30. Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
REGAN
Three weeks of this. Three weeks of Caleb at my door with food he claims Maeve sent, except Maeve told me last Tuesday she hasn’t made a casserole in a month. Three weeks of his truck in my parking lot after dark, and his boots on my stairs, and Bear settling on the rug like he pays rent.
Three weeks of falling asleep next to him and waking up with his arm across my waist and his breathing slow against my neck.
We don’t name it. He won’t name it, and I’ve stopped trying because naming it means holding it up to the light, and I’m afraid of what the light will show.
So we exist in the space between what this is and what we call it.
He comes to me. I go to him. We eat together at the Briar Rose or on the tailgate of his truck in the clearing, Bear between us, stealing crusts.
He plays the Friday gig at the Spur, and I sit in the back booth with Amy and watch him behind the drums. He catches my eye once during Noah’s slow song, and the look on his face nearly takes me apart.
It’s good. It’s so good it scares me. Because underneath the good, there’s something else. A crack I can feel but can’t see. A question he won’t answer. A door he keeps locked.
I’ve asked. Twice. Early on, before the workshop I asked what happened when he left.
He shut down. After the workshop, I asked again, softer.
He said he couldn’t talk about it. Both times his face went blank, like someone pulling shutters closed, and I let it go because pushing Caleb is like pushing a wall.
You hurt your hands, and the wall doesn’t move.
But the crack is still there. I feel it when he’s lying next to me and his breathing changes, goes shallow, and he stares at the ceiling like he’s running numbers in his head.
I feel it when I mention prom and his jaw tightens.
I feel it in the careful way he touches me, tender and desperate at the same time, like he’s memorizing something he expects to lose.
He’s waiting for this to end. Happy, but waiting. The way the air goes still before a storm and the birds disappear.
I’m tired of waiting.
It’s Saturday night and I’m at the Airstream. The clearing is dark around us and the fire has burned down to coals. Bear is asleep in the doorway, and we’re on the mattress on the floor. It’s the saddest bed I’ve ever seen and also my favorite place in the world because he’s in it.
His hand is on my stomach. My T-shirt, his T-shirt, the one I stole three days ago and haven’t given back.
He’s on his back, staring at the ceiling of the Airstream, and the quiet between us could go either way.
Easy or heavy. I’ve been lying here for ten minutes trying to decide whether I’m brave enough to break it.
You said you’d fight for this. So fight.
“Caleb.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to ask you something, and I need you not to shut down.”
His hand goes still on my stomach. Not pulling away. Just stopping. Like a machine pausing between cycles.
“Okay,” he says, but he sounds wary.
I turn on my side to face him, but he won’t look at me. He keeps staring at the ceiling, at the riveted metal panels, at the nothing above us.
“What did I do?”
Silence.
“Caleb. Please. I’ve been asking you this for weeks. I’ve been asking you this for ten years. What did I do? Tell me what you think I did.”
He closes his eyes. His jaw is tight. The tendons in his neck stand out, and I watch his chest rise and fall, and I wait, the way I’ve always waited for him, patient and present and terrified.
“You were with someone else,” he says.
The words come out flat. Like he’s reading off a card he’s carried in his wallet for a decade.
“On prom night, when you went out for some air. You were with someone else.”
I stare at him.
“I wasn’t,” I say.
“I saw it, Regan.”
“You saw what?” I’m sitting up now. The T-shirt bunched at my waist, my hands in my lap, my pulse doing something fast and wrong. “What did you see?”
“I have proof.”
“Proof of what? I wasn’t with anyone. I went out for some air because the hall was hot, and by the time I got back in, you’d gone. You left, and until a few weeks ago, I thought I’d never see you again.”
His face moves through so many emotions I can’t tell which one it will land on. Anger? Sadness? Jealousy?
“Drew took a photo,” he says.
My blood goes cold. “What?”
“Drew was in the parking lot. He saw you with someone. He took a photo on his phone and showed me.” Caleb’s voice is steady, but his hands are fists against the mattress.
“You were there outside, all beautiful in your prom dress. And there was a guy. Tall. His arms around you. His mouth on your neck.”
I can’t breathe. “Show me,” I say.
“Regan.”
“Show me the photo, Caleb.”
He sits up and reaches for his jeans on the floor. His phone is in the back pocket. He unlocks it, scrolls, and turns the screen toward me.
The photo is dark and grainy. A parking lot at night, badly lit, shot from a distance on a phone camera that was cheap ten years ago. Two figures. A girl in a green prom dress and a tall man with his arms around her.
I look at it. My hands are shaking. No fucking way. This cannot be happening.
“That’s Tyler,” I say, trying and failing to hide the anger that’s making my voice shake.
Caleb doesn’t move.
“That’s my brother. Remember, my twin? The one you were best buddies with until you dumped his sister on prom night, just after you asked her to marry you?”
The words come out steady and quiet, and I don’t recognize my own voice. I take a deep breath and carry on.
“Tyler was in the parking lot when I went outside. He’d come to find me. He’d just found out he’d won a football scholarship and wanted me to be the first to know. We were celebrating. That photo was a moment of joy. And for ten years you’ve turned it into something dark, something dirty.”
Caleb is staring at me. The phone is still in his hand, the photo glowing between us, and his face, I’ll never forget his face. The color leaving it. The certainty crumbling like a wall hit at the foundation. The understanding arriving slow and total and devastating.
“What?” he says, and I wonder if he heard anything I just said.
“Tyler. My brother. He won a football scholarship. I was congratulating him. We were celebrating.”
“That’s not…” He stops. Looks at the photo. Looks at me. “Drew said…”
“Drew was wrong.”
“He saw you with…”
“He saw me with my brother.”
The Airstream is silent. Bear lifts his head in the doorway, ears forward, sensing the shift.
Caleb looks at the photo again. I watch him look at it. The recalculation. The ten-year story rewriting itself, every assumption, every certainty, every night he spent staring at this image and feeding the anger that kept him upright.
“I wasn’t with anyone,” I say. “I was never with anyone. That’s my brother in that photo, Caleb. My twin. How could you think I’d cheat on you? How could you not have known that the only man I ever wanted was you?”
My voice cracks.
“And you saw that photo and you enlisted the next morning. And you left. Without a word. Without asking me. Without one single conversation. You looked at a dark, blurry picture of my brother hugging me, and you blew up our entire lives.”
Caleb puts the phone down. Face-up on the mattress. The photo still glowing.
He doesn’t speak. His hands are on his knees, his head is down, and he’s so still that for a second I think he’s stopped breathing.
“Ten years,” I say. “You’ve been carrying this for ten years. And you never asked.”
He flinches. The first time I’ve ever seen Caleb Callahan flinch.
“You never asked,” I say again, and the tears come now, not the ugly crying from the truck, this is different, this is hot and furious and clean, the tears of a woman who has just learned that the worst thing that ever happened to her was a mistake.
A misunderstanding. A dark photo taken by a seventeen-year-old in a parking lot.
“Regan.” His voice breaks. “Regan, I…”
“Don’t.”
I get off the mattress. I find my jeans. My shoes. I pull them on and my hands are shaking, and I can’t get the left shoe on because my fingers won’t cooperate, and he reaches for me and I pull my arm away.
“Don’t touch me.”
He pulls back like I’ve burned him.
“I need to leave,” I say.
“Please.”
“I can’t be here right now.”
Bear is standing now. Looking between us. His tail is down.
I walk past him down the Airstream steps and into the clearing. The fire is dead. The sky is full of stars, and I can’t see any of them because my eyes are full of water and my chest is full of something that has no name, fury and grief and relief and horror all tangled together.
My truck is parked at the edge of the clearing. I get in. Close the door. Sit there.
Through the open doorway of the Airstream, I can see Caleb. He hasn’t moved. He’s sitting on the mattress with the phone beside him and his head in his hands.
I start the engine. The headlights sweep across the clearing and catch him, just for a second, framed in the doorway. A man sitting alone in a tin can with a photo of a mistake and a dog who doesn’t understand what just happened.