Chapter 42
Forty-Two
Rhett
Nobody warns you about getting the thing you wanted.
It’s terrifying in a whole new direction.
I kept the real me locked in the dark my whole life, dead certain that if anybody got a good look, they’d leave, and a locked door never gets slammed in your face.
Then Wren picked the lock, walked in, took a long look at the actual me, the unfunny one, the soft one, and instead of backing out slowly, she moved in and started rearranging the furniture.
Now I’ve got no door left to hide behind, and I keep waiting for the catch.
The catch doesn’t come. That’s the thing rewiring my whole head, one ordinary day at a time.
We’re figuring it out as we go: four people, two buildings, and no manual.
Most nights land at Wren’s, over the shop, because the nest’s up there and the nest has opinions.
We drag a bigger bed in. Cal builds shelves nobody asked for and stands back admiring them for a full ten minutes each.
Eli fixes every hinge in the place on some silent rotation only he understands.
And me, I’m the one who cooks, which surprised everybody, including me, but somebody had to, because Wren bakes like a dream and cannot produce a dinner to save her life, and Cal is under the impression garlic is a personality.
I keep catching myself being domestic and not hating a second of it.
Dishes while she does the books. Her sock feet in my lap on the couch.
Arguing with Eli about baseball in a low voice so we don’t wake Cal, who drops off like a golden retriever the instant he stops moving.
It’s the most boring, ordinary, unglamorous stuff on this earth, and I’d set myself on fire before I gave up one minute of it.
Nobody ever told me the good part was this quiet.
We have exactly one real fight the first week, over whose turn it is to deal with the possessed radiator in Wren’s back room, and it ends with all three of us trying to fix it at once, elbowing each other, while Wren sits on the counter eating a day-old pastry and rating our performance out of ten.
I get a four. Eli gets a nine. Cal gets disqualified for flexing.
It’s the stupidest twenty minutes of my life, and I’d frame it if I could.
The town’s decided we’re the best entertainment it’s had in years, and it isn’t wrong.
We can’t walk down Main without somebody hollering something.
Mrs. Alder informs me, unprompted, in the hardware store, that I’ve finally quit wasting that face on nonsense, which from her is a marriage blessing.
Old Hank keeps trying to give us a group rate on lumber for the domestic situation.
A month ago, all this attention would’ve had me reaching for a joke and the nearest exit.
Now I just wave and mean it. Wren laces her fingers through mine on the sidewalk like it’s nothing, like I’m hers to hold onto in front of God and the whole damn town. I let her. Because I am.
And then there’s the scent thing, and I don’t have a single joke for what it’s doing to me.
It’s slow. Nothing like the heat, no fireworks.
Just, day by day, we start to smell like each other.
I catch it on her first, my smoke and clove threaded up under her sugar and orange, faint at the edges, less faint every morning.
Then I catch it on me, her vanilla in my collar, Cal’s cedar, Eli’s coffee and rain, the four of us blending down slow into one scent that hasn’t got a name yet but smells, unmistakably, like home.
Dot, when I ask, just grins like a woman whose long game is finally landing, and says it’ll finish when we finish it.
What gets me about it is the sweet note.
The burnt-sugar thing. The tell. The soft center I spent my whole life burying under smoke so deep nobody would ever catch it.
It’s just out now, all the time, part of the blend, mixed right into the smell of the four of us.
I stopped hiding it, and the world didn’t end.
She didn’t run. She leans in, breathes it in, and calls it her favorite, every single day, like it isn’t the exact thing I was sure would get me left behind.
Some nights she falls asleep with her nose tucked into my throat, right into the sweet of it, on purpose, and I lie in the dark not breathing too hard in case I wake her, cataloging the plain fact that a woman chose to fall asleep breathing in the one part of me I’d have paid money to bury.
Now I fall asleep in a pile of my own people, smelling like all of them, no cold spot anywhere.
And I keep having to remind myself it’s real, not a bit I’m running.
I still keep score, some cowardly back corner of me.
Old habits die hard. I keep waiting for the morning she wakes up, looks at the real me over coffee, and files me back under fun, harmless, disposable.
It never comes. She wakes up, looks at the unfunny one, the one who cooks and worries and actually means it.
And she picks him. Every damn morning. Turns out worthless doesn’t survive being chosen on purpose, out loud, in daylight, morning after morning.
My whole life I ran the same play. Be the good time. Get out before anybody looks too close. Turns out the whole time the thing I was hiding was the thing worth keeping. Wish somebody’d told six-year-old me. Would’ve saved us both a mountain of jokes.
The festival’s four days out, so the whole committee’s crammed into Della’s diner for the last planning meeting, Wren with her binder, Dot running the show, the Pelhams taking minutes nobody requested.
The mountain search-and-rescue crew’s there too, because they cover the safety end of the festival.
A pack of rope-and-flannel types who smell like pine and cold air and wrestle bears for cardio.
I’m half listening, because I’ve got a hand on Wren’s knee under the table and that’s a full-time job.
But I’ve spent my life reading rooms to stay a step ahead of them, and the habit doesn’t switch off just because I’m happy.
So I catch it. Della, working the coffee pot, pausing a half second too long behind the biggest of the search-and-rescue guys, the quiet one with the tired eyes.
She looks at the back of his head like it’s a question she hasn’t got the nerve to ask out loud.
Then she catches herself and moves on, all sass and refills, like she didn’t just do that.
He doesn’t notice. Of course he doesn’t. They never do, this early. I know that look from the inside, God knows. I wore it about Wren for weeks and called it something else.
I take the man in properly while I’ve got the excuse.
Big. Quiet, though not Eli’s steady quiet, more like a fella carrying a weight he won’t set down for anybody.
His crew ribs him, and he half-smiles and doesn’t quite land it.
Takes care of the whole mountain and looks like nobody’s taken care of him in a long time.
And Della, who feeds this entire town and never once sits down to eat, keeps drifting into his orbit with that coffee pot like a moth that’s decided the porch light is being rude just by existing.
I nudge Eli under the table and tip my head at Della.
Eli, who misses nothing, follows my look, watches it happen one more time, gives me the smallest nod.
Filed. Neither of us says a word. It’s not ours to say.
But I make a note, because I owe this town a few good turns, and playing quiet matchmaker for the woman who fed Wren soup when she had nobody feels like a fine place to start paying it back.
Meeting wraps. Wren gathers her binder, Cal carries it for her because Cal carries everything for her now, Eli’s already got the door held open.
And I catch our reflection in the diner window on the way out, the four of us, and for a second I don’t place the guy in the middle.
Loose. Easy. Not performing for a living soul.
Just a man walking out of a diner with his pack, wearing his own real face in public like it costs him nothing.
The sweet center’s just out there now. In the blend. In the daylight. In the reflection in a diner window. Nobody ran. She leaned in and called it her favorite.
Six-year-old me would never believe it. Grown me’s still working on it. But I’ve decided to quit arguing with the evidence and just be the luckiest smart-ass in Ember Hollow, soft middle and all.