19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
CALEB
The text from Maeve comes in at eight a.m., and it’s got that tone. The written version of her putting both hands flat on the table and smiling at you as if you’ve already agreed to something.
Barn dance decorating today! Luke’s got rodeo, Noah’s taking Mason to the dentist, Ben’s doing fence repairs on the north line. I’d do it myself, but Jack and I have a meeting with a local breeder. You’re the last Callahan standing! Regan’s already confirmed. Noon. Love you!
Six exclamation marks. A personal record, even for Maeve.
I read the message twice. The first time is to absorb it. The second to count the number of Callahans who are suddenly, conveniently, unavailable.
Five. The answer is five.
I text back: Fine.
She sends a heart emoji. I put the phone down and look at Bear.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
He thumps his tail once against the Airstream floor. Traitorous animal.
The barn is east of the main house, down past the tack room, the one they use for community stuff. Hay storage in the loft, dirt floor, big sliding doors that let in the light. It smells like hay and old wood and the dry dust that comes off everything in Tennessee in September.
Regan’s truck is already there.
I sit in my own for a full minute before I cut the engine.
This is the part where, six weeks ago, I’d have texted Maeve back with something unprintable and driven to town.
Six weeks ago, I had the wall intact, and the anger running hot, and the photo on my phone like a weapon I could pull whenever the resolve got soft.
The wall’s still there. The anger’s still there. The photo’s still there.
But she sat on my workshop floor three days ago and didn’t ask anything of me, and the wall has a crack in it now, and I don’t know how to patch something like that.
I get out.
She’s inside, standing on a stepladder with a string of lights looped over her arm, trying to reach the first rafter hook.
She’s in her usual jeans and flannel. Her hair’s pulled back and there’s a smudge of dust on her jaw.
The man I am now thinks fuck, she’s hot.
The heartbroken teenager in me thinks, get the hell off my ranch.
“Hey,” she says, not turning her head.
“Hey.”
“Maeve left instructions.” She nods toward a clipboard on a hay bale. “I’d call them thorough, but I think the word is unhinged.”
The clipboard has three pages. Color-coded. A hand-drawn diagram of light placement with measurements in both feet and meters because Maeve, at some point, decided the barn dance needed international specifications.
“She’s measured the hay bale spacing,” I say.
“In centimeters.”
“There’s a section on bunting angles.”
“Page two. With a protractor sketch.”
I look at her. She looks at me. Her face breaks into a smile that does stupid things to my insides, and I have to look away.
“All right,” I say. “Lights first.”
The thing about physical labor is it gives you somewhere to put your hands and your eyes, and if you’re smart, you keep both on the job and not on the woman standing four feet away on a ladder.
I’m not smart.
The ladder gets held while she hooks the first string. Her boot is level with my chest, and her weight shifts every time she reaches. The ladder creaks, and my hand stays flat on the rail, and my eyes on the rafter, not on the strip of skin between her shirt hem and her waistband.
Mostly.
“Higher or lower?” she asks, holding the light string against two different hooks.
“Higher.”
“You sure? Maeve’s diagram says lower.”
“Higher looks better.”
She clips it and steps down. Stands close enough that I can smell her. Not perfume. Soap and sunscreen and something warm underneath. I step back.
We move to the next rafter. And the next. The lights go up in loops, warm white, and the afternoon light through the doors catches the dust, and the whole barn glows.
“Hand me that box,” she says, pointing to a crate on the floor.
The box goes up. Our fingers brush on the cardboard edge, and neither of us mentions it, but her breath catches. We both felt it.
“Mason’s going to love this,” she says, threading lights through a rafter hook. “He told me at the clinic last week that he’s been practicing his two-step.”
“He’s six. He doesn’t two-step. He just runs in circles and calls it dancing.”
“That’s basically the two-step.”
“You’ve never danced at the Rusty Spur.”
“I’ve been to the Rusty Spur.”
“But you didn’t dance.” I hold the ladder steady as she stretches for the far hook. “Which, by the way, is a miracle. Friday night is when Luke makes everyone get up. If you can’t two-step by the third song, he drags you onto the floor.”
“Sounds like Luke.”
“It’s worse than it sounds. He counts out loud.”
The sound she makes is almost a laugh. Short, surprised, the kind that escapes before you can catch it. She covers it with her hand, and I look up at her on the ladder, and she’s smiling down at me, and for about two seconds neither of us is pretending this is normal.
I look away first.
We do the hay bales next. Maeve wants them in a horseshoe around the dance floor, with her specific gap widths, and I carry them two at a time because it’s easier than standing still.
Regan positions them, checking measurements against the clipboard, making adjustments with her hip when they’re close enough.
“You played last year, right?” she asks, brushing hay off her jeans. “The barn dance.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you play?”
“You know what I play.”
She looks at me. Steady. “I know what you played in high school. And I know you play drums for the Wild Briar Boys, but I’m wondering if there’s anything else.”
Something tightens in my chest. A clean line between then and now, laid down easy, no accusation in it. She’s not pretending the past doesn’t exist. She’s just not letting it be the only thing that does.
“Drums,” I say. “Like you heard when you watched us.”
“I know that, but what about guitar and keys? You still play those too?”
“No, just drums now. I was never great at guitar or keys.”
“Liar.” She smiles. “Noah told me you’re the best musician in the band, and if I ever tell you he said that, he’ll deny it under oath.”
“That sounds like Noah.”
“He also said you write. Songs.”
I don’t answer. I lift a bale and carry it to the far end. She follows.
“Caleb.”
“I don’t write songs.”
“Noah says you do.”
“Noah talks too much.”
“Noah barely talks at all. That’s how I know he meant it.”
The bale hits the floor harder than it needs to. She’s standing two feet away with hay in her hair and dust on her jaw, and she’s looking at me like she can see past every wall I’ve put up. Because she can.
“Why does it matter?” I ask. “What I play. Whether I write. Why does that matter to you?”
“Because I’m trying to know who you are now,” she says. “Not who you were then.”
The barn goes quiet. Dust dances in the light. The string lights hum faintly on the extension cord. Her face is tilted up toward mine, and her eyes are fixed on mine, not giving me a single inch of room to pretend this conversation is about music.
I should walk away. I should pick up another bale, change the subject, make a crack about Maeve’s protractor. I should do any of the things I’ve been doing since she got here whenever she gets this close to the real thing.
“You’ve been on my mind.”
The words land in the space between us like something dropped from a height.
I hear them after they’re out. Too late.
Too honest. The wrong thing to say to the woman I’ve spent a decade convincing myself I’m right to hate.
I wait for her to flinch, or laugh, or step back.
Any of those I could work with. Any of those I could build the wall back around.
She doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t laugh.
She doesn’t step back.
She holds my gaze. Her expression doesn’t change, the barn is completely silent, and she says, “Good.”
One word. No heat, no victory, no performance. Just one word, laid down between us like a line drawn in the dirt.
Good.
I can’t move. My hands are at my sides, hay dust on my knuckles.
She’s two feet away, the string lights are turning the dust to gold, and there’s an edge to this I’m not going to be able to walk back from.
Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not with the photo or the anger or the ten years of certainty I’ve used like armor.
She breaks first. Picks up the clipboard, turns to the next page of Maeve’s instructions.
“We still need bunting,” she says. Her voice is steady. Almost. “Page two says thirty-degree angles.”
“Thirty-five.”
“You read the protractor sketch.”
“I read everything.”
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t need to. The charge in the barn is real, and we both know it, and for the next forty minutes we hang bunting and move hay bales and test the speaker setup and don’t mention what just happened.
The drive back to the Airstream is all open windows and warm air. Bear’s waiting in the doorway. He lifts his head when I cut the engine and watches me sit there with my hands on the wheel, not moving.
You’ve been on my mind.
Three days ago she sat on my workshop floor, and I let her. Today I opened my mouth and let the one true thing out, and she caught it, and she didn’t hand it back.
Good.
The point of no return is close. I can feel it the way you feel weather coming, the pressure change before the sky breaks open.
It’s been building since she walked into the stable yard and turned around and said my name.
Every day I stay in this town and she stays in this town, it builds.
Every time I let her sit with me instead of pushing her away, it builds.
Bear puts his chin on my knee through the open truck door.
“I know,” I tell him.
He knows.
The dead bulb in the workshop is still working. The one she told me to fix.
Evening draws in, and the clearing goes quiet. Night insects in the hickories. The creek running low. Somewhere past the treeline a screech owl calls, and another one answers.
She’s been on my mind. That’s not the problem.
The problem is she’s been there for ten years, and I just ran out of reasons to pretend she hasn’t.