Chapter 33
Wyatt noticed it before she said a word.
Meghan pulled into the farm on Saturday morning with two cups of coffee and a bag full of baked goods.
She got out of the car and walked to the porch where he was sitting, and something about the way she moved was different.
A looseness in her shoulders that hadn’t been there the day before.
A half inch of tension gone from the way she carried her head.
She sat in the chair beside him—her chair now, the one on the left, the one she’d claimed the night of the grilled peaches without either of them discussing it—and handed him a coffee. “Blueberry,” she said, nodding at the bag.
“Sierra’s?”
“She had them in the window when I drove past. I didn’t stand a chance.”
They ate on the porch.
Junebug came to the fence and watched them. The bay mare stood in the barn doorway, less suspicious of visitors than she used to be. The morning was already warm, but the porch was in shade, and the air smelled like honeysuckle and coffee and whatever sugar Sierra had put on top of the muffins.
Meghan was halfway through her second one when she said, “I talked to Brynn.”
No buildup. No preamble. Just the sentence, set down between them.
“Last night,” she said. “After the fireworks. I went back to the salon, and she came in.”
Wyatt drank his coffee. He didn’t ask what they’d talked about. Didn’t ask how it had gone, or whether the thing that had been weighing on her for two weeks was lighter now. He just sat in his chair and waited, because that was what he did, and Meghan knew it.
“I can’t give you the details,” she said. “It’s hers to tell. But we talked, and it was real, and something I didn’t understand before is starting to make sense.”
She looked at the pasture. Junebug had given up on muffins and was grazing near the fence, his old gray head low in the grass. The mountains beyond the property were blue-green in the morning light, the ridgeline sharp against a sky that hadn’t decided what it was doing yet.
“I was wrong about some things,” Meghan said. “About why we stopped being friends. About what happened. I didn’t have the whole picture, and I didn’t try to get it. I just decided I knew, and I held onto that for eight years.”
She picked at the edge of her muffin wrapper. A small thing. Her hands looking for something to do. But the rest of her was still.
The heaviness was gone. Not all of it—he could tell there were things she was still carrying, pieces she hadn’t sorted yet, conversations that hadn’t happened. But the worst of it—the thing that had weighed on her since that Friday night on the sidewalk—had changed.
He knew the feeling. The morning after Pop died, Wyatt had woken up, and the grief had been the first thing in the room. Before his feet hit the floor, before his eyes were fully open, it was there—heavy and total and taking up all the air.
It stayed that way for months. The same weight. The same fullness. The same feeling of walking through a house that was too quiet, past tools on the wall nobody was coming back to use.
He didn’t remember the first morning it changed. That was the thing about grief lifting. It didn’t announce itself. There was no moment where the weight rolled off and you sat up thinking it’s better now.
There was only one morning, sometime in the second year, when Wyatt woke up and thought about coffee before he thought about Pop.
Then he thought about Pop, and the grief was still there, but it was sitting in the corner instead of on his chest. Present, but not first. Part of the room instead of the whole room.
That was what he saw in Meghan this morning.
Not the absence of the weight. Just the relocation of it.
The thing she’d been carrying had moved from her chest to the corner, and she could breathe around it now.
The breathing had changed the way she sat in the chair, the way she held her coffee, the way she looked at the mountains.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“It’s not fixed.”
“No.”
“We’re not—” She stopped, searching for the right words. “It’s not like before. I don’t know if it can be. But we talked, and she didn’t walk away, and I didn’t either.”
“That sounds like a start.”
“It is.” She looked at him. “It’s the first real conversation we’ve had in eight years. About the thing that actually matters. Not clients or schedules or who’s closing up. The real thing.”
Wyatt nodded. He set his coffee on the porch railing and leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked the way it always did—the sound of a porch he’d built in a hurry with cheap screws and good lumber, the porch Pop had seen finished from a wheelchair on a warm afternoon three springs ago.
“You look different,” he said.
Meghan glanced at him. “Different how?”
He considered it. Lighter wasn’t quite right. Better wasn’t his to judge.
“Like you slept,” he said.
She almost laughed. The sound caught in her throat and came out as a breath, a short exhale through her nose, and her mouth curved.
“I did,” she said. “First full night in two weeks.”
“Then whatever happened last night was the right thing.”
“It was.” She nodded. “I should have done it years ago.”
“You did it now.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were clear. Not happy, exactly. The word was too simple for what was behind them. But clear. The cloudiness that had been there since the sidewalk, the fog of carrying something she couldn’t see through, was gone.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not asking. All those mornings when I sat on your tailgate staring at nothing. You never asked.”
“You told me you’d tell me when you were ready.”
“And you believed me.”
“I did.”
She reached over and set her hand on his forearm. The same gesture she’d made at the staging area—her palm flat against his skin, her fingers resting near the inside of his wrist. This time, she didn’t pull away after a second. She left it there.
“I’m ready now,” she said. “Not for all of it. But I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Whenever you want.”
“Not today.” She looked toward the pasture, where Junebug flicked his tail and tore at the grass. “Today, I want to sit on this porch and eat muffins and not think about anything heavy.”
“I can do that.”
She squeezed his arm once, then let go and picked up her coffee.
They sat in the chairs and looked at the pasture. Junebug grazed. The bay mare retreated into the barn. The morning moved forward, slow and warm.
Meghan finished her coffee, set the cup on the railing next to his, and leaned her head back against the chair. Her eyes closed. Sunlight touched the edge of her cheek, filtered through the porch rail and the old maple at the corner of the house.
Wyatt watched her. The looseness in her shoulders. The face of a woman who’d woken up this morning and thought about coffee before she thought about the thing that had been taking up all the air.
He leaned back in his own chair and closed his eyes. They sat there in the shade while the morning warmed and the horses grazed. The porch held them both.
It had been holding him for two years—steady, patient, built in a hurry but standing just fine.