Chapter 17
Wyatt was under the truck when something hit him.
Not a revelation. Not a lightning bolt. Just a fact, quiet and uninvited, landing while he was lying on his back in the gravel with a socket wrench in his hand and the exhaust manifold six inches from his face.
He was in love with Meghan Asher. Had been for a while. Probably longer than he wanted to count.
He tightened the gasket bolt and stared at the underside of the truck. A spider had built a web between the frame rail and the heat shield. It was a good web. Organized. The spider clearly had its life together.
Wyatt did not.
He slid out from under the truck and sat up in the gravel, wiping his hands on the rag from his back pocket. The afternoon sun was brutal. His shirt was soaked through, and the wrench had left a grease mark on his forearm that he’d probably still be scrubbing at tomorrow.
Junebug watched from the fence, ears forward, head cocked, one eye fixed on Wyatt like he was waiting for an explanation.
“Don’t start,” Wyatt told him.
Junebug blinked.
Wyatt stood, tossed the wrench into the toolbox, and leaned against the truck.
The gasket was fixed. Six months of meaning to do it, and it had taken forty minutes.
He could have done it any Saturday since November.
He just hadn’t, because the rattle in the exhaust had been Pop’s rattle, and fixing it meant one more piece of the old man was gone.
He’d fixed it today because Meghan had ridden in the truck yesterday.
Her car had been in the shop, and he’d driven her to the staging area. The rattle had been loud enough that she’d looked at the dashboard with concern. He’d said it was nothing. She hadn’t argued, but her eyebrows had done a thing that suggested she didn’t believe him.
So he’d fixed it. For her. Because she’d been in his truck, and he wanted his truck to be the kind of vehicle a person could ride in without wondering if the engine was about to fall out.
That was the problem. She was in everything now.
Not just the truck. The kitchen, where he’d started wondering if the linoleum really was as bad as it looked.
The barn, where he’d caught himself thinking about whether the fluorescent lights bothered her eyes the way they bothered his.
The staging area, where the tailgate of his truck had become her office and her coffee cup sat on the wheel well like it belonged there.
For six years, Meghan had existed at a safe distance. Across the salon, in Brynn’s mirror. A voice he listened to while pretending to read a magazine. She was beautiful and easy and out of reach, and the out-of-reach part had been the whole point.
He could have a thing for a woman he never talked to. That was harmless. That was a crush, and crushes were manageable because they didn’t require anything.
This required something. He just wasn’t sure what.
Wyatt walked to the porch and sat in one of the two chairs.
The afternoon heat settled over the property like a blanket nobody had asked for.
The bay mare stood in the shade of the barn.
Junebug had given up watching him and rested his head over the fence, eyes half-closed.
The mountains behind the pasture were hazy with humidity, and the sky had the white, flat look of a day that wouldn’t rain but wanted credit for thinking about it.
He’d been here before.
Not here exactly. But in the territory. The place where caring about someone shifted from background noise to something that filled your mind and refused to go away.
Her name was Caroline. She was a vet tech he’d dated for almost two years in his late twenties.
She worked at a large-animal practice in Maryville and came out to the farms on the same circuit he drove.
They’d met over a horse with an abscess—she was draining it, he was trimming the foot, and they spent forty minutes bent over the same hoof, talking about everything except the hoof.
She was smart, funny, and direct in a way he appreciated because it meant he never had to guess. They’d been good together. Easy. The kind of relationship where nobody fought because there was nothing to fight about.
That had been the problem, though he hadn’t seen it at the time. Caroline wanted Nashville. She’d been offered a position at a specialty clinic, and for weeks she talked about the opportunities, the cases she’d see, the city she had always wanted to live in.
She never asked Wyatt to come. She just talked about it and waited for him to volunteer. He hadn’t. Not because he didn’t care about her. He did. But the farm was here. The practice was here. Pop was still alive, and leaving felt like something Wyatt wasn’t built to do.
Caroline hadn’t pushed. She packed. And on her last night, sitting on this same porch, she said something he’d never forgotten.
“You’re the best man I’ve ever dated, Wyatt. But I don’t think I’m the reason you get up in the morning.”
She’d said it without anger. Without much hurt, even. Just an observation, delivered by a woman who was good at diagnosis.
He’d started to argue, and she’d put her hand on his arm and shaken her head. “It’s okay. I’d rather know now than pretend for another two years.”
She drove to Nashville the next morning. They texted for a while. Then they stopped. No hard feelings. Just two people who had drifted close enough to see the gap.
The gap had been real. Caroline had been right. She wasn’t the reason he got up in the morning. The horses were. The farm was. Pop was.And Caroline had deserved to be someone’s reason, not someone’s company.
Wyatt sat on the porch and watched heat shimmer over the pasture.
He thought about Meghan in the gold light behind the church. The scar she’d noticed. The six inches neither of them had closed. The morning after, when she’d sat beside him on the fence and something in her shoulders had loosened, like she had been bracing for a version of him that never showed up.
He wanted to be with her. That part was simple. The complicated part was why.
Because he had wanted to be with Caroline too. And Caroline had looked at him and seen a steady man. A dependable man. A present man. All the things people said about Wyatt like they were compliments.
But she had understood, before he did, that steady wasn’t the same as chosen.
He hadn’t chosen Caroline. He had just never had a reason to leave.
He didn’t want to be that for Meghan. He’d watched her hold people at a distance for years. The way she held her mug when the conversation got too close. The way she stood in the parking lot six inches away and didn’t move in either direction.
Something had taught her to keep that space. He didn’t know what. He just knew it was there.
What if that was all this was? What if he was the man who didn’t push, and that was enough for a woman who was tired of being pushed? What if she was choosing the absence of something bad instead of the presence of something real?
He would rather be alone than be someone’s safe harbor. He would rather sit on this porch by himself for the next thirty years than be the man Meghan Asher settled for because he didn’t scare her.
He wanted to be the reason, not the steadiness.
Not the coffee on the fence rail or the walk to the car or the silence that didn’t need filling.
He wanted her to want him—the man under all those useful qualities.
The man who lay under trucks and talked to horses and still reached for the phone to call a dead man.
Junebug lifted his head from the fence and looked at the house. Wyatt looked back at him.
“I know,” he said.
The horse went back to dozing.
Wyatt sat on the porch until the sun dropped behind the ridge and the shadows stretched across the pasture and the air finally cooled enough to breathe. Then he went inside, washed the grease off his hands, and stood at the kitchen window.
The linoleum looked terrible. It had always looked terrible. He just hadn’t cared before. He cared now. He cared because Meghan had stood on this floor and drunk coffee from Pop’s mug and looked out this window at the horses, and the floor she stood on should be better than cracked green vinyl.
He wasn’t going to replace it for her. That would be the wrong reason, and he had learned from Caroline what happened when you built a life around the wrong reason.
He was going to replace it for himself. The old floor was done.
Keeping it hadn’t kept Pop. And wanting something better didn’t mean missing him less.
Wyatt pulled out his phone and searched for flooring. He got as far as the first page of results before closing the browser and setting the phone on the counter.
One thing at a time.