2. I Stepped Aside
Chapter two
I Stepped Aside
Beck
Igo back to my truck and sit around for ten minutes. I let my hands shake against the steering wheel because nobody is watching and I have earned this particular moment of private crisis.
She is exactly what I was afraid she would be.
I built a version of Sloane Mackenzie over a decade from the scattered materials Jamie offered: "Sloane-y doesn't back down from anything" and "she fixed the irrigation system herself, can you believe that" and one photo on his phone of her mid-laugh, arguing about something, sun in her hair like she'd personally negotiated with it to land there.
I had a whole architecture of her in my head, assembled from secondhand information and one college party and ten years of wondering.
The real Sloane has replaced the laugh with a jaw that could cut geological formations, and she threatened me with agricultural equipment before she'd been speaking to me for five minutes, and my brain has apparently catalogued the specific scent of apple and cold morning air and something underneath that is probably just shampoo as "important" and filed it somewhere I cannot retrieve it from without causing myself significant emotional distress.
I am, objectively, so far gone it is embarrassing.
I call Marin because Marin is the only person who will tell me the truth without excessive sympathy, which is what I need right now, and her number rings twice before she picks up.
"You saw her," she says, instead of hello. My sister has always operated at a frequency slightly ahead of the conversation.
"She threatened to bury me," I confirm. "Specifically mentioned that she knows where the soft ground is."
"So it went really well."
"Marin, she looked at that partnership agreement like it was evidence in a criminal proceeding and I was the defendant."
"How does she look?" Her voice shifts, quieter and more serious, because Marin knows enough of the backstory to understand what that question actually means.
I consider the honest answer. "Like she hasn't slept properly in two years and could still absolutely take me in a fight.
Like she's been hauling the entire weight of that place on her own and decided somewhere along the way that asking for help would be the thing that actually breaks her.
" I pause. "She's magnificent and terrifying and I am in so much trouble. "
"You flew and drove and sold your apartment and quit your firm to come sleep in a barn," Marin says. "The trouble started a considerable time ago, Beck. You're just now catching up to it."
"I'm here because of the legal agreement. Because Jamie asked me to—"
"You are there because you have been down bad for this woman since the night you met her at a party in Eugene and you stepped aside because Jamie wanted her too and you decided that's what decent people do.
" She says this with the calm, non-judgmental precision of someone who has spent years listening to people explain their own behavior to themselves.
"Being here is the right thing for extremely complicated reasons and you know it. Just don't make it weird."
"She already thinks it's weird."
"Then your baseline is established. Only room to improve." She hangs up with the efficiency of someone with a full client schedule, and I sit with the dial tone for a moment before I start the truck.
The orchard stretches out through the windshield in the October light, three hundred trees heavy with fruit that nobody is going to be able to harvest alone, regardless of how furiously Sloane Mackenzie moves those crates. The math is not complicated. The situation is.
She leads me to the farmhouse around noon, walking three steps ahead the entire way with the energy of someone who deeply regrets every decision that has led to this moment.
The building is extraordinary in the way that things that have been genuinely loved tend to be: Victorian bones, wraparound porch listing slightly to the left, a roofline I would have spent three consultations arguing for in my old professional life.
The kind of structure that wants climbing roses on the south wall and a proper kitchen garden in the western corner and someone who thinks about it the way it deserves to be thought about.
Inside, the farmhouse is clean and exhausted.
The kitchen hasn't seen an update since roughly the early 90's, which gives it a specific charm and a specific sadness simultaneously.
Jamie's presence is everywhere and nowhere, curated down to the details Sloane can live with: his coat on the chair back, his boots by the door, but the personal landmarks edited out of the common spaces with the care of someone who has made deliberate choices about what she can afford to see every day.
"Upstairs is mine," she announces, not looking at me. "The barn loft has a bed, a bathroom, and a space heater with strong opinions about when it wants to function. That's your situation."
"That sounds completely workable, thank you—"
"Rules," she says, and holds up a hand with the authority of someone who has been running this operation solo long enough to stop apologizing for it.
"The farmhouse kitchen is shared for meals and nothing else.
No lingering. No dropping in to chat. No whatever it is people from California do when they think they're building rapport. "
"I'm from Oregon."
She levels me with a look that communicates, with remarkable efficiency, that this distinction does not register as meaningful.
"Rules two and three. The orchard is the job.
We are professional partners and nothing warmer than that.
And if you go through Jamie's things, his office, his closet, any of it, we are done immediately. "
She says this last part with a flatness that tells me the things in Jamie's office are things she has not yet looked at herself, and that she's terrified of what I might find if I look first. I file this information away, not because I plan to do anything with it, but because reading the hidden architecture of a space is a reflex I cannot turn off.
It's like asking someone to stop noticing which way the light falls.
"Understood on all points," I say.
She nods once, with the brisk satisfaction of someone who has closed a negotiation, and leads me back outside to the barn.
The loft is small and drafty and smells like old timber and hay, which I find genuinely comforting in a way that surprises me.
The mattress is decent. The shower, upon immediate investigation, produces water that oscillates between ice-cold and marginally-less-ice-cold, which will be character-building in a season that doesn't require additional character.
The window faces the orchard rows directly, which means I will spend every morning watching the trees and thinking about everything I cannot have, which feels thematically appropriate.
I unpack what I brought, which is not much because I made deliberate choices about what deserved to come with me into this next phase.
Work clothes, boots, a carving knife and a block of cherry wood I've been carrying around for three months without knowing what it wants to become.
A folder of Jamie's letters. One photograph, small, slightly creased at the corner, which I place face-down in the nightstand drawer without looking at it directly.
The photograph is from the night I met her.
I was not supposed to be at that party. My roommate dragged me, claiming it would be "good for my social ecosystem," which was his way of saying I'd been in the studio for six days straight working on a landscape proposal and he was concerned.
Across the living room of a Eugene rental house, a girl was in the middle of a passionate argument about whether a particular Christmas film qualified as a Christmas film, and she was so clearly correct and so clearly uninterested in the fact that nobody was agreeing with her that I walked over before I'd consciously decided to.
"Finally," she said, when I introduced myself. "Someone who looks like they'd rather be literally anywhere else too."
I laughed. She laughed. For forty-five minutes we talked about film classification systems and agricultural economics, and something in my chest did a structural realignment of the kind you spend the rest of your life building around.
Then Jamie arrived, loud and bright and genuinely impossible not to look at, and he saw her across the room and I watched his whole face change, and I knew.
I knew the way you know when someone else spots the thing you were reaching for first, and you have to make a decision in real time about what kind of person you're going to be.
I stepped aside.
I have been stepping aside, in various configurations, for ten years.
I pick up the cherry wood and the knife because my hands need something to do when my brain is running this particular loop, and the knife moves the way it always moves when I'm not thinking about it, finding the shape the wood was already carrying before I showed up.
Outside the barn window, the apple trees stand in their rows in the fading afternoon light, and somewhere in the farmhouse I can hear the radio playing something with steel guitar in it, and a sound that might be a cabinet closing or might be something else entirely.
Here is the honest accounting, Calloway, because you are alone in a barn loft with nobody to perform reasonableness for: you are in love with your dead best friend's wife, and you have been for so long that the feeling has stopped feeling like an emergency and started feeling like weather.
Permanent. Ambient. Something you work around.
You told yourself you came for the orchard.
The orchard is genuinely in trouble and the partnership is genuinely legal and you do genuinely have the skills to help.
All of that is true. But the reason you sold the apartment instead of subletting it, the reason you said goodbye to the firm instead of taking a leave of absence, the reason you came with your entire professional life in a single duffel bag, is standing three hundred feet away from you making decisions about soup and choosing not to cry.
She is never going to forgive you when she finds out you knew her before she knew you.
That you watched her meet Jamie and loved her anyway, secretly, at a respectable distance, like a person doing the right thing for the worst possible mix of reasons.
She will think it was motive. She will think every kindness was calculation.
She will look at you with those brown eyes that are warmer than she clearly intends them to be, and she will decide you are one more man who wanted something from her life without telling her what it was.
So here is the actual plan: work the harvest. Save the orchard.
Earn every percentage point of that partnership through labor and competence and absolutely nothing else.
Do not notice how she ties her hair back in a braid that starts neat and gives up around hour two.
Do not notice the way she talks to the trees sometimes, under her breath, like they owe her a conversation.
Do not, under any circumstances, carve anything that reveals what is happening in your interior emotional situation.
I look down at the cherry wood in my hands.
I have carved an apple blossom. Five petals, a spray of stamens in the center, the particular curve of the Honeycrisp variety that I recognize from the trees I walked past this morning, because apparently my hands have opinions that my brain has not approved.
I put it in the drawer with the photograph and lie on the mattress and stare at the hand-hewn beams above me, which have been holding this roof up for a hundred years and will presumably continue to do so regardless of my personal turmoil.
There is something steadying about that. Old things that hold.
Through the barn wall, the radio plays on, and the light goes, and Willowbrook gets quiet in the way that small towns do, like the whole place exhales at once.
My last coherent thought before I fall into sleep is that tomorrow I have to face her over breakfast in a shared kitchen with a rule against lingering, and I have to do it like a professional, and I have to do it without letting a single thing I actually feel show on my face.
I have been practicing that particular skill for ten years.
I am, regrettably, still not very good at it.