Chapter 10
The linoleum stayed with her.
Not the horses. Not the barn. Not even the moment at the fence when Junebug had leaned into her hand like she was someone he’d been waiting for.
All of that was good. Better than good. Warm in a way Meghan hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure she’d earned.
But it was the kitchen floor that followed her home.
Pale green. Cracked near the sink. Curling at the edges where it met the baseboard.
A floor that hadn’t been replaced in decades, in a kitchen where the cabinets didn’t close right and the coffeepot sat in the exact spot where Wyatt’s grandfather had kept it.
Wyatt had stood at that counter and poured her coffee like it was nothing. Like the kitchen wasn’t a museum. Like the mugs were just mugs and the window was just a window and the linoleum was just a floor he would replace when he got around to it.
But the porch was new. That was the part that turned over in her mind as she drove home through the valley, the mountains going soft and blue in the late-afternoon light.
He’d rebuilt the porch. Fresh boards. Clean railing.
Two chairs from the hardware store. He’d put his hands on the outside of that house and made it his.
But the kitchen—the room where his grandfather had started every morning, coffee in hand, watching the horses—he couldn’t touch.
Meghan understood that. That was the problem. She understood it in a way she didn’t want to, because understanding it meant recognizing just how familiar it was.
She had her own version of the linoleum.
Not a floor. Not a physical thing she could point to and say this is the part I can’t fix.
Hers was internal. A pattern she’d only recently started to see, and only because Wyatt had accidentally held up a mirror by being nothing like the men who had come before him.
The boy.
She didn’t think his name anymore. Hadn’t in years. He was just the boy, the way you’d refer to a storm that had come through. Not by date or name. Just by the damage it left behind.
She’d been twenty. He’d been twenty-one.
For three months, she’d been the center of his attention.
Calls. Plans. The feeling of being chosen by someone who seemed to have options.
He was charming. Funny. The kind of person who looked at you while you talked like what you were saying was the most important thing in the room.
Then he’d pushed.
Not dramatically. Not in a way she could have pointed to and called wrong at first. He’d just moved the line. A little at a time, a little farther each week, until the distance between where she stood and where he wanted her to be felt like a gap she was supposed to close.
She hadn’t closed it. She’d held the line, and he’d left. No fight. No conversation. No explanation. He just stopped calling. Stopped showing up.
She tried twice. Two calls that went to voicemail. Then she stopped too, because chasing someone who had walked away without telling you why was its own kind of damage.
She spent three months after that trying to figure out what she had done wrong. The answer, eventually, was nothing. But nothing wasn’t satisfying. Nothing left a hole where a reason should have been, and the hole never quite filled in.
Then there he was, in a booth at the diner with Brynn, his arm around her shoulders. Brynn laughing.
Meghan pulled into her driveway, turned off the engine, and sat there.
After the boy, there had been others. Not many.
A man she’d met at a wedding in Knoxville who texted constantly for two weeks and then vanished.
A guy from Maryville who’d asked her out three times, then showed up to the third date with plans she hadn’t agreed to.
A setup through one of Elissa’s friends that lasted one coffee and ended with him suggesting they go back to his place, and Meghan suggesting they not.
Each one confirmed something she hadn’t wanted to believe. Men either pushed or disappeared. There was nothing in between.
Wyatt stood in between. That was the thing she kept circling back to, and it unsettled her more than the pushing or the disappearing ever had.
Those she knew how to handle. Those had rules.
A man who pushed got a line. A man who disappeared got forgotten.
But a man who just stood there—patient, steady, present without pressing—that she had no script for.
He’d handed her a cup of coffee and their fingers had touched on the handle, and he hadn’t made a thing of it.
Hadn’t lingered, hadn’t pulled back so quickly that the not-lingering became its own kind of statement.
He’d just let the contact happen and moved on, like two people’s hands brushing was something that could occur in the course of an ordinary day.
She’d grabbed the mug too quickly. She knew he’d seen it. He hadn’t mentioned it. Hadn’t smiled at it or filed it away for later. He’d just turned to the window and talked about the bay mare.
That was what stayed with her. The quiet permission in it. Nothing demanded, nothing withdrawn. Just room.
The kitchen had felt like that too. The linoleum his grandfather had walked on every morning. The mugs in the same cabinet. The coffeepot in the same spot. Wyatt knowing where everything was because he hadn’t moved any of it.
But he wasn’t sad. That was what Meghan kept coming back to. He hadn’t seemed sad in that kitchen. Just unfinished. The porch was done and the kitchen wasn’t, and he was living in the gap between the two without rushing to close it.
She recognized the gap. She’d been standing in her own version of it for eight years—the space between what happened with the boy and whatever was supposed to come after. She’d rebuilt the outside. The salon. The career. The life that looked complete from the street.
But the interior—the part where she let someone in, the part where she trusted that a man who showed up today would still be there tomorrow—that was the linoleum. Cracked, curling at the edges, and completely untouched.
Meghan got out of the car and walked up the porch steps. Her house was small and neat and exactly what she needed, and she’d never once brought a man inside it. Not because she’d made a rule about it. Because she didn’t let anyone get close enough.
She unlocked the door, dropped her bag on the chair by the entry, and stood in her own kitchen.
Decent floors. Cabinets that closed. A coffeepot she had bought herself.
A window that looked out at the neighbor’s fence and a maple tree.
No pasture, no mountains, no twenty-two-year-old horse watching the road like he’d been put in charge of it.
She filled the kettle and set it on the stove, then leaned against the counter while she waited. The house was quiet. The street outside was quiet. She could hear the kettle beginning to heat, the small ticking sound of metal expanding.
Wyatt had said you’re welcome to stay like it meant nothing. She had said I could use some coffee like it meant the same. Both of them careful. Both of them standing exactly at the edge of something without stepping over.
He didn’t push. He didn’t disappear.
Meghan wrapped her arms around herself and looked down at the clean, uncracked floor beneath her feet. She didn’t know what came after that. But for the first time in a long time, she wondered if something could.