Chapter 5
Josie
I said it out loud on a Thursday, which felt like an unglamorous day for a confession that big, but grief and love have never once consulted my calendar preferences.
The day itself had been ordinary in the way most of my days had started to become again — a full case of morning orders, a delivery mix-up with the flour wholesaler that took forty-five minutes and two phone calls to untangle, a stretch of afternoon quiet where I let myself simply exist behind the counter without anyone needing anything from me.
Cormac had come by around three, flour-dusted from helping me haul supplies in from his truck, and something about watching him do that small ordinary task — lifting bags, stacking them where I pointed, easy and competent and present — had cracked something loose in my chest that I hadn't expected.
I'd been fine all day. That was the strange part, turning it over on the walk home.
Not fine in the performed way, the way I'd been fine for church ladies and curious customers, but actually, quietly fine, the kind of fine that made the feeling underneath it, when it finally surfaced, land even harder for how unexpected it was.
I'd started noticing it in pieces over the last week, actually, small moments I hadn't let myself examine too closely at the time.
The way my chest did something warm and unguarded when I heard his truck pull up outside the shop before I even saw him.
The way I'd caught myself, twice now, humming that same tuneless crossword tune he'd once found annoying, except this time I was humming while waiting for him, not despite missing him.
The way I'd started leaving the porch light on in the evenings even on nights we hadn't specifically planned to see each other, just in case, just as an invitation I wasn't quite brave enough to voice out loud.
Small things. They'd been accumulating for days, quiet evidence of a verdict I hadn't let myself read aloud yet.
We were on the porch again — we lived on that porch those weeks, I think because it was neutral ground, not the shop with all its careful new-life architecture, not the old house with all its old-life ghosts, just a strip of wood between the two lives, safe enough to be honest on.
"I'm falling back in love with you," I said, watching the mountains instead of his face, because I couldn't do both at once. "I need you to know that. And I need you to know it terrifies me more than the day you knocked on my door."
"Why more?"
"Because that day, I'd already lost you once.
There wasn't a worse version of that grief waiting for me — I'd already survived the worst thing, I'd already built a life on the other side of it.
But this—" I gestured between us, helpless.
"This is me choosing to be vulnerable to losing you again.
On purpose. With my eyes open. And I don't know if I have it in me to survive that a second time, Cormac. I barely survived the first one."
He didn't argue. I'd started to expect that from him now — the old Cormac would have rushed to reassure me, would have said something confident and a little too fast, I'm not going anywhere, nothing will happen to me, and I'd have wanted to believe it even though we both would have known it wasn't a promise anyone could actually keep.
This Cormac sat with it. Let it be as heavy as it was.
"You died once," I said, my voice cracking. "I can't do that again. I can't build a whole life on you and have it collapse a second time. I don't have another two years of grief in me. I used them all up on the first round."
"I'm not going to promise you forever," he said, quiet.
"I want to. God, Josie, some animal part of me wants to grab your hands right now and swear on everything I have that nothing will ever take me from you again.
But I'd be lying, and you'd know I was lying, because nobody can promise that.
Nobody. Not me, not the safest man in the world, not anybody.
Forever isn't a thing people get to guarantee.
It's not a thing I could have guaranteed you the first time either, if I'm honest — I just didn't know it yet, because nothing had ever tested it. "
"So what can you promise me?"
"That every day I get, I'll be here. Fully.
Out loud." His voice had gone rough, low, the kind of steady that costs a person something to hold onto.
"No more secrets. No more noble sacrifices that decide your grief for you before you even get a vote.
If something takes me — and I hope to God nothing does, I intend to fight like hell against anything that tries — it won't be because I chose to leave you in the dark again.
That choice is the one thing I can actually control, and I'm telling you right now, I will never make it again.
Whatever comes, you'll know. You'll always know.
I'll never again decide what you can survive without asking you first."
It wasn't the fairy tale. I want to be honest about that too, sitting here writing this down — it wasn't the sweeping, uncomplicated promise every part of me, the part that grew up on stories where love conquered everything, wanted to hear.
It was smaller than that, and harder, and it reached somewhere the fairy tale never could have, because it was true.
"My mother used to tell me love was supposed to feel safe," I said, after a while, watching the last light drain out of the sky over the mountains.
"Simple. Uncomplicated. No hard edges. I believed her for a long time, and I built my whole idea of what a good marriage looked like around that.
Then I lost you, and grieved you, and rebuilt an entire life out of the wreckage, and I realized safe was never actually the promise.
Safe was just the story we tell young women to make them stop asking harder questions. "
"What's the real promise, then, if not safe?"
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "I think maybe it's what you just said. Not safety. Just honesty. Showing up, out loud, every single day you get, even knowing none of it comes with a guarantee attached. That's harder to hold onto than 'safe.' But I think it might actually be truer."
"I think you might be right," he said, quiet, and something in his voice had gone rough in a way that told me the words had landed somewhere deep.
"Okay," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
"Okay?"
"Okay, I believe you. I believe that promise. I don't believe the other kind anymore — I don't think I ever will again, not really, not the way I used to before. But that one, the honest one — I believe that."
"Can I ask you something," he said, careful. "You don't have to answer if it's too soon."
"Ask."
"The date. Friday. The one with Warren. Is that still—"
"I already told him," I said, quiet. "Before you ask, before you spiral into whatever version of guilt you're about to build around this.
I called him two days ago. I told him the truth, that I needed to figure out what was happening with you, that I couldn't in good conscience keep him waiting on something I didn't have an honest answer for yet.
He was gracious about it. He usually is. "
Something eased in Cormac's shoulders, a tension I hadn't fully clocked until it released.
"I wasn't going to ask you to end it. I want to be clear about that.
If you'd wanted to keep seeing him while you figured out what you wanted from me, I'd have understood.
I gave up the right to jealousy the day I let you bury me. "
"I know you would have understood," I said.
"That's not why I ended it. I ended it because I already knew the answer, underneath all the shock and the grief and the two years of catching up we still have to do.
I knew it standing in my doorway the night you knocked.
I just needed some time to admit it out loud. "
"And the answer is?"
"The answer is you," I said, simple, unguarded, more certain than I'd expected to feel saying it.
"It's always going to be you, Cormac. I don't know yet what that looks like, practically — how long it takes to actually rebuild the trust, how we get from careful porch conversations to something that feels like a real marriage again instead of two people cautiously circling each other.
But the answer underneath all of it isn't in question.
It never really was, even when I was furious enough to hit you in my own doorway. "
He reached for my hand, slow, giving me every chance to pull away, and I let him take it, and we sat there a long time not saying anything else, because some things don't need more words stacked on top of them.
It was two days later that the other conversation happened — the one that scared me in a different way, quieter and colder, because it wasn't about the past. It was about whether the past was actually finished.
I found him in the clubhouse office with Knox, both of them bent over a laptop with the particular stillness of men trying not to alarm someone standing behind them, which of course had the opposite effect entirely.
"What," I said, from the doorway. Not a question. A demand.
Cormac looked up, and I watched him decide, in real time, not to lie to me — watched the old instinct flicker and get overruled by the new promise, right there on his face, and something in my chest eased even before he spoke, because I got to see the choosing happen.
"There's a loose end," he said. "From the job. A man who might have tracked me home."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "Tracked you home. Here. To Clover Ridge."
"We don't know that for certain yet," Knox said, gentler than his usual register. "We're being careful. We've got people watching, quietly, and Ivy's already got contacts warmed up on the legal side if it comes to that."
"How dangerous," I said, to Cormac, direct, refusing to let it be softened. "Tell me the truth. You promised me the truth."