Chapter 19
Wyatt hadn’t asked her to come. He hadn’t not asked her either.
They’d been at the staging area that morning, going over the final rider schedule, and she’d mentioned she didn’t have plans tonight. He’d mentioned he was going to grill. Neither of them had asked, Do you want to come over?
Somehow, at six o’clock, her car was in his driveway and she was holding peaches.
“These looked good,” she said, handing him the bag. “I don’t know what you do with peaches, but they were right there.”
“Pop used to grill them,” Wyatt said. “Cut them in half, put them face down on the grate. They caramelize.”
“That sounds like something I’d eat an embarrassing amount of.”
He took the bag inside, and she followed him through the screen door into the kitchen.
Wyatt waited for the thing that usually happened.
The pause, the scan of the linoleum, the careful not-commenting people did when they walked into a room that clearly belonged to another decade.
Meghan had done it the first time she came here.
The polite silence. The quick redirect to the window.
She didn’t do it this time. She walked to the counter, set her keys next to the coffeepot, and leaned against the edge like she’d done it before.
Because she had. Twice now. Maybe three times, if he counted the morning she’d come early to help with the chestnut and he’d made her coffee before they drove to the staging area.
Her keys on his counter. Next to Pop’s coffeepot. The image settled in his heart and stayed there.
“What are we having?” she asked.
“Chicken. Nothing fancy.”
“Can I help?”
“You can shuck the corn.”
He handed her four ears from the bag on the table.
She took them to the porch without being told—just picked them up, pushed the screen door open with her hip, and went outside.
He heard the creak of the chair as she sat down.
Then the rustle of the husks. Then nothing, because those were the only sounds the evening required.
Wyatt seasoned the chicken at the counter.
Salt, pepper, and the garlic rub Pop had made from a recipe he’d never written down.
Wyatt had watched him make it enough times to get close, but it was never exact.
Something was always slightly off—too much garlic, not enough salt, some proportion that had lived in Pop’s hands and hadn’t transferred to his.
He’d stopped trying to match it. His version was his version. Close enough.
He carried the plate outside. Meghan had finished the corn and stacked the husks in a neat pile on the porch railing. She was sitting in the chair on the right, feet pulled up, chin resting on her knees, watching the pasture.
Junebug was at the fence. He’d been there since Meghan’s car pulled in, head over the top rail, ears tracking her movements the way they tracked everything that interested him.
The bay mare stood in the barn doorway, half in and half out, watching the house with the cautious curiosity of a horse who hadn’t decided yet whether company was a good thing.
“She’s staring at me,” Meghan said.
“She’s deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“Whether you belong here.”
He said it about the horse. He meant it about the horse. But the sentence landed on the porch between them and turned into something else, and Wyatt busied himself with the grill before either of them had to answer it.
The grill was on the far end of the porch—a charcoal one, not gas, because Pop hadn’t liked gas grills and Wyatt had inherited that opinion along with everything else. He laid the chicken on the grate and listened to the sizzle, watched the smoke curl into the evening air.
The sun was behind the ridge, but the sky was still light, that long blue hour between day and dark when the mountains turned to silhouettes.
Meghan was quiet behind him. Sitting on his porch in his chair, watching his horses, breathing the same air as the charcoal and the corn husks and the garlic rub that wasn’t quite Pop’s recipe.
She fit here. That was the thing Wyatt kept thinking. She fit. She’d just sat down and pulled her feet up and watched the pasture, and the space around her had rearranged itself to accommodate her.
He hadn’t known the space was empty. That was what surprised him.
He’d lived in this house for three years, on this porch for two of those, and it had always felt complete.
The two chairs. The view. The horses at the fence.
He’d sit out here in the evenings after a long day and feel like a man who had what he needed and didn’t want more.
Meghan wasn’t more. She was different.
He flipped the chicken. Added the corn, still in the husks, along the edge of the grate where the heat was lower. Cut the peaches in half and laid them face down the way Pop used to, listening for the quiet hiss as the sugar hit the iron.
“It smells incredible out here,” Meghan said.
“That’s mostly the charcoal.”
“It is not mostly the charcoal.”
He smiled, but he kept his back to her so she wouldn’t see it.
He could feel her watching him, and for once, he didn’t mind.
He’d spent six years avoiding her gaze from across a salon, and now she was on his porch, looking at the back of his head—the hair she’d cut, the damage she’d fixed—and he wanted her to look as long as she wanted.
The chicken was done in twenty minutes. He pulled everything off the grill and carried it to the small table between the two chairs.
Meghan had gone inside at some point and come back with plates and napkins. She’d found them without asking. That meant she’d opened the cabinet above the sink—Pop’s cabinet, Pop’s plates—and pulled them down and carried them outside, and the world had continued turning.
They ate on the porch. The chicken was good. The corn was sweet. The peaches were the best part—soft and warm and caramelized at the edges, sweet enough that Meghan closed her eyes on the first bite and didn’t open them for a second.
“Pop’s trick,” Wyatt said. “He did this at every cookout. People would skip the meat and go straight for the peaches.”
“Smart people.”
“He thought so.”
The dark came slowly. The sky turned from blue to purple to something deeper, and the crickets started—one at first, then all of them at once, the way they did in July when the heat finally broke enough for night to take over.
Stars came out in patches, filling the gaps between the clouds. Junebug stood at the fence, a dark shape against the darker pasture, unbothered, ancient, permanent.
Meghan’s plate was empty on the table. Her feet were back up in the chair, her arms wrapped around her knees. The porch light was off—Wyatt had left it off because the stars were better without it—and her face was lit only by the glow of the charcoal cooling in the grill.
“I forget this is here,” she said. “Five minutes from town, and it’s a different world.”
“Pop picked the spot for that reason. He said he wanted to live close enough to town that he could get coffee and far enough away that he couldn’t hear anybody else’s opinions.”
Meghan laughed. Short, quiet, real. The sound carried across the porch and into the pasture, where the crickets kept going and Junebug kept standing and the bay mare had finally settled enough to lie down in the barn doorway.
“I like it here,” Meghan said.
“I’m glad,” Wyatt said.
They sat there until the sky went fully dark and the stars were the only light left.
Neither of them mentioned leaving. Meghan’s keys were still on the counter next to the coffeepot.
Her plate was on the table. Her chair was close enough to his that if he reached out, his hand would find hers without looking.
He didn’t reach out. Not yet. He just sat there in the dark with the crickets and the horses and the woman who fit in a space he hadn’t known was empty, and let the evening be what it was.
Enough.
For now, it was enough.