Chapter 3 #2
Grief taught me. Cruelly, thoroughly, with no patience for how slowly I learned.
I'd had to call the bank myself, argue our mortgage into a manageable shape myself, sit across from a funeral director myself and make decisions no twenty-nine-year-old should have to make alone, and somewhere in the middle of doing all of it with shaking hands and a voice that cracked more often than it held, I'd discovered I could actually do it.
Not gracefully. Not without crying in my car afterward more times than I could count.
But I could do it, and each time I did it, some new load-bearing wall went up inside me that hadn't been there before.
I didn't know yet if that woman had room in her for a man who used to do the hard things for her.
I didn't know if I wanted her to make room, even if she could.
That was the real question sitting underneath everything else, the one I wasn't ready to say out loud to Cormac yet, standing in a kitchen that smelled like his coffee and my two years of hard-won independence in equal measure.
Warren came by at noon.
I'd known he would, and some part of me was grateful for it, because at least with Warren there was no ambiguity to navigate, no two-year backlog of complicated love to sort through.
He came in quiet, hat in his hands, and I could see on his face that he'd already heard, of course he'd already heard, the whole town had heard by breakfast.
"I'll get right to it," he said, before I could figure out how to start. "I'm not going to make you say the hard part. I heard he's back. I heard he's really back, not a rumor, not a mix-up. That true?"
"That's true," I said.
"And how are you, Josie? Not the town's version. Yours."
I could have cried right there over how gently he asked it — how, even standing in the wreckage of whatever we'd been building, the first thing Warren Doss thought to ask about was me.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "I don't have a version yet. I've had less than twenty-four hours."
Warren nodded slowly, turning his hat over in his hands.
"I'm not going to pretend I'm not disappointed," he said.
"I liked what we were building. I liked you, Josie, in a way I hadn't let myself like anybody since Carol passed, and that scared me a little, if I'm honest, and I was starting to think maybe scared was worth it. "
"Warren—"
"Let me finish, because I've been practicing this in my truck the whole drive over and I'll lose my nerve if you interrupt me.
" He smiled, small and sad and entirely without bitterness.
"Some things aren't a competition, Josie.
I'm not going to stand here and try to make a case for myself against a man who came back from the dead for you.
That's not a fight I'd win, and honestly, it's not one I even want to have.
Go be with your husband. If it doesn't work out — I'm not saying it won't, I'm saying if — you know where the feed store is.
But I don't think it's going to come to that.
I saw the way this whole town lit up talking about him this morning, even in shock.
That's not the kind of thing people fake. "
"You're a good man," I said, and my voice cracked on it, unexpected, and I had to look away and blink hard.
"I try to be." He put his hat back on, paused at the door. "For what it's worth — I hope he knows what he's got. I hope he treats it like the miracle it is."
He left before I could answer, and I stood behind my counter and cried, properly, for the first time since Cormac had knocked on my door — not grief this time, not fury, just the plain overwhelming ache of a good man being kind to me at the exact moment kindness was hardest to receive.
I thought about the three coffee dates we'd had, the easy, undemanding rhythm of them, the way Warren had never once pushed for more than I was ready to give.
I thought about how safe it had felt, and how I'd mistaken that safety for the whole of what I wanted, when really it had only ever been the shape available to me at the time — a warm room built on the ruins of a fire I thought had gone out for good.
It wasn't nothing. I wanted to be fair to it, even now, even grieving its loss in this strange sideways way.
Warren had been real. What we were building had been real.
It just hadn't been the whole truth of what I still wanted, underneath the careful, sensible surface I'd built to survive on.
Harper found me a few minutes later, took one look at my face, and didn't ask a single question.
She just came around the counter and hugged me, flour and all, and let me cry into her shoulder the way I had a hundred times over the last two years, and something about the familiarity of it — my oldest friend, my same shoulder, my same tears, just aimed at an entirely new and impossible cause — steadied me more than anything else had all day.