Chapter 4
Cormac
I have done a number of difficult things in my life.
I've lied to men with guns for a living.
I've held pressure on a brother's gunshot wound with my bare hands while telling him he was going to be fine, in a voice steady enough that he believed me.
I've sat in a locked room for two years and made myself small enough to survive it.
None of it prepared me to court my own wife like a stranger.
That's what it was, though, in those first weeks.
I didn't have the right to walk back into her house and put my toothbrush next to hers like the two years hadn't happened.
I didn't have the right to assume the ring — which I'd found, eventually, in a small box on her dresser, not worn but not thrown away either, which told me something I didn't let myself examine too closely — was still mine to put back on her finger.
So I did the only thing that felt honest. I started over.
"You don't have to fix the oven," Josie said, the second morning I showed up before opening, sleeves already rolled up, staring down the temperamental old unit she'd told me had been running twenty degrees hot for six months and costing her burnt batches she couldn't afford.
"I know I don't have to."
"I have a guy for that."
"Does your guy know this oven has a sticky thermostat relay because Harold Whitfield installed it fifteen years ago on the cheap and never told anyone?"
She stared at me. "How do you know that."
"I helped Harold install it fifteen years ago. On the cheap. I was twenty-one and needed the money and I've felt guilty about that relay for a decade and a half." I was already elbow-deep in the access panel. "Consider this penance."
She didn't smile, not exactly, but something in her shoulders eased half an inch, and I counted that as a win, the way I'd started counting all of it — half inches, small unlocked doors, a woman letting a stranger back into the edges of her life one careful permission at a time.
Mr. Castellano at the Millbrook hardware store took one look at me across the counter and went the particular shade of pale I was getting used to seeing on people who'd known me before.
"You're the Vale fella," he said, not quite a question. "The one from the paper."
"Word travels fast."
"Son, word doesn't travel in these mountains, it detonates.
My sister called me at six this morning to tell me a dead man was buying groceries at the Clover Ridge market.
I didn't believe her. I'm having some trouble believing you right now, if I'm honest, and you're standing right in front of me holding a thermostat relay. "
"I get that a lot lately."
"I imagine you will for a while yet." He rang up the part slowly, still studying me like I might dissolve if he looked away. "Well. Welcome back, I suppose, is the thing to say. Strange thing to have to say to a man, but there it is. Welcome back."
"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than the exchange probably warranted, because it was the first time since I'd walked back into town that a stranger had simply, plainly, without complicated grief attached, been glad to see me. It was a small thing. It helped more than I expected.
I drove back to Clover Ridge with the part on the passenger seat and the mountains going gold in the late afternoon light, and I let myself think, for the length of that drive, about nothing more complicated than a broken thermostat relay and the particular satisfaction of fixing something with my hands.
Two years of having every choice taken from me had left we with an appetite for exactly this kind of problem — small, solvable, entirely within my control.
I fixed the oven. It took four hours total and the part turned out to need a specific gauge of wire I had to improvise from an old extension cord Josie kept in the back for reasons neither of us could remember, and I came back to the panel covered in grease with a burn on my forearm I didn't mention, because mentioning it would have meant Josie fussing over me, and I wasn't ready yet for her to fuss over me the way a wife fusses, not until I'd earned back the right to let her.
Josie ran her first batch of the day at exactly the right temperature for the first time in six months, and she stood in front of that oven with her hand pressed flat against the door like she was checking a pulse.
"It's perfect," she said, disbelieving.
"I told you. Penance."
"You're going to have to fix a lot of ovens to make up for two years, Cormac."
"I've got the time," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."
I meant it as reassurance. I watched it land as something more complicated — a flicker of old grief crossing her face, the reflexive flinch of a woman who'd once believed those exact words from me before and buried an empty box six months later.
I filed the mistake away. Every promise I made her now had to earn its weight in a way it never had to before.
Words alone weren't enough anymore. I understood that.
I was going to have to prove it in oven repairs and small mundane Tuesdays, one at a time, for as long as it took.
I learned the business she'd built without me the way you learn a country you've never visited — slowly, humbly, without assuming you already know the customs. I learned that she'd developed a sourdough starter she named Gerald, unprompted, apparently just because it amused her, and that Gerald had outlived several relationships in this town and was treated with more reverence than most of the town council.
I learned she'd taught herself bookkeeping from library books because she couldn't afford an accountant those first lean months, and that she now kept better books than half the businesses on Main Street.
I learned she'd negotiated her wholesale flour contract down eleven percent through sheer stubborn persistence, a fact I only discovered because Harper mentioned it in passing and Josie looked faintly embarrassed to have it praised, like she still hadn't quite absorbed that she was allowed to be proud of what she'd built.
I was floored by all of it. I want to be honest about the specific shape of that feeling, because it surprised me — I'd spent two years afraid of finding a woman who'd simply survived, who'd gotten through, gray and diminished, the way grief sometimes flattens a person.
Instead I found a woman who'd built something.
Who'd taken the worst thing that ever happened to her and turned it, stubbornly, methodically, into a life with her own name on the deed.
"I keep looking for the woman I left," I told her one evening, the two of us on her porch, mugs of tea going cold between us, the mountains going purple in the last light. "She's not here anymore."
Josie went still beside me, bracing, I think, for grief, for a man mourning a version of her that no longer existed.
"Someone stronger took her place," I said. "And I think I'm even more in love with that one, which is deeply inconvenient, because that one has every reason in the world not to want me back."
She laughed. It startled out of her, half a laugh and half something wetter, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth like she could stop it retroactively. "That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me."
"It's true, though."
"It's still the worst. You're supposed to say something simple. 'You look beautiful.' 'I missed you.' Not — a whole philosophical argument about which version of your wife you're in love with."
"Would you rather I lied?"
"I'd rather you gave me something I could just enjoy for one minute without also having to think about it."
"Noted," I said, and reached over, slow, giving her every chance to pull away, and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. "You look beautiful. I missed you. Both true. No philosophy attached."
"Better," she said, mock-serious, though her eyes were bright. "See, that wasn't so hard."
"I'll work on my delivery. Two years of no practice talking to anyone I actually liked, my conversational skills have gotten rusty in strange places."
"You seem to be doing all right so far."
"I've had a very forgiving audience."
She bumped her shoulder against mine, light, easy, the kind of small physical contact that would have meant nothing before everything happened and now felt like its own small miracle. "Don't get used to forgiving. I reserve the right to revoke it at any time."
"Understood. I'll take what I can get in the meantime."
She let me. Small thing. I counted it.
"Tell me something you missed," she said, after a while, watching the mountains instead of me, which I understood by then was how she asked her hardest questions — sideways, aimed at the middle distance, giving both of us somewhere to look that wasn't each other's faces.
"Something specific. Not the big stuff. The small stuff. "
I thought about it seriously, because she deserved a real answer and not a reflexive one.
"The sound of you doing the crossword," I said finally.
"You used to hum, this tuneless little thing, whenever you got stuck on a clue.
I used to find it unbelievably annoying, if I'm honest. I'd have told you that back then, if you'd asked.
I spent two years wishing I could hear it again so badly it physically hurt some nights. "
"That's a strange thing to miss."
"Grief makes strange things precious. You don't get to pick which ones." I glanced at her, found her almost smiling. "Your turn. Something small."