Chapter 20
Wyatt asked her on a Wednesday.
They were at the staging area, sitting on the tailgate after the morning session.
The chestnut had walked the full parade route for the first time—all the way down Main Street, past the square, to the intersection and back.
She’d spooked once, at a flag that snapped in the wind near the pharmacy, but she’d recovered on her own.
Curtis had nearly cried. Wyatt had nodded, said good girl, and moved on to checking the Percheron’s shoes.
That had been that.
Now the horses were loaded, the deputies were gone, and the lot was empty except for two trucks and Meghan’s car. The morning was already hot. The Fourth was six days away, and the town was strung with so much red, white, and blue bunting that Main Street looked gift-wrapped.
“You going to watch the fireworks?” Wyatt asked.
He said it casually, eyes on the parking lot, coffee cup balanced on his knee. Like he was asking about the weather.
“I usually do,” Meghan said. “Elissa and I found a spot on the hill last year. You can see the whole show from up there.”
“I meant with me.”
Meghan looked at him. He was still watching the parking lot, but his jaw had tightened just slightly—the way it did when he was saying something that cost him more than he wanted it to.
“Not as a committee thing,” he said. “Just—with me.”
She knew what he was asking. She’d known before he clarified. Maybe before he’d even said it.
The evening on the porch. The parking lot behind the church.
The mornings at the fence with coffee. They’d been building toward this for weeks, each day adding another small thing to the pile—a conversation, a silence, a brush of hands on a coffee cup—until the pile was tall enough that one of them had to name it.
She should have said yes. The word was right there. The man sitting beside her had earned it a dozen times over. He had been patient and present and steady. He hadn’t pushed once, and she wanted to watch the fireworks with him.
She wanted it so clearly it almost hurt. But the word stuck. It stuck because the last time she’d said yes to something like this—the last time she had stepped into a space a man held open—the space had closed without warning, and she’d spent eight years trying to understand why.
Wyatt noticed. She saw it register. A shift in his posture, a slight pulling back that wasn’t physical so much as atmospheric. He was giving her room. Making space for whatever was happening in her silence without crowding it.
“You don’t have to answer now,” he said.
“It’s not that.”
“Okay.”
He waited. The parking lot was quiet. A bird fussed in the tree behind the church.
The sun climbed higher, shrinking the shadow from the truck, and Meghan sat on the tailgate beside a man who’d just asked her on a date and was now waiting without a trace of pressure for her to figure out why she couldn’t say the one word she wanted to say.
“When I was twenty, I thought I was in love,” she said. “Three months. Then he was gone. No fight. No conversation. He just stopped calling. I tried twice, and he didn’t answer. That was it.”
She picked at the edge of the tailgate. The metal was warm from the sun.
“I never found out what I did wrong. Eight years later, I still don’t know. And every guy since has either pushed too fast or done the same thing. Just disappeared. After a while, I stopped trying.”
She hadn’t planned to say any of that. The words came out anyway, like she’d been holding them for too long and her grip finally slipped. She stared at the gravel between her feet and felt the confession sit there in the open air, exposed and strange and too late to take back.
Wyatt was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Meghan wondered if she’d said too much. If this was the part where he pulled back for real. Where the steady, patient man beside her finally reached the edge of what he was willing to take on.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
Five simple words. He wasn’t trying to convince her. Wasn’t analyzing or explaining or offering a theory about the kind of man who walked away without a reason. He was just stating something he believed to be true and letting it stand on its own.
Meghan looked at him. He was looking back at her now, those steady eyes on her face, and in them she saw something she hadn’t seen in a long time.
Certainty. The kind that came from a man who had spent his whole life learning to read what was in front of him and trust what he saw.
He saw her. And what he saw didn’t make him leave.
“I’m not going anywhere, Meghan.”
She believed him. That was the part that scared her.
Not the believing itself. She’d believed men before and been wrong and survived the wrongness.
What scared her was how fast the belief arrived.
How completely it settled in her, like it had been waiting for a place to land and had finally found one.
She’d spent eight years building a wall out of unanswered questions and empty voicemails, and Wyatt had just walked through it with five words. The wall didn’t even have the decency to put up a fight.
She looked at the gravel. The parking lot. The church steeple rising white against the blue July sky.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“The fireworks,” she said. “With you. Yes.”
He didn’t smile exactly, but something in his face changed—a softening around his eyes, a release of tension.
He’d been nervous. This man who stood beside thousand-pound horses and worked with tools that could break his hand, who hadn’t flinched once in all the weeks she’d known him, had been nervous asking her to watch fireworks.
“Good,” he said.
“Good.”
They sat on the tailgate for a while longer. The morning moved around them—a truck on the road, a door opening and closing somewhere on Main Street, the distant sound of someone testing the PA system for the parade announcements.
Normal sounds. A normal Wednesday in a town getting ready for a holiday.
Meghan finished her coffee and set the cup on the truck bed behind her. Her hands were free. For once, she didn’t reach for something to hold onto.
“I should get to the salon,” she said.
“I’ve got a call in Townsend this afternoon. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be here.”
She slid off the tailgate and walked to her car. Opened the door. Then she turned back. Wyatt was still sitting on the tailgate, one boot on the bumper, watching her the way patiently. Like he had all the time in the world and planned to use it.
She lifted a hand. He lifted his back.
Meghan drove to the salon with the windows down and her left hand resting on the doorframe, warm air pushing against her fingers. The town was bright with bunting and banners and the particular energy of a place six days from its biggest event of the year.
Six days. Fireworks with Wyatt. She’d said yes.
She’d told him about the boy—not all of it, not the part about Brynn—but enough.
She’d cracked the door she’d kept locked for eight years, and the man on the other side hadn’t pushed through it.
He’d just stood there and told her she hadn’t done anything wrong. And she’d believed him.
She pulled into the salon parking spot and sat in the car for a minute. Through the glass front of The Cutting Room, she could see Brynn at her station, setting up for the day. The cat was in the window between the two chairs, asleep in the sun.
Meghan got out of the car and went inside.