12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
REGAN
The thing about the Briar Rose is that it becomes a habit, part of your daily routine before you’ve even decided to make it so.
Amy knows my order now. Black, no sugar, and whatever pie is freshest, which this week is peach because peach season is hanging on by its fingernails. She has the plate on the counter before I’ve sat down.
“You look like a woman who skipped breakfast,” she says.
“I had a granola bar in the truck.”
“That’s not breakfast. That’s an apology to breakfast.” She refills my mug without asking.
I laugh, and it surprises me how easy it is after the life I thought I was settled in crumbled. I thought I was coming here to save my career and start afresh. I hadn’t even considered the possibility I might make some new friends.
The bell over the door clatters, and Maeve Callahan blows in, carrying a tote bag and a look on her face that makes me think she’s about to volunteer me for something.
“Regan.” She says my name as if she’s been looking for me. “Good. You’re coming Saturday.”
“To what?”
“Bonfire. Sweetgum Hollow.” She drops onto the stool beside me. “Whole family, half the town, too much food. There’ll be music. It’ll be fun.”
“I’ve got early calls on Sunday.”
“Everyone’s got early calls on Sunday. This is a ranch town.
” She says it like she’s already won, which I’m learning is a Maeve thing.
“You’ve been here a month and you’ve met us all in crisis.
Foaling, colic, that gelding with the abscess.
You should see us when we’re not standing over something bleeding. ”
Amy snorts into the pie case. “She’s not wrong.”
“I appreciate it. I really do. But I don’t want to crash a family thing.”
“It’s not a family thing. It’s a town thing.” Maeve fixes me with a look I imagine works on her brothers and small children alike. “And you’re in this town now.”
“Maeve.”
“Regan.”
We hold there a second. I’ve gone up against vets twice my age, a barn full of panicked owners, a stallion who wanted me dead. I lose this one in about four seconds.
“Fine,” I say. “What do I bring?”
“Yourself. And a jacket. It turns cold up the hollow after dark.” She’s already standing, already onto the next thing, tote bag back on her shoulder. “Seven o’clock. Follow the smoke.”
She’s gone before I can change my mind, which is, I suspect, the entire strategy.
*
Sweetgum Hollow at dusk is the prettiest thing I’ve seen in years.
The meadow drops into a natural bowl, ringed with trees just starting to think about turning.
The creek runs along the low edge of it, catching the last of the light.
Someone’s built the fire big and proper, and the smoke goes straight up into a sky that can’t decide between gold and dark.
There are trucks parked at angles in the grass.
Folding tables. A cooler the size of a small horse.
I hear them before I’m fully out of the truck. Laughter, a guitar being tuned, a kid yelling about marshmallows. The sound of people who are fully at home in their surroundings.
Suddenly I feel like I’m five-years-old about to start a new school where everyone else already knows each other. I almost get back in and drive home.
Then Amy spots me and hollers my name across the meadow, and that’s that. I’m here.
Josie hands me a beer. Ethan nods at me, which from Ethan is basically a hug. Maeve introduces me to people I’ve already met and a few I haven’t. Grace, who is two and feral, attaches herself to my leg and informs me she has a dog. I tell her I’m a dog doctor. Her eyes go wide.
It’s easy. That’s the thing nobody warned me about. It’s so easy to be folded into this, to let the noise and the warmth close over my head.
And then I see him.
Caleb is at the edge of it. I find him before I mean to.
He’s leaning against the tailgate of a truck a little apart from the fire, a beer hanging from one hand, watching the whole thing the way I imagine he watches everything.
Like he’s clocking exits. Like he’s waiting for something to go wrong so he can be the one who fixes it.
He’s not looking at me. For once.
I tell myself I’m only looking because I’m a professional and Bear is my patient and Caleb is attached to Bear. Where Caleb goes, Bear goes, and I should check whether the dog made the trip.
I don’t see the dog. I see Caleb’s forearms in the firelight, the ink running down to those scarred, careful hands, and I make myself look at the fire instead.
But my eyes keep going back anyway. This is ridiculous. Stop it, Regan, just stop it.
Caleb stops leaning on the truck and walks toward the fire. I can’t tell if he’s seen me yet. He sits down on a bale, catches my eye and nods. My cheeks burn. Nothing to do with the fire.
“Regan, you made it!” Luke grins at me, then drops onto a hay bale near his cousin. “Caleb. Tell Regan about the time you tried to two-step.”
“No,” Caleb says.
“He went down like a felled oak,” Luke tells me anyway. “Took out a whole table of pies. Mabel June banned him for a month.”
“That was you,” Caleb says, not looking up from his beer.
“It was not.”
“You blamed me so Mabel June wouldn’t ban you from the diner.” He takes a slow pull of the beer. “Worked, too. You ate there the next morning. Coward.”
Maeve walks over arm in arm with Quinn. “Don’t believe anything Luke tells you,” she says, finding a bale and pulling me down onto it beside them. “He’s the best storyteller in Wild Briar Creek, but never assume the stories are true.”
Caleb tells us about the time when they were kids and Luke tricked him into stealing a walking stick from the hardware store. He has us in stitches, and for a second his whole face opens with it.
I didn’t know he was funny.
In two years of loving him as a teenager, I learned a lot of things about Caleb Callahan. I did not learn that.
You knew a boy. This is a man.
I drink my beer.
And then a small body launches itself across the firelight and into Caleb’s lap without slowing down, the way only a six-year-old who has never once been told no by this particular adult would dare.
“Caleb.” Mason plants both hands on Caleb’s chest and looks up at him as if he’s about to negotiate a hostage release. “Can I have your marshmallow stick. Mine breaked.”
“Broke,” Quinn says from beside me, not even looking.
“Broke,” Mason agrees, uninterested.
Caleb looks down at the kid in his lap and hands Mason the stick.
“Don’t put it in your eye,” he says.
“I won’t put it in my eye.”
Caleb frowns at him.
“You put one in your eye last time.”
“That was a different time,” Mason says with enormous dignity, and settles back against Caleb’s chest like it’s a recliner he owns.
He doesn’t get down. Caleb doesn’t move him.
The kid just stays there, sticky and certain, and Caleb shifts his beer to his other hand so he’s not holding it near him, and goes back to watching the fire with a six-year-old using his sternum as a backrest.
The real Caleb. Finally. He doesn’t perform the gruff-man-softened-by-child routine for anybody. He’s not even aware he’s doing it. He just lets the kid be there, because the kid wants to be there, and the wall I’ve spent a decade reinforcing develops a hairline crack.
I think about the man who left me without a word. Who looked at me ten years later like the sight of my face was an insult. Who has spoken maybe forty words to me since I got to this town, and most of them about a dog.
And then I look at the Caleb in front of me now, holding still so a child can lean on him.
I don’t know which of them is real. The one in the stable yard or the one by the fire. The boy who vanished, or the man who hands over his marshmallow stick and tells a kid not to put it in his eye.
Maybe they’re the same person with the walls down for one night. Maybe the walls are the real thing and this is the lie.
But I want to know. That’s the part that scares me. Standing in this beautiful meadow, with a beer going warm in my hand and a town closing over my head, I want to know which version of Caleb Callahan is true more than I’ve wanted anything in a long, careful time.
Caleb glances up and catches me watching him.
He doesn’t look away this time.
Neither do I.
Oh, I think. I’m in trouble.
I drink my beer, and I don’t move, and I let him keep looking.