Chapter Twenty-Three
TALLY
I’d stayed in my room long enough.
After one of the most unexpectedly intimate, deeply strange moments of my life, everything had come crashing back to earth thanks to my geriatric poodle dragging her crusty, little ass across the pristine carpet like she was possessed by a demon with a dingleberry.
The two of us, locked in stunned silence, had scrambled to clean it up as fast as humanly possible.
Charlie, ever calm in a crisis, muttered about Eunice Wilder—Lee’s mother and savior of antique upholstery—probably having a stain removal spell or knowing a guy.
I hadn’t waited for a follow-up. I bolted to my room and leaned against the door.
Hours later, I was still replaying it.
His hand on my belly, the heat sinking through. The air held still, thick with silence that felt holy.
I hadn’t meant to wake him. Hadn’t planned to stand there watching him sleep.
But he’d looked so... peaceful. And uncomfortable.
And there was this unspoken truth in the room—he’d stayed.
He could’ve gone back downstairs, could’ve crashed in the second guest room, could’ve done anything but contort himself like a human pretzel on that tiny love seat.
But he hadn’t.
When I pressed his hand to my stomach, the prickliness he wore like chainmail melted away.
It wasn’t the jolt of surprise when the baby kicked, no, but the way his whole body leaned toward mine, drawn to us without even realizing it.
It was like some invisible thread was tugging us together.
When our foreheads nearly touched, whatever had been brewing between us suddenly felt real.
Now, sitting on the edge of my bed, I pressed a hand to that same spot on my belly, the ghost of his touch still warm against my skin.
It wasn’t the baby fluttering this time.
It was me.
That slow, unmistakable bloom of wanting. Of being seen. Of hoping for that one, unreachable thing you didn’t think you were allowed to have.
The knock at the door sent me practically hurtling across the room like someone had fired a starter pistol.
“Yeah?” I called—too loud, too fast—already halfway there, my bare feet skimming across the polished floor.
Charlie filled the doorway with that impossible stillness of his, like nothing in the entire world could touch him. Like last night hadn’t happened. Like I hadn’t placed his hand on my stomach and watched his entire face soften in the dark.
“Hey,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m heading down to the studio. I’ve got to finish this piece before Christmas, and I’m already behind.”
I could see it—the twitch of his jaw, the tightness around his eyes. Charlie wasn’t just stressed. He was pressure personified, like a man who lived with a ticking clock inside his chest and refused to let it skip a single beat.
“You got plans today, or—”
“I’ll come down with you,” I cut in too quickly. “I told Jordan I’d check in with Sylvie anyway, but otherwise…”
He blinked. For a split second, his face almost—almost—lit up. But then his eyes slid past me and landed on Nancy Reagan, who was standing behind me, squinting at him with elderly contempt.
“Yeah,” he muttered, “We should probably get her out of here. Carpet cleaners’ll be here in an hour. Best if the criminal isn’t present at the scene.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I murmured, bending to clip on Nancy’s leash. “She knows people.”
I took her for a walk through the square, stopping into Cheese, Please!
to say hi to Sylvie and pretend I wasn’t hyper-aware of the man I was about to follow into close quarters.
I was trying to tamp down the thing brewing inside me—the part of me that had curled up on the couch before I woke him up and thought, God help me, maybe I do want this.
By the time I walked through the front entrance of the studio, my nerves were shot.
It was warm inside, even though the door was cracked open in the back. A low breeze curled in from the alley, but the heat was from the space itself—alive with energy and paint fumes and sawdust and whatever else Charlie used to make the chaos in his mind come alive.
The front half of the studio looked like a gallery curated by someone half-mad and full of genius—trash turned into treasure, light bending across sculptures made of rusted metal and broken glass.
But it was the back room that pulled me in, where the edges blurred between creation and comfort.
A worn couch. A long worktable. Coffee mugs stacked haphazardly beside paint-splattered rags.
Home, but only if you knew how to look.
Lee’s voice drifted in from the speakers—slow and dreamy, a little mournful, the kind of song that slipped under your skin and settled in.
Nancy let out one sharp boof like she was announcing us at a gala, and Charlie looked up from where he was crouched, organizing a stack of sketchbooks.
“Hey, you,” he said, voice low, almost easy.
He looked better down here—calmer. Grounded. As if the tension that followed him around like a shadow had finally slipped off his shoulders, the moment he stepped into his world.
“This place looks a lot different when I’m not actively vomiting or unconscious,” I said, curling into the corner of the love seat tucked against the back wall.
From here, I could really take it in—the quiet tangle of creation that made up Charlie’s space.
Layers of paint-splattered rags, dog-eared sketchbooks, old snapshots pinned to the walls without a frame in sight.
There were piles of what might’ve been trash or art, or maybe both, depending on how generous you were feeling.
But it felt lived in. Rooted. It was like someone had poured their entire self into the walls.
Charlie huffed out a laugh but didn’t turn around, his focus locked on the large canvas stretched along the far wall. It was close to finished—the kind of piece that vibrated with meaning even before you knew what it was about.
I stood and wandered closer, pulled forward as if the thing was magnetic. When I finally caught it in full, I exhaled. “That’s Magnolia,” I murmured, standing in front of it now, dwarfed by the sheer scale.
The whole piece was her, built out of tiny mosaic portraits—snapshots of family and friends, O’Malley’s, the river, sun-drenched porches, and fireworks over Forsyth. Savannah, and everyone who made it home, woven together into the shape of his sister’s face.
Tilting my head back, I took in the loops of writing running through it all, winding between the images like a thread. “Are those… song lyrics?”
Charlie didn’t look away from what he was doing—tweezing a tiny photo into place with the care of a surgeon—but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Yeah. This one’s for Magnolia. Lee commissioned it. It’s a Christmas gift.”
I frowned a little. “Isn’t she marrying his brother?”
He let out a dry laugh, then finally looked at me.
There was a flicker of restraint in his eyes, or maybe curiosity he didn’t know what to do with.
“That she is,” he said, placing the photo, a shot of the two of them as kids, right above her collarbone.
“But somehow, their love song keeps playing on a loop in this town.”
I smiled, hugging my arms across my chest. “Savannah seems to have a thing for complicated love stories.”
Charlie walked to his worktable, where hundreds of small photos fanned out across the surface in careful disarray.
I followed without thinking, drawn to the table and maybe to him, too.
I hovered beside him, letting my fingers brush the edges of old memories I wasn’t part of but suddenly wanted to understand.
There was so much history here. In this space. In these pictures. In him.
“Magnolia told me about your uncle when Dig and I were at O’Malley’s not long ago,” I said, tracing the rim of my water bottle with my thumb. “He owned the bar?”
Charlie chewed on his bottom lip, eyes scanning the table of photos. “Yeah. Our parents died when we were still kids, so our Uncle Cole took us in. We grew up in the apartment above the bar.”
He stepped across the room, and I followed again, drawn in without thinking. The way he said we made me ache in a way I didn’t expect. There was a security there, even in the grief.
“Mags still lives up there,” he added.
I snorted. “Seriously? I thought her fiancé was loaded.”
Charlie glanced over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth twitching like he was trying not to smile. “You’re awfully chatty today. Must be feeling better.”
I wanted to make it a joke, toss the moment aside. But all I could think about was his touch—how the room had gone still, how it hadn’t felt fleeting at all. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I guess I am.”
He leaned onto his elbows over the worktable, fixing me with a playful squint. “Okay, then riddle me this, Nancy Drew. Why the hell is that dog named after a First Lady?”
I smirked, gesturing vaguely toward Nancy Reagan, curled into a tight ball and snoring dramatically on the loveseat. “She doesn’t give off major Nancy Reagan energy to you?”
“Not even a little,” Charlie said, after pretending to study her like a museum piece.
I popped open an iced tea from the mini fridge, that familiar tightness in my chest easing enough to let the moment in. “She was my Nonie’s dog. My grandmother.”
Charlie looked up, quiet now.
“When Nonie got really sick, she had a fall and had to be moved into a nursing home. Doyle told me our momma was planning to send Nancy to the pound.” I twisted the cap tighter on my tea and looked down at the table, the sharp memory of that day still catching at my throat.
“Said she was too old, too untrained. That she didn’t comply. ”
Charlie winced.
“The shelter said dogs like her don’t get adopted out at that age.” I gave a small shrug, like the whole thing still didn’t piss me off. “I was back in New York, trying to get some money together before my next trip to Scotland, but instead, I hitchhiked home and picked her up.”
His head snapped toward me. “Wait. You hitchhiked? For a poodle?”
I laughed, and maybe it was a little unhinged, but I couldn’t help it. “Yeah. It sounds wild, I know. But... I know what it’s like to be left behind for reasons you don’t understand. What it feels like when someone decides you’re too much trouble to keep around. I couldn’t let that happen to her.”
Charlie didn’t say anything for a second, the air between us softening into the kind of quiet that said he got it. That he wasn’t going to tell me it wasn’t that bad or that I should move on.
I looked over at Nancy, the stubborn, crusty little thing. “She’s kind of the worst. Smells like socks and corn chips. But I’d do it all over again.”
Charlie studied me for a moment. “I knew I was right about you, Tally Aden.”
I tilted my head, the corner of my mouth tugging up. “And how’s that?”
His voice was low. “You’re the one doing the rescuing. Not the one waiting to be saved.”
I rolled my eyes, mostly to keep from crying.
I settled back into my spot on the couch while Charlie went back to work, his hands moving with focused precision. Every so often, he paused to glance over at me. “So what happened next?” he asked, trimming a photo down to fit an empty space.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You hitchhiked, picked up the dog, brought her back to New York—then what? What’d you do with her when you traveled?”
As if she knew we were talking about her, Nancy started chasing her tail, barking at it like she had just discovered it was attached to her body.
“Well,” I said, nodding toward the mayhem, “She clearly needs constant supervision, so I stayed in New York.”
“So you gave up all your dreams for a poodle?”
It did sound ridiculous. But that was one thing Charlie and I had in common.
“I’d do anything for the people and creatures I love, even if it means rearranging everything. Not everyone gets that kind of love. I didn’t, not really. But I do now. Especially now.”
“I get it,” he said, his eyes locked on mine.
I nodded, then asked, “And what would you do for love? Would you buy a bar? Cancel your plans? Give up your dreams?”
Charlie didn’t answer right away. When he finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “For me, love itself is the dream.”