Chapter 12 #2
“So your solution is to leave first?”
He didn’t deny it.
“Grant, look at me.”
He looked at her.
His eyes were dark, and his face was drawn.
She could see the war raging behind his expression.
“I am not Owen,” she said. “I am not going to disappear on you, but you don’t get to disappear on me either. That’s not how this works. You don’t get to give me ‘stay’ and then choose to go without even letting me be part of the conversation.”
“Well, what if I take this deal and it’s wrong? What if I don’t take it and I resent this place? What if I stay and I lose you anyway?”
“And what if you don’t?”
The question hung between them.
She could see that the one variable his careful brain had never accounted for was the possibility that something good could just last.
He didn’t answer.
She picked up the cookie jar and held it for a moment.
This ridiculous thing that had somehow become the most important thing on the counter.
She set it back down gently, like she was putting something precious back where it belonged.
“I’m not asking you to turn down the deal. I’m not even asking you to stay. I was asking… asking you to be honest with me. That’s all. Just be honest.”
She walked to the door.
“Liza.”
She stopped but didn’t turn around.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded once and then left.
Dixie found Liza twenty minutes later, sitting on the floor of the children’s section, between the beanbag chairs, not crying completely, but crying a little.
“Oh, honey.”
Dixie slowly lowered herself down beside Liza.
She didn’t ask what happened.
She didn’t offer advice.
She just sat there and let Liza lean against her shoulder.
After a while, Liza told her.
The secret, the withdrawal, the acquisition, the locked door, the four-word texts, the word STAY when he was really planning to leave.
Dixie listened to all of it.
“That boy is afraid.”
“I know he’s afraid.”
“Well, afraid and cruel aren’t the same thing. One of those you can forgive, the other you shouldn’t have to.”
Liza wiped her eyes.
“And which one is this?”
Dixie was quiet for a moment, running her hand over the fabric of the new beanbag chair.
“When Johnny got sick,” she said, “he tried to push me away. Told me to go stay with my sister in Columbia. Said he didn’t want me to see him like that.
And I said, ‘Johnny, you do not get to decide what I can handle. That’s my decision, not yours.
’” She looked at Liza. “The worst thing that a scared person can do is make your decisions for you. Grant didn’t give you the chance to choose, and that’s the part that needs fixing. ”
Liza nodded.
“So what do I do?”
“Well, nothing, sugar, not today. Today you get to sit here and feel your feelings, maybe even eat some cookies. Tomorrow you figure out what you want, and then you go tell him because you’re not a woman who lets other people write her story for her.”
Liza leaned her head against Dixie’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
“Dixie?”
“Hmm?”
“Did Johnny ever fix it? The pushing you away?”
Dixie was quiet for a moment, somewhere back in the long goodbye of losing him.
“He did. Took him about a week. He showed up at my sister’s house with a bag of peaches and a handwritten letter that was mostly apologies and partly a recipe for peach cobbler, which was his way of saying he loved me without using words.”
She smiled.
“You know, men sometimes have a hard time saying the things. They’d rather build you a house or bake you a cobbler or hide a message in a crossword.”
The bookstore went quiet around them.
The children’s section, the one Liza had rebuilt from nothing, with the new cushions and fresh paint, held her now like a pair of big warm arms.
Grant stood in his shop after Liza left and didn’t move for a very long time.
The little bell at the door had stopped ringing.
It was closed.
The owl cookie jar sat on the counter where she had set it down, and looking at it was almost too much to take.
She was right about everything.
The hiding, the silence, his pathological need to disappear rather than risk being hurt.
What a coward he was.
She had named the thing he had spent three years refusing to name, but she had done it without the cruelty, without the shouting, without anything but clarity.
“It’s what you do,” she’d said.
He walked to the back room and looked at Owen’s photo on the shelf.
The small fish, the big grin, the brother who had never once in his life chosen the safe option, the brother who had taken life with both hands and squeezed it.
Stop hiding behind the puzzles, little brother.
Grant sat on the floor in the back room, his back against the wall, and pressed his palms against his eyes.
He wasn’t crying; he was far too locked up for that, but the pressure behind his eyes was immense, and the silence was the wrong kind of silence.
Not the kind you choose, but the kind that’s left behind when someone walks away.
He thought about the crossword, the one that said STAY.
He’d given it to her days ago, but he meant it.
He meant every word, every clue, every letter he placed on that grid.
Then he’d done the very thing that the crossword didn’t say.
He’d started to leave.
The shop was dark.
The fairy lights were still on outside, connecting the building to hers, but he felt very disconnected.
He picked up his phone and stared at the Meridian email.
Then he stared at Liza’s name in his contacts.
He put his phone down.
Not yet, but soon.
He had to figure out the right words first.
For once in his life, he had no idea where to begin.