20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
REGAN
The barn empties how small-town events always empty.
Slowly, then all at once. One minute there are thirty people two-stepping on a dirt floor while Luke counts the beat from the stage.
The next, it’s truck doors slamming in the dark and headlights sweeping across the pasture, and Maeve collecting paper cups with the same efficiency she uses to color-code barn dance clipboards.
Mason fell asleep on a hay bale an hour ago.
Quinn scooped him up, the kid’s head lolling against her shoulder, one boot dangling.
Amy boxed up the leftover pie. Ben carried the speaker rig to Luke’s truck.
Maeve hugged me at the door, squeezed my arm, said, “You two did a beautiful job.” Then she smiled a smile that revealed she knew exactly what she was doing and wasn’t sorry about it.
Now it’s quiet.
The string lights are still up, looped rafter to rafter. The hay bales sit in their horseshoe. Maeve’s bunting hangs at the protractor-approved angles. The barn smells of hay and spilled cider and the cool late September night coming through the open doors.
And Caleb is still here.
He’s stacking folding chairs against the far wall.
Sleeves rolled. The light catches the tattoo on his forearm every time he reaches up.
He hasn’t said a word to me since the band finished their last song, which was a slow one that Luke dedicated to “everyone who’s still pretending they don’t want to dance with somebody.
” I swear Caleb’s grip tightened on the drumsticks.
I should go. The clinic has early appointments. There are six reasonable reasons to grab my jacket and walk to the truck.
I start pulling down bunting instead.
We work from opposite ends. Not talking. The silence isn’t hostile. It hasn’t been hostile for a while. It’s the other thing now. The hum underneath every conversation and every accidental touch and every time we end up alone and pretend we didn’t engineer it.
We meet in the middle. Which is what keeps happening with us.
“Good turnout,” I say. Coward’s small talk.
“Yeah.”
“Mason lasted longer than I thought. Three songs before he went down.”
“He’s been practicing all week.” Caleb’s voice is flat, but there’s warmth underneath. There always is, when it comes to Mason. “Noah’s going to hear about the two-step for days.”
“He was pretty good.”
“He was running in circles.”
“Enthusiastic circles.”
His mouth twitches in an almost-smile. The part before a smile, the part he always catches and kills. But tonight it lasts half a second longer, and I see it, and he sees me seeing it, and neither of us looks away.
The barn feels smaller.
“I should go,” I say. I don’t move.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t either.
A moth taps against one of the bulbs. The sound is too loud in the quiet. My pulse won’t settle.
“Caleb.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re about to say.”
“You don’t know what I’m about to say.”
“Yeah. I do.”
He’s probably right. He could always read me, even when we were teenagers and certain about everything. The fact that he still can after a decade of silence is either the best thing about us or the most dangerous.
“Fine.” I set the bunting crate on the nearest bale. “Then I’ll say something else. I’m done pretending I don’t feel this.”
He flinches. I hear the words after they’re out, tinny and too honest, and I can’t pull them back.
He doesn’t look at me. The muscle in his jaw flexes, releases, flexes. “You should pretend.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing good comes from this, Regan.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know exactly that.” His voice drops. Not anger. Something older. “Trust me.”
“Trust you.” The laugh comes out sharp and cold. “You won’t talk to me. You won’t tell me why you left. You won’t tell me what I did wrong. You’ve spent two months treating me like I’m guilty of something you won’t name, and you’re asking me to trust you?”
He turns. Full body, facing me, and the distance between us is shrinking because I’ve stepped forward without deciding to and he hasn’t stepped back.
“You know what you did,” he says, so quiet I almost don’t hear.
My chest tightens. “No. I don’t.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Tell the truth?” My voice is climbing and I can’t stop it.
“I don’t know what I did, Caleb. I have never known.
You left the morning after prom. No note.
No call. You just vanished. I went to your house, and you were gone.
I called a phone that was disconnected for three months. Nobody would tell me anything.”
“Because I know what you did.” Low. Quiet. His eyes locked on mine. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
He shakes his head. Steps back. And the wall comes down, the one I’ve been watching crack for weeks, except it doesn’t come down the way I wanted. It comes down like a portcullis. Fast, hard, between us.
“Caleb. Tell me what you think you saw.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Drop it.”
“No.”
“Drop it, Regan.”
“You can’t accuse me of something and refuse to say what it is. That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.” I’m shaking. My hands, my voice, the whole stupid architecture of the calm I’ve built for myself in this town. “Tell me. Whatever you think I did, say it to my face.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.”
He’s two feet away. Close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat, the tension running through his shoulders, the effort it’s taking him to hold still.
His hands are fists at his sides, and his breathing is wrong, and he’s looking at me with something behind his eyes I haven’t seen before. Not the cold wall. Not the anger.
Want.
Desperate, furious, terrified, want. It radiates off his skin like heat off asphalt. He wants to close the gap. I can see it in his whole body, in the way he’s leaning forward even as his feet stay planted, his fists clenching tighter like he’s physically holding himself back.
I should step away, but I don’t.
“Tell me,” I say. Quieter now. My voice has dropped to something I barely recognize. “Whatever it is. I can take it.”
“No.” His voice scrapes. “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I tell you, this is done. Whatever this is. It’s done.”
“This is already impossible. You’ve made sure of that.”
“That’s why you should pretend.” He’s close enough now that I can feel the warmth coming off his body. The cider-and-woodsmoke smell of him. “Pretend you don’t feel it. Walk out of this barn. Go back to your life.”
“My life is in this town. Where you live.”
“Then it’s going to be a problem.”
“It’s already a problem.”
We’re a foot apart, not touching. My heartbeat is in my throat, my wrists, the hollow of my chest. His face is angled down toward mine, and his eyes are dark and furious and honest, more honest than his words have been in two months, and I understand with perfect, terrible clarity that he wants to kiss me and he’s not going to.
And I want him to. God, I want him to. I want him to close the last twelve inches and put his hands on me and stop talking and stop fighting and stop holding a decade of silence between us like a shield.
I want to grab the front of his shirt and pull him down and find out if he still tastes the way he did when I was seventeen and stupid enough to believe that love was simple.
Neither of us moves.
The barn is silent. The string lights hum. The moth taps its slow, stupid rhythm against the bulb.
“I’m going to find out,” I say. “Whatever it is you think I did. I’m going to find out.”
“Leave it alone.”
“I can’t.”
“Leave it alone, Regan.”
“I’ve spent ten years leaving it alone. I’m done.”
He looks at me for a long time. Then he steps back. One step, then two, and the space between us opens up like a wound, and the air where his body used to be is cold.
“Lock up when you leave,” he says.
He walks out.
The gravel crunches. The truck door opens, shuts. The engine turns over and the headlights swing across the barn wall, and then they’re gone and it’s just me and the string lights and the quiet.
I stand in the middle of the barn we decorated together and press both palms flat on the nearest hay bale and breathe. My hands are still shaking. My heart won’t slow down. My whole body is vibrating at a pitch that hurts.
Because I know what you did.
What did I do?
I saw it.
Saw what? What could he possibly have seen? Prom night was perfect. We danced. We made plans. He told me he wanted to marry me. I stepped outside for five minutes because the gym was hot and I needed air.
Five minutes.
I press my forehead against the hay bale. It smells of dust and dry grass. The string lights cast long, warm shadows across the dirt floor, and I stay there, bent over, hands flat, breathing, trying to think through the noise in my chest.
He saw something. He believes he saw something.
And whatever he thinks he saw broke us in half.
I straighten up and wipe my eyes. They’re wet.
The barn needs locking. I pull the doors closed, loop the chain, click the padlock shut. My hands are steady enough for that. The truck is where I left it. The key goes in. The engine starts.
I count the minutes it takes me to drive back to the clinic.
I’m going to find out.
Even if what I find out finishes this for good.