Chapter 3
THREE
Millie
My apartment had never looked smaller than it did empty.
I stood in the middle of the living room at seven forty-five in the morning and looked at the stack of boxes by the door that represented the entirety of my material life.
It wasn't a lot. Twelve boxes, two duffel bags, a lamp I'd had since college that I refused to get rid of, and a small print of the San Antonio skyline my dad had given me when I moved in that I'd taken off the wall last night and wrapped carefully in a dish towel.
Everything else had been the apartment's—the furniture, the kitchen table, the bed frame—and I'd left it all for the next tenant because Gage had said the cottage was furnished and it turned out that when I stripped away everything that had come with a lease, this was what was actually mine.
Twelve boxes.
It's enough, I told myself. It's a start.
"You know," my best friend Daniela said from her position on the kitchen counter, where she was eating the last of my cereal directly from the box because I'd already packed the bowls, "when you told me you were moving in with a man you met at a fertility clinic I said a lot of things."
"You said it was insane."
"I said it was insane, I said you'd lost your mind, I said—"
"You also said go for it."
"I said go for it last," she said. "The insane part came first. That's important."
She crunched a handful of cereal and looked at me with the expression she used when she was being supportive and entertained simultaneously, which was most of the time.
Daniela was in a sports bra and bike shorts because it was June and she had been doing outdoor theatre in this heat since she was nineteen and had long since made her peace with sweating in public.
Her braids were up off her neck and she still looked like she was about to audition for something.
I was in a tank top and cutoffs and felt like a wet paper towel.
"You look good," she said.
"I look like I've been outside."
"You look like a woman who made a decision." She hopped off the counter. "That's attractive."
From the other room, in Spanish: "Mija, where do you want this?"
My mom appeared in the doorway holding a dish towel. She was in a sleeveless blouse with her hair up and the expression she'd been wearing for two weeks—the expression of a woman feeling many things and expressing them primarily through helpfulness.
She'd cried when I told her. Happy tears, she said.
A man, she'd said. A real man. I had not mentioned the fertility clinic.
I had not mentioned the contract. I had said: I met someone, it's fast, he has a ranch, I'm moving.
She had cried and called my dad and called my tía Rosa and presumably texted Saint Anthony directly.
"Just put it with the boxes, Mamá."
She set it down carefully. Looked around the empty apartment with the expression of a woman filing it away.
"It's a good thing," she said, to the room more than to me.
"It is," I agreed.
She looked at me with her eyes doing the thing they did where she was seeing me at every age simultaneously. "You're happy?"
"I think I'm going to be."
She nodded once, satisfied, and went back to the other room where my dad was doing something I'd asked him not to do, which was rearrange the boxes by size.
"Robert," she said.
"I'm just—"
"Leave them."
"They'll stack better if—"
"Robert."
Daniela caught my eye. I caught hers. We both laughed under our breath.
My dad appeared in the doorway. He was in a polo shirt that was now as damp with sweat as the rest of us, pretending to be casual, which was his least convincing setting.
He was a tall white guy who had married into a Tejano family thirty years ago and tried valiantly to fit in—even if he still looked like a software developer who’d accidentally found himself at a quinceanera.
"I just want to make sure everything travels well," he said.
"It's an hour away, Dad."
"An hour is still—" He checked his watch. "They said eight?"
"They said eight."
"It's seven fifty-four."
"I know."
He nodded. Looked at the boxes. Looked at me. "I want to meet him."
"You're going to meet him."
"Before you leave. I want to—"
"Robert," my mom said.
He stopped.
"She's twenty-six," my mom said. "Let her go."
He looked at me and something moved across his face—all of it, all the years, the apartment I'd moved into at twenty-three and was now leaving, every version of me he'd watched become the next one.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay, sweetpea."
I crossed the room and hugged him and he held on a second longer than usual and I let him. Then I stepped back before either of us made it worse.
"They're here," Daniela said from the window.
She was looking down at the street with the neutral expression she used when she was clocking something and choosing not to editorialize. Daniela had been doing background work and commercial shoots long enough to have a very good professional poker face. She deployed it now.
"Hm," she said.
"What."
"Nothing." She stepped back from the window. "Just—your man is punctual."
I smoothed my tank top. Told myself I was not nervous. I had met this man. I had negotiated a contract with him on a tailgate. I had nothing to be nervous about. Sure, I hadn’t seen him in two weeks…but that was fine.
We were in a business arrangement.
My mom straightened her blouse.
My dad put his shoulders back.
A knock.
I went to the door and opened it.
Gage Holt was standing in my doorway in a plain white t-shirt and worn jeans with his dark hair slightly damp at the temples, and he was exactly as I remembered and somehow more.
In my apartment doorway with the morning sun behind him he was just large in a way that reorganized the available space, and those brown eyes found mine immediately and my body noted his arrival with the same inconvenient enthusiasm it had shown in the parking lot.
It struck me all of a sudden that he was older. That I hadn’t mentioned that to my mother.
That she and my dad might be about to freak out.
But he was charming and Texan and outgoing, and his eyes found them immediately after me, and I knew he had this handled.
He stepped inside and shook my dad's hand first, which I noticed and suspected was intentional.
"Gage Holt," he said. "Sir."
My dad looked him in the eye the way he'd said he wanted to. Gage looked back, steady and unhurried. Something passed between them—the specific male communication of a handshake that is actually an assessment—and then my dad nodded once, a small thing, and let go.
"Robert Calloway," he said. "Good to meet you."
My mom stepped forward before my dad could say anything else. "Elena," she said, with the warmth she deployed like a force of nature, taking his hand in both of hers the way she did with everyone she'd already decided she liked. "We're so glad to meet you."
"Yes ma'am," Gage said. "Thank you for raising her right."
My mom looked at me over his shoulder.
I looked at the ceiling.
Behind Gage, slightly to the left, was a man about his height. He took his baseball cap off when he came through the door.
"This is my cousin Sawyer," Gage said.
"Hi," I said, extending my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
"Ma'am," Sawyer said.
He looked around the apartment the way someone looks at a job—taking inventory, already planning the order. Something else registered too, something I hadn't been consciously waiting for but felt immediately when I saw it: Sawyer had light brown skin and tight curls, clearly mixed.
Something in my chest quietly unclenched.
Daniela had put the cereal box down and was looking at Sawyer with the slightly narrowed eyes she used when she was trying to place someone.
"You look familiar," she said.
Sawyer looked at her, and I saw the recognition when he figured it out. "Horse picture," he said. "Baton Rouge. Last fall."
She pointed at him, nodding and smiling. "Background holding."
"Wrangler."
"Riiiight." She nodded again. "The bay that kept spooking at the craft services tent."
"Every single time," he chuckled.
"Every single time," she agreed.
Gage was already moving, scanning the stack, lifting a box and testing the weight.
"This all of it?" he asked.
"That's all of it."
He looked at the twelve boxes and the two duffel bags and the lamp and didn't say anything, just picked up two boxes like they weighed nothing. Sawyer politely ended his conversation with Daniela, then followed suit.
My mom watched him go.
Then she turned to me.
"Mija." Low, while my dad was occupied asking Sawyer something about the trailer hitch. "He's older."
"I know, Mamá."
"How much older?”
I honestly wasn’t sure. I dug through the details of the contract, of the test results he’d handed back, tried to remember his birth year…
It was a guess, but I tried it anyway. “Ten years?”
She absorbed this the way she absorbed most information, which was thoroughly and without immediate visible reaction.
"He's established," I said.
"He's established," she repeated, in the tone that meant she was not necessarily disagreeing.
"He owns land. He's—"
"I can see what he is." She said it without heat. Just observation. Then she looked at me the way she'd been looking at me my whole life, the way that saw everything. "You like him."
"We're—it's early."
"Mija."
"It's a complicated situation—"
"You like him," she said again, quieter this time. Not a question.
I thought about the parking lot. The tailgate. Everything. The spreadsheet in his back pocket that I hadn't noticed him take until it was gone.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I do."
She made a sound—not satisfied exactly, not worried exactly, somewhere in the complicated middle territory that only Catholic mothers occupied.
"He found you first," she said. "When he walked in. Before me, before your father." A pause. "A man who walks into a room and finds you first—"
"Mamá—"
"I'm just saying what I saw." She patted my cheek once, brief and warm. "Go help them."