt should have stayed beside her and let the song pass.
He should have checked the time, thanked Della, taken Beau home, and left Wren with whatever truth she had almost given him twice already.
Instead he held out his hand.
Wren looked at it.
"For Della," he said.
"Is that why?"
No. It was an answer he could survive saying. "Enough of why."
She put her hand in his.
The slow dance required less remembering and somehow took more from him.
He set one hand at her back, careful, leaving space any town eye could approve of.
Wren's fingers rested on his shoulder. The first turn brought them beneath the low sweep of an oak limb, leaves flickering shadows over her face.
People were ten feet away. Twenty. Close enough to cough, gossip, witness. It should have kept the moment harmless.
Harmless did not last.
Wren looked up at him. "You are counting."
"Habit."
"No. You count when something matters."
He swallowed. "Maybe I am making sure I don't step on you."
"You never did."
The past moved up between them, wearing Sunday-night light.
He saw her at seventeen in a church hall, laughing because he had refused to dance until she dragged him into it.
He saw her at eighteen at the fence line, hair coming loose, telling him Dusthallow was not enough and waiting for him to argue right.
He saw the empty months after, the phone silent, his own letter gone into a world that never answered.
His hand tightened a fraction at her back.
Wren felt it. "Colt."
He almost asked then.
What did you find at Sudie's?
Did you read it?
What did your mother do?
What did you think I knew?
The questions lined up like cattle crowding a gate, each one ready to break something if he swung it open too fast. Wren's mouth trembled once before she pressed it still. She had the look of a woman holding glass in both hands while people bumped past her.
Colt let the question die behind his teeth.
"You looked ready to run," he said instead.
Her laugh came small. "From the dance?"
"From me."
The music kept moving. Around them, boots brushed wood. Somewhere near the truck, Junie murmured a low shelf story to a child too asleep to hear it.
Wren's gaze dropped to his shirt pocket, where Beau's sticker clung by stubborn faith. "I have run from a lot of things badly enough that I do not trust myself to name them fast."
"You planning to?"
"Name them?"
"Run."
She looked back up. "I do not know."
That answer cut deeper than a no would have. It was honest enough to be cruel and careful enough to be kind.
Colt nodded because he had asked. Because repeated action mattered more than pretty promises, and Wren had not had enough time to build either.
Because Beau slept twenty yards away under Harlow's quilt, and any hope Colt let himself have had to pass through the shape of his daughter's life before it reached his own.
"Thank you for not lying," he said.
Wren's eyes shone. "I am tired of lying."
The song ended, and applause gave them an excuse to step apart.
Colt released her before his hand learned too much.
Della caught his eye from Ruston's arms and mouthed thank you.
Cressie stood near the lemonade table, expression narrowed with the frustration of a woman who had wanted a scene and been given grace instead.
Colt should have felt satisfied.
All he felt was unfinished.
Wren stepped off the planks and reached for the stack of paper fans the breeze had scattered from the end of the table. Work, always. Give her a task and she could stand inside it. He recognized the dodge because he used chores the same way.
"Leave those," he said.
"They will blow into the street."
"Then Dusthallow will survive paper in the street."
"You say that now."
A gust lifted one fan and sent it skittering toward the feed store alley. Wren went after it. Colt followed because the alley was darker beyond the spill of dance lights and because he was done pretending his feet had other plans.