Matt
Iwas off shift, about to head home when Becca texted me.
Becca: Holloway’s. Seven. Don’t argue.
I called her because a text like that from my sister has historically preceded some of the worst evenings of my life. She declined the call and texted back a single pumpkin emoji, which answered nothing, and then wear the green shirt, which answered even less.
The green shirt was dark hunter green, a button-down Becca had given me two Christmases ago and I’d worn exactly twice.
I put it on. I rolled the sleeves back to the forearm.
Dark jeans. My good boots, the brown ones, not the work pair with the salt line at the toe.
The leather jacket off the hook by the door, because it had started raining again around three and hadn’t let up since.
I looked at myself in the hall mirror on my way out and did not let myself finish a single one of the thoughts that started, which is a discipline I have been practicing my whole life whenever I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Sweetbriar goes soft in the rain. I drove in through the dark with the wipers keeping time, past the Stop & Go with its lit sign and one car at the pump, past the shuttered feed store and the hardware place with the pumpkins piled out front under a tarp, and the wet street threw all of it back doubled—every window a smear of gold, every taillight a long red streak.
The maples along the main drag had turned all the way over to fire, and half their leaves were down and stuck flat to the pavement, and the whole town smelled like rain on warm asphalt and somebody’s chimney.
I thought about her the entire drive. That was the trouble.
I thought about her standing in the rain between those pumpkin rows the night before, arms wrapped around herself, her face wet and stripped bare of every bit of the brightness she runs the world on.
I’d seen a lot of people at the worst hour of a bad night.
You learn to look and not flinch. But I flinched at that one, somewhere behind the ribs, and it hadn’t stopped—because it was her, and because she’d looked, for that minute in the dark, like the loneliest person in town, and this is a woman who is never once alone, who is the reason half of Sweetbriar doesn’t feel alone either.
That was what stayed with me. Not the tears themselves.
The distance she’d put between them and every person who loved her.
She’d walked all the way out to the far rows so the sound wouldn’t reach an upstairs window, and she’d have gotten up this morning and poured coffee and cracked a joke for everybody who came through that door, and not one of them would have known. I knew, and I couldn’t set it down.
Then I thought about her ten minutes later, sitting down beside me in the mud in the dark because she didn’t want to be alone and didn’t want to be seen either, and had somehow decided I counted as neither.
I thought about her hand an inch from mine on the cold ground.
I’d been thinking about that inch since roughly two in the morning, on and off, in a way I had no professional or personal business thinking about it.
She’d have gone right back to work today.
That’s the part that ate at me, driving in.
She’d have gotten up, put her game face on, and stood behind the counter at the Stop & Go with a coffee in her hand and a joke ready for every single person who came through the door, and not one of them would know what she’d done in the dark the night before, because she wouldn’t let them.
She’d hold the whole weight of it by herself and call it a day.
I didn’t know yet what a man was supposed to do about a woman like that.
So I figured dinner. Becca and Levi, maybe a wedding-photo ambush, maybe some scheme requiring my truck.
What I did not figure, walking into the warm noise of Holloway’s with rain shaking off my jacket—walnut paneling, amber light, the jukebox working through something slow, Simon Holloway visible through the kitchen pass with his head down over the flattop—was who was sitting in the corner booth.
The big round one in the back corner, the horseshoe that seats eight and usually holds a birthday dinner.
Becca. Levi. Harper, mid-argument with Jude across the curve of it, both of them leaning in like opposing counsel.
And around the far side, sliding out of her coat and laughing at whatever Harper had just said, auburn hair coming loose from its knot—
Elizabeth.
I’d spent the whole drive prying my mind off her, one finger at a time, and I’d nearly managed it, until I walked into the warmth and the amber light and there she was, then all that work came apart in a second.
She had her hair half out of its knot and rain still shining in it and color high in her face from the heat of the room, and she looked—there’s no professional way to put it—like something I’d been trying not to want out loud.
She saw me the same second I saw her and stopped with one arm still in her coat sleeve, and I watched last night arrive in her face—the rain, the mud, the inch of cold ground between our hands—and felt it arrive in my chest at the same moment.
Then she went faintly, beautifully pink and looked at Becca, who was watching the two of us with the deep serenity of a woman whose plan was proceeding on schedule.
And there it was—the scheme, laid out clean as a diagram the instant I saw that serenity.
The text. The green shirt. Don’t argue. A booth built for eight with seven of them already seated and one open stretch of bench, which was, by an astonishing coincidence, exactly where it needed to be.
My sister hadn’t invited me to dinner. She’d staged an operation, and I’d driven straight into it in my good boots.
“You said girls’ night,” Elizabeth accused. “I knew you were lying when Levi and Jude showed up, but seriously? Could you be more obvious?”
“I said night,” Becca answered. “The girl’s part was flexible.” She beamed at me. “Matt, you made it. Look at that, the green shirt.” She patted the one empty stretch of bench, which was, by an astonishing coincidence, directly beside Elizabeth. “Sit. We ordered pretzels.”
I looked at my sister. My sister looked back at me with both eyebrows up, daring me to make it weird. I ran the odds on turning around and driving home, and found I didn’t want them—which was the most damning piece of evidence in the whole case. She’d caught me, and worse, I was happy about it.
The horseshoe was full all the way around except for one open stretch of bench, and short of turning around and walking back out into the rain there was nothing to do but slide in around the curve next to Elizabeth Starling—close enough that her coat sleeve brushed my arm as she pulled it the rest of the way off, close enough to smell rain in her hair—and say, with all the composure I had left, “Evening.”
“Officer.” Her mouth was fighting a smile and losing. “Come here often?”
“Often enough.”
“He does not,” Levi said. “He comes in, drinks one beer standing up like he’s on a call, and leaves. I’ve seen him do it. It’s the saddest thing in this pub, and we have a broken jukebox speaker.”
“That is a gross mischaracterization,” I shot back, embarrassed because it was true.
“Sit down for a whole meal for once in your life, Hartford,” He dared me with a grin.
“I’m sitting.”
“You’re sitting like a man waiting for a radio call,” Jude said, without even turning around from his argument with Harper, and the table laughed, and Elizabeth laughed—not at me, somehow, never at me, a laugh that made room for me inside it—and the whole evening tipped, right there, from ambush into something I didn’t want to leave.
The pretzels came. Savannah Holloway brought them, took one look at the seating arrangement, and said nothing with an expression that said everything, and went to tell the kitchen, presumably, because Simon looked up through the pass a minute later and gave me a nod I chose not to interpret.
It was easy. That was what kept catching me off guard, all evening, how easy it was. Levi had one arm around Becca and settled the way a man settles when everyone he loves is inside arm’s reach.
And I couldn’t stop looking at her.
I had to be honest with myself about that, because I’d been telling myself a story about liaison duties and community obligations and being the responsible one, and it fell apart somewhere around the second time Elizabeth laughed at something Harper said and threw her head back to do it.
She laughs with her whole body. Nothing held back, nothing measured out—her eyes closing, her hand coming up to press against her collarbone as if she had to hold herself together, that loose knot of auburn hair giving up another piece each time.
There was a strand of it stuck to her cheek from the rain, and she never once noticed, and I spent an unreasonable amount of the evening not reaching over to move it.
I wanted to move it for her, but somehow, I held myself back and kept my hands to myself.
She was beautiful. I’d known that forever, in the way you know a fact.
But there’s a difference between knowing a woman is beautiful and sitting close enough to watch the amber light move across her face while she laughs at somebody else’s joke, so lit up she practically hums with it, and understanding—all the way down, in a place that has nothing to do with facts—that you’d sit in a booth in a rainstorm for the rest of your life just to keep being in the room while she glowed.
And her knee kept bumping mine under the table. Every few minutes. Neither of us moved away.
“The bear,” Harper said, picking the argument back up as if she’d bookmarked it. “Jude. It was a dog.”
“It was a bear,” he insisted.
“It was Brody Cassidy’s dog.”
“Fine then. Brody’s dog is the size of a bear.”