32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Two
REGAN
The apartment is dark when I get home. The fairy lights are on their timer, soft gold across the bookshelf, and I stand in the kitchen in his T-shirt and I can’t stop shaking.
All those wasted years because of a photo?
A photo of me and Tyler. My twin brother.
At prom. Tyler who called me into the parking lot because he couldn’t wait one more minute to tell me he’d got his football scholarship, full ride, the thing he’d been chasing since any of us could remember.
Tyler who picked me up and swung me around and held me so tight I couldn’t breathe because that’s how Tyler loves, with his whole body, his whole heart, no half measures.
Someone took a photo. In the dark. From a distance. And an eighteen-year-old boy looked at it, saw betrayal, and he left.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Ten years.
Two lives. A decade of silence and wondering and lying awake at three a.m. asking myself what I did wrong, what part of me wasn’t enough, what invisible flaw sent him running.
All of it because Drew Garner had a cheap phone and a bad angle and Caleb Callahan would rather believe the worst than ask one question.
I make it to the bathroom before the crying starts.
My knees hit the tile, and I stay there with my back against the bathtub and cry until my ribs ache.
The tears are not elegant and silent. They’re ugly and accompanied by animal sounds, raw and echoing off the blue tiles and the little plant on the windowsill that I water every morning because I am a person who takes care of things.
For ten years I lived with the wreckage he left behind, and I kept going, and I never knew why.
A fucking photo.
The anger comes after the tears dry.
It arrives like a storm, all-consuming, filling the apartment until the walls feel too small. I get up off the bathroom floor. Wash my face. Look at myself in the mirror and the woman looking back is furious in a way I haven’t been since I was seventeen and he disappeared.
How dare he? How dare he look at a grainy picture in the dark and decide he knew the whole story? How dare he not ask? One question. One phone call. One knock on my door. Was that you with someone? Who was that guy? Ten seconds of courage. That’s all it would have taken.
How dare he carry that photo for years like a wound he was proud of?
Like a medal for surviving something that never happened.
How dare he build a shrine to his own hurt and never once, not once, consider that I was hurting too?
That I spent a decade measuring every man I met against the ghost of him and finding them lacking.
That I moved to this town for a fresh start and walked into his family and his dog and his workshop and fell in love with him again because I never stopped, I never once stopped, and he had a photo of my brother in his phone the whole time and he thought it was proof.
I pace the apartment. Kitchen to living room and back. The grandmother’s quilt is on the couch, and I want to wrap myself in it and I also want to throw it through the window.
He didn’t ask.
That’s the part that I keep coming back to.
Not the photo. Not Drew. The not asking.
Because the photo is a mistake. Drew made a mistake.
But choosing not to ask isn’t a mistake.
It’s a decision. He decided, consciously, deliberately, that a blurry image was more reliable than the girl who loved him. He chose the photo over me.
And then he enlisted. And he served. And he came home carrying things I can’t imagine, and he built a life in an Airstream with a rescue dog and a drum kit, and he never once picked up the phone.
Because he was afraid.
The thought arrives uninvited. I don’t want it. I push it away.
It comes back.
He was afraid.
I know about Bill.
Not the details. Not the how, or the when, or the morning after.
But I know that Caleb’s father killed himself.
I know it happened when Caleb was a little boy.
I know his mother was there and then she wasn’t, drifting in and out like a radio signal, present but unreachable, until she was just gone.
I know that for Caleb and Ben, the Callahan ranch is the only home they’ve known, even if they lived elsewhere for most of their lives.
I know what a father’s suicide does to a boy.
I’m a vet, not a therapist. But I’ve read enough.
I’ve watched enough animals flinch at a raised hand to understand what early damage looks like.
The hypervigilance. The expectation of loss.
The way a creature that’s been hurt learns to read every situation as threat, because the one time it didn’t, the worst thing happened.
Caleb looked at that photo and he didn’t see a blurry image. He saw confirmation. He saw the world proving what his father’s death had already taught him: that good things end, that love is a prelude to leaving, that the safest place to be is alone.
He was primed to believe it. That doesn’t make it right. That doesn’t undo ten years of silence. But it makes it human.
The anger doesn’t leave. But it makes room for something else. A grief so deep it feels never-ending.
I sit on the couch, pull the quilt around my shoulders, and stare at nothing. At midnight, I call Tyler. He picks up on the second ring. The twin hotline, he calls it. Always open.
“Reg?” Sleep in his voice. The sound of sheets shifting. “You okay?”
“I’m okay.” My voice is steady, which surprises me. “I need to tell you something.”
I tell him all of it. About the photo, about Drew, what Caleb believed, and what it means.
Tyler doesn’t speak for a long time. “That was me,” he says finally. “In the parking lot.”
“I know.”
“My scholarship. I came to tell you about my scholarship.” His voice cracks. Tyler, who is strong and steady and has never once let me see him break. “That was the best night of my life, Reg. I was so happy. I couldn’t wait to tell you.”
“I know.”
“And someone took a fucking picture, and that’s why he left? All of this because of a hug?”
“Yeah.”
Silence. Then Tyler’s voice, low and wrecked: “I’ll come down. I can be there by morning.”
“Don’t.”
“Regan.”
“Ty, this isn’t yours to fix. You hugged your sister because you were happy. That’s not something you should have to apologize for.”
“I’m not apologizing. I’m coming because you’re crying and I can hear it.”
He can always hear it. Even when I think I’m hiding it, even when my voice is steady and my breathing is controlled, Tyler hears the crack underneath. Twin frequency. The same way I can hear his.
“Stay home,” I say. “Please. I need to sit with this. I need to think.”
“You don’t have to think alone.”
“I know. But I need to.”
He’s quiet. Then he says, “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“I will.”
I hang up and put the phone on the coffee table. The screen goes dark.
Tyler’s voice that night is imprinted on my brain. I did it, Reg. I actually did it. We were both so happy, I was so proud of him. And someone was standing fifty feet away with a camera phone about to blow up my entire world.
I go down to the clinic at two in the morning because I can’t bear to spend another minute in my empty apartment.
The exam room is dark other than the moonlight coming through the window, catching the edge of the steel table, the jar of tongue depressors, and the chart on the wall with horse anatomy diagrammed in clean, labeled lines.
This is my room. My tools. My work. The thing I built when everything else was broken.
I sit in the chair where I sit when I’m writing up case notes after a long day.
The question isn’t whether I still love him.
I do. That hasn’t changed since I was seventeen and he looked at me across the hall at prom and I forgot how to think straight.
What I felt in his Airstream, his hands and his mouth and the way he said my name like it was the most important word he knew, that’s the same feeling, grown up, tested, scarred, but the same.
The question isn’t whether I want to forgive him. I do. I want to forgive him so badly it sits in my chest like a second heartbeat. The question is whether I can.
Forgiving means trusting him again. Trusting that he won’t run the next time something looks wrong from a distance.
Trusting that the man who spent ten years choosing a photo over a conversation has learned to ask the question instead of assuming the answer.
Trusting that the wall is actually down and not just lowered.
I don’t know if I can do that. But I know what happens if I don’t.
I go back to the version of my life without him.
The dating apps and the quiet apartments, and the men who are fine but aren’t Caleb.
The measuring and the lacking and the constant, low-grade ache of missing something I never got to finish.
The clinic is quiet. The moon moves across the window.
Somewhere outside, a dog barks and falls silent.
I sit there for a long time. I won’t decide anything tonight.
But beneath the anger and the grief, something is forming.
Not a decision yet. Still a battle between my heart and my head.
But I have a feeling I know which one will win.
You’ve never been a woman who plays it safe.
I turn off the exam room light, go upstairs, and get into bed.
Tomorrow I’ll decide what to do and how to get out of this fucking mess.
But deep down, the choice is already made, whether I want to acknowledge it or not.
I’ve known since the parking lot at prom, since he said one day he’d marry me, since the first time he looked at me and I forgot the rest of the room.
I close my eyes. The fairy lights go off on their timer. The apartment goes dark.