Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
HARRISON
The hospital smells the way all hospitals smell. Cleaning solution and something underneath it that no amount of chemicals covers up.
Paige walks beside me through the corridor, her hand in mine, turquoise at her throat.
She wore a sundress. I've never seen her in a dress.
Light blue cotton, boots underneath because she's still Paige, and when she came out of the hotel bathroom this morning, I stood there with my coffee going cold in my hand.
"You're staring," she'd said, smoothing the fabric over her thighs.
"Yeah."
"That gonna be a problem?"
"Probably."
She'd kissed me. Quick. Coffee-flavored. Steadying. Like she knew what today was going to cost me and was frontloading the good.
Room 412. The door's cracked. Wyatt's voice carries into the hall, low, talking to someone. I stop walking.
Paige squeezes my hand.
"Right here," she says.
"I know."
"Whenever you're ready."
My brother's voice. I haven't heard it in twelve years except in dreams, and even in dreams it's the voice from the barbecue joint, laughing at something Delaney said, younger, lighter. This voice is different. Tired. Thin.
I push the door open.
The room's small. Single window, blinds half-drawn, afternoon light cutting across the linoleum. Machines beeping. An IV pole. Flowers on the sill that are starting to brown at the edges, which means they've been here a while.
And my mother.
She's half the woman I remember. That's the first thing that registers, and it registers in my knees.
The humming woman from the kitchen, the one who cut pound cake and ran a house and filled a room just by being in it, is eighty pounds of bone and papery skin propped up on pillows.
Her eyes are closed. Her hands are on the blanket, and the veins show blue through skin that used to be brown from gardening.
Wyatt stands from the bedside chair.
He looks like me. That's the thing nobody warned me about. Twelve years, and he's filled out, and the jaw is the same, and the eyes are the same, and the hands gripping the chair back are Harrison hands, and I hate how much we look like the same man.
"Aiden." His voice cracks on the second syllable.
"Wyatt."
His eyes go to Paige. To our hands. Back to me.
"Mama," he says, touching her arm. "Mama, wake up. He's here."
Her eyes open. Slow. Unfocused. The medication's got her somewhere between here and wherever she goes when she sleeps. Then her gaze finds me and sharpens, and the sound she makes is small and wet and cuts straight through my chest.
"Aiden." A whisper. "Oh, baby. Oh, my baby."
My hand tightens on Paige's so hard she'll have bruises.
"Hey, Mama."
"Come here. Come here, let me see you."
I cross the room. Sit in the chair Wyatt gives up. Her hand finds my face, trembling, cold, and she touches my beard and my cheek and the line of my jaw.
"You're so big," she says. "When did you get so big?"
"Been a while, Mama."
"Too long." Tears. Running into the pillow. "Too long, baby. I thought you weren't coming."
"I'm here."
Her eyes slide past me. Find Paige in the doorway.
"Who's this?"
Paige steps forward. Crouches by the bed so she's eye level. Takes my mother's other hand in both of hers, gentle.
"I'm Paige, ma'am. I'm with your son."
My mother looks at Paige. Looks at me. Something passes over her face. Relief, maybe. Gratitude. She squeezes Paige's hand with what little grip she's got.
"You're beautiful," my mother says. "Aiden, she's beautiful."
"I know, Mama."
"Are you taking care of my boy?"
"Best I can," Paige says, smiling. "He makes it difficult."
My mother laughs. Weak. Breathy. But real.
"He always did," she says. "Stubborn since the day he was born."
For a few minutes, it's almost good. My mother asks Paige questions. Where she's from, what she does, how we met. Paige gives her the version we rehearsed on the plane, close enough to true that it flows easy. Ranch hand. Contractor. Coffee every morning.
"She brought you coffee?" My mother's face softens. "Aiden never lets anybody do anything for him."
"I didn't let her," I say. "She just showed up."
"Good," Mama says. "Good girl."
Paige's eyes are shining. She blinks hard. Holds my mother's hand.
Then Mama looks at me, and her face changes. The softness is still there, but something else comes underneath it. That look. The one I know. The one that sat across from me at the kitchen table twelve years ago.
"I knew you'd come," she says. "I told Wyatt. Give him time. He always comes around. That's my Aiden."
The room contracts.
Comes around.
Like I've been pouting. Like I took a long drive to cool off and it just went on a bit too long. Like twelve years of rebuilding my life from sawdust in a state where nobody knows my name was a tantrum she was waiting out.
I don't move. My face doesn't change. But something inside my chest closes up tight and fast, a trap door I forgot was there, and Paige must feel it because her eyes cut to me.
"Mama needs rest," Wyatt says from the corner. "Maybe we could grab some food downstairs?"
I stand. Lean down. Kiss my mother's forehead. She smells like hospital soap. Nothing like the kitchen.
"I'll come back tomorrow, Mama."
"Bring Paige."
"Yes, ma'am."
The cafeteria's half empty. Bad coffee. Worse fluorescent light. Wyatt sits across from me with a sandwich he's not eating, and Paige is at the counter getting water.
"She seems great," Wyatt says.
"She is."
"How long have you—"
"Few months."
He nods. Turns his sandwich. Turns it back. His hands shake. I notice, and I don't know what to do with the noticing.
"Delaney said you didn't want to come."
"Delaney drove ten hours to ask me for money."
His jaw sets. "That's not—"
"She was on the hospital bills inside two minutes, Wyatt."
"She's stressed. We both are. Mama's got no insurance worth a damn, and the house needs—"
"I'll handle the bills."
He stops. Stares at me.
"Whatever the medical costs are, I'll handle them. Send me the statements." My coffee's bitter. I drink it anyway. "But that's not why I came."
"Then why?"
Because at four in the morning in a cabin in Oregon, there's nothing to do but think, and I've spent six years thinking about what it would feel like if she died and I hadn't shown up.
I don't say that.
"Because she asked," I say.
Wyatt looks at his hands. His eyes go wet.
"Aiden, I'm sorry."
"Don't."
"I need to say—"
"You don't need to say anything." My voice comes out flat. Controlled. "It was twelve years ago. I didn't come here for an apology. I came to see Mama."
"But I—"
"Wyatt." I set my coffee down. "If you want to apologize, apologize. But don't do it here. Don't do it today. And don't do it because she's dying and you need it off your chest before she goes. That's for you. Not for me."
He flinches.
Paige comes back with three waters. Sets one in front of each of us. Sits beside me. Her knee finds mine under the table. I don't lean into it.
Something in her face shifts.
The rest of the visit is polite. Careful. Wyatt talks about the house, the yard, the neighbor who's been mowing while he's been at the hospital. Paige asks the right questions, laughs in the right places, carries the conversation when I go quiet, which is most of the time.
On the way out, Delaney's in the lobby.
She's sitting in a plastic chair with her phone, legs crossed, and she stands when she sees us. Her eyes go to Paige first. Then to me.
"How is she?"
"Sleeping," Wyatt says.
"Good." Delaney smooths her hair. Turns that smile on Paige. "It's sweet of you to come all this way. I know it must be strange, meeting everyone under these circumstances."
"Not strange at all," Paige says. Warm. Easy.
"Well." Delaney tilts her head. "I just hope Aiden's been honest with you about everything. Family stuff gets complicated, and he's always had his version of events."
The lobby goes very quiet.
His version of events.
Like there are two sides. Like what I walked into in my own driveway, with a ring in my jacket, has a second interpretation I haven't considered.
"Delaney," Wyatt says. Low. Warning.
"What? I'm just saying." That smile again. "She seems like a nice girl. She deserves the full picture."
"She's got it," I say.
"Does she?" Delaney looks right at me. "Because the Aiden I knew had a habit of leaving out the parts that make him look anything less than a victim."
The word lands in my sternum.
Victim.
Like I constructed this. Like I engineered the betrayal so I'd have something to be righteous about. Like losing my woman, my brother, my parents, and my hometown in one night was a narrative choice I made for sympathy.
Paige's hand is on my arm. I feel it. Distantly.
"We're done here," Paige says.
"I didn't mean—"
"Yeah, you did." Paige's voice stays even. "And you've been meaning it since you drove up that gravel road. Goodnight, Delaney."
The parking lot. Rental car. Paige drives because my hands aren't steady. The hotel is fifteen minutes from the hospital, a place with thin walls and a bed that sags in the middle, and I don't say a single word the entire drive.
She parks. Kills the engine. Waits.
"Aiden."
Nothing. The lobby. The elevator. The room. I sit on the edge of the bed. Stare at the carpet.
His version of events.
He always comes around.
Victim.
Paige kneels in front of me. Hands on my knees.
"Hey." She tips her face up. "Talk to me."
"You should go home."
Her hands go still.
"What?"
"You've got a good life up there. Clean. Simple. This." I gesture at the room. The walls. Texas. "This is twelve years of garbage. You don't need to be standing in it."
"Aiden, that's not—"
"I shouldn't have brought you."
"Stop."
"You stood in a yard and told a woman you were mine." My voice sounds dead. I hear it from far away. "But that was for show. We both know what that was."
She pulls back. Slowly. Her hands slide off my knees.
The look on her face is something I'll carry for a long time. Not anger. Something quieter. Something that breaks underneath without making a sound.
"Is that what you think," she says. "That I've been pretending."
"I think you saw a broken man in a parking lot and you did what you always do. You problem-solved. You brought coffee. You fixed it." My hands grip the edge of the mattress. "And I let you, because it felt good, and I wanted it, and I'm selfish enough to take something I've got no right to."
"You've got every right. I told you that."
"You told me a lot of things." The trap door in my chest is shut.
Sealed. Twelve years of scar tissue holding it down.
"And I believed them because I wanted to.
But my mother's dying in a bed down the road and she still thinks I'm the one who needs to come around, and Delaney looked you in the face and called me a liar, and I sat there and let it happen.
Same as always. Same as twelve years ago. "
Paige stands up.
She's shaking. Not crying. Shaking. Her jaw is set and her fists are tight at her sides.
"You're not the same as twelve years ago," she says. "You're a man who's spent one day with people who broke him and is letting them do it again. And I'm standing right here telling you I'm not them. But you've gotta hear me, Aiden. You've gotta let yourself hear me."
"Go home, Paige."
"No."
"Go back to Wild Peak. Go back to the ranch. I'll fly home when I'm done here."
"You're pushing me out because it's easier than letting me in."
"I'm pushing you out because you deserve better than a man whose own family thinks he's the villain."
Her eyes go bright. She blinks once. Hard.
"Fine," she says. Quiet. Steady. "Fine. You want to sit in this hotel room and let Delaney Harrison win twelve years after the fact, you go ahead.
But I'm not getting on a plane tonight, and I'm not pretending this morning in that hospital room didn't happen, and I'm sure as hell not pretending Tuesday in your loft didn't happen. "
She grabs her jacket off the chair.
"I'm going for a walk. When I come back, you can decide if you want to keep being Aiden Harrison who hides in the timber, or if you want to be the man who kissed me on a kitchen table and told me he'd been carving spoons at three in the morning because he couldn't stop thinking about my face."
The door closes behind her.
Quiet.
The AC clicks on. The bed sags. Through the thin wall, a TV's playing.
I stare at the carpet, and the carpet doesn't care about me any more than the creek does, and for the first time in twelve years, the silence I've built my whole life around feels exactly like what it is.
Empty.