CHAPTER TWO #2
"Someone's got to do the tables."
"One year," Pip said, coming up beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched and not quite, the way it always went with the two of them, one chair apart even standing up, a careful half-inch of distance maintained with the same unconscious precision he brought to squaring a tablecloth, "you could let someone else do the tables. "
Renz straightened the last corner of the last cloth, and looked at the long clean lines of it, the good coffee waiting, the chairs all set, the one gap by the fire that he still hadn't let himself look at directly, and said, in the flat reasonable voice that closed every subject he'd ever wanted closed, "Maybe next year. "
Neither of them believed it. Both of them, for entirely different reasons, needed to say it anyway.
She helped him carry the last of the folding chairs down from the shed, the two of them falling into the easy wordless coordination they always fell into when there was a physical job in front of them, four years of practice making the handoffs and the counterweights automatic — she took the awkward end, he took the heavier one, without either of them discussing who took which, the way old dance partners find their positions without needing to be told.
It was, she thought, not for the first time, one of the strange small mercies of loving a man like Renz: that even before either of them had said a single true thing about what was actually happening between them, they had already built four years of this, of moving in the same direction without collision, of knowing where the other one's hands would be before they got there.
"Cal's flying in today," Renz said, setting his end of the last chair down with more care than a folding chair strictly warranted. "Eighteen months in the Territory. You'd hardly recognise him, from what everyone says."
"I heard he found someone up there. A flight nurse."
"Josie." Renz said the name like he was trying it out, filing it away the way he filed away everyone's coffee order, everyone's kid's exam schedule. "Sasha reckons she's sharp as anything. Reckons Cal's a different bloke entirely."
"Must be nice," Pip said, before she'd quite decided to say it, and heard the small unguarded honesty in it a half-second too late to take it back.
Renz looked at her properly then, the particular careful attention he paid to a sentence that had more weight in it than its length suggested, the same attention he'd have given a fireground reading that didn't quite match the forecast. "What must be?"
"Finding someone in the middle of an actual catastrophe and just — knowing.
No four years of circling. No wondering.
" She busied her hands with a chair that didn't need straightening, mirroring, without noticing she was doing it, his own habit of tidying a thing to avoid looking directly at a person.
"Some people just get handed the answer, apparently. "
"Some people nearly drown first," Renz said, quieter than before. "I don't know that I'd call that the easy way."
"No," Pip admitted. "I suppose not."
They stood a moment in the unfinished quiet of that, the kind of pause that in another conversation, between other people, might have been the moment something got said outright — and then a car door slammed down in the car park, and a voice that could only be Mia's carried up the slope already mid-sentence about something involving an alternator, and the moment folded itself back down into the ordinary business of a gathering morning, the way it always did, the way it had folded down a dozen times before across four careful years, and Pip picked up the last of the chairs and told herself, again, that there would be another moment, eventually, and that she would know it when it came.
She did not yet know how right she was.
? ? ?
Pip worked at the local vet clinic in town, had done for six years now, the longest she'd held any single job in her adult life, and she sometimes wondered whether the animals had something to do with that particular longevity — whether there was something in the specific, uncomplicated trust of a frightened dog or a wary cat that had taught her, slowly, patiently, a version of staying she hadn't quite managed to extend to people yet.
She was good at the work, genuinely good, the vets trusting her with more responsibility each year, and there was a part of her that suspected the appeal ran deeper than simple competence — that caring for creatures who couldn't ask her to promise anything permanent, who simply needed her hands steady and her voice calm for exactly as long as the appointment lasted, had let her practise a kind of devotion that felt safe precisely because it came with a built-in expiry.
She'd thought about that a lot, over the years, turning it over the way she turned over most uncomfortable truths about herself, usually late at night, usually alone.
It was easier to love something you knew you'd eventually have to let go of, whether through the natural rhythm of an appointment ending or the harder rhythm of a beloved old dog finally reaching the end of things.
The animals never asked her to stay past what the job required.
Renz, she suspected, watching him work the crowd with his coffee tray that morning, would ask for considerably more than that, eventually, if she ever let him — and the terrifying, hopeful truth of the last four years was that some part of her had started, very quietly, to want exactly that kind of asking.
? ? ?
Her phone buzzed as she was setting the last chair down, and she saw her father's name and felt the familiar small flinch that his calls always produced in her, equal parts affection and old, worn-smooth grief.
He didn't call often. When he did, it was usually brief, practical, a man who'd spent thirty years moving from territory to territory and had never quite learned how to be still on a phone call any more than he'd learned how to be still anywhere else.
"Just checking you're right for money," he said, without much preamble, the way he always opened, a habit she recognised now as an inheritance she'd absorbed without noticing, the same straight-to-the-point economy Renz used, though her father's version came from a different well entirely — not usefulness offered as love, but simply a man who'd learned that dwelling on a feeling too long cost you the momentum you needed to pack up and move again.
"I'm fine, Dad. Good, actually."
"Good. That's good." A pause, filled with the sound of a television somewhere behind him, some sports broadcast he wasn't really watching. "You still up at that same flat?"
"Same one. Lease is up for renewal again, actually. Twelve months, same as always."