Chapter 26 Mara — Day 78
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The afternoon light has gone gold on the porch boards, and I'm sitting in the old kitchen chair with a coffee cup on my knee, watching the road.
I don't have to watch it long.
I set my cup down on the porch rail. My hand isn't shaking.
That surprises me. Six days ago, when he called, it shook so hard I put the phone on the counter to keep it from clattering.
I told him six days. No calls. Park at the gate on Day Seventy-eight and let me decide whether I walked out.
He said I had all the time I named. He kept his word.
Now here's the truck.
He parks at the gate. He doesn't drive up. He kills the engine and gets out and shuts the door with two hands like he's putting something down for good. Then he starts to walk.
A hundred yards. It's a long hundred yards.
The gravel is loud under his boots. Somewhere behind the barn, Rafe's calling to Orin about a bale hook.
Roman leans his head over the stall door and whickers at me like I've been ignoring him.
I have. I've been watching a tall man in a plain shirt walk up my drive like he means to stay.
He stops at the bottom of the porch steps. He takes his hat off. He holds it in both hands in front of him — brim between his fingers — and he looks up at me the way a man looks at a lit window from the outside on a cold night.
“I'm not asking for anything today,” he says. “I just wanted you to see me choose to stand here without any of it in my hand.”
I look at him.
I let the minute be a minute. That's the thing about the porch — it lets a minute have weight.
The bees are working the honeysuckle at the corner of the house.
Somewhere the windmill catches and creaks and lets go.
Bastien Lorne, born in Montreal, heir to a company I can barely spell, stands hatless on my porch steps with sun on his forearms and dust on his boots and looks at me like he's afraid of one thing in the world, and it isn't the money.
His hair's a little too long. It always is.
He hasn't cut it since the day at the auction.
There's a shadow of stubble that isn't quite a beard.
His eyes are the same ocean-blue they were the first morning I put him to work stringing wire — but they hold steadier now, and they don't slide away when I hold his gaze.
I let the minute finish.
Then I stand up.
The chair creaks. My knee pops. My father's watch shifts on my wrist. I feel every bit of thirty-one.
I set the coffee cup down on the little slat table so I don't spill it.
I walk to the top of the steps in my sock feet — I've been out here long enough to shed my boots and forget them — and then I go down.
Three steps. He stays where he is until I get there.
When I hold my hand out, he takes it. His palm's warm. There's a callus at the base of his thumb that wasn't there ten weeks ago; Vale fence wire put it there. He looks down at our hands as if the contact is a small miracle. Maybe it is.
“Come inside,” I say. “Opal made bread.”
He nods. Just once. Not a big thing, not a speech.
“Bread,” he says quietly.
“Rosemary.”
“Okay.”
We walk to the house side by side. He doesn't try to talk. I don't either. Whatever we're doing, we're not doing it out here, in front of the barn and the sky.
Opal's in the kitchen when we come through the mudroom, dish towel in her hands. She takes one look at Bastien with his hat in his hand and me in sock feet and says, “There's bread on the board and coffee in the pot. I've got laundry to fold at the cottage.”
“Opal,” I say.
“Laundry,” she repeats, sharper, but a crooked smile escapes before she walks out.
The screen door clacks.
The kitchen is very quiet.
The pot on the stove is the blue-speckled enamel one my father bought at a hardware sale in Alpine before I was born, dented on one side and chipped at the rim.
The coffee is Opal's second pot since noon because she knows what day it is even if she won't say so.
I take two plain white mugs from the hooks, pour, set the pot back on the burner, and turn.
Bastien's at the table. He isn't sitting. He's standing behind the chair with his hands on the top rail, hat set down on the seat beside him. He looks at me across the kitchen like he's memorizing me.
I walk the two mugs over. I slide one across the table to him. It scrapes on the wood. He catches it. He doesn't drink.
I keep my hands on my mug so I don't do anything with them.
“I've been thinking about what to say to you for six days,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“I checked every piece,” I say. “Veda read the Rivas agreement. Selene showed me the release. Your Toronto counsel sent the trust instruments directly to Veda. Nothing is in my name. Nothing gives you a claim on this land.”
“I wanted you to have proof without needing to trust my word first.”
“Good. Here's the rule I found while I was checking it: no decision touching my land, debt, name, work, or future gets made without me. Not because you can afford it. Not because the help is legal. Not because you're scared. You ask.”
“I will.”
“And if you want to hide something because you think the truth might cost you me, that's the moment you tell me fastest.”
“I will. I should have on the first morning.”
“I'm not forgetting what happened,” I say. “Forgiveness isn't amnesia.”
“I don't want it to be.”
I let that answer settle. Then I say the other truth. “I love you. Not the money. Not the story. You.”
He lets go of the chair and puts both hands flat on the table as if he needs the wood under them. “I love you. All of you. The land, the woman on it, and the way you say my name.”
“Which one,” I say.
“Both.”
I laugh.
It comes out of me like a sound I haven't made in weeks. He laughs too — a low startled thing, the laugh of a man who wasn't sure he'd hear himself do it again in this kitchen. It sounds like relief. It sounds like the first honest weather after a long dry spell.
He comes around the table.
He doesn't rush. He steps around the corner and stops with a foot of air between us, and he lifts one hand and puts it very carefully on the side of my neck, right at the jaw, where my pulse is. His thumb strokes once, along the line of my jaw. He waits.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
He kisses me.
It's warm. That's the first thing. Not hungry, not careful — just warm, the way a house is warm when you've been outside a long time.
His mouth on mine, his other hand coming up to the back of my head, my hand fisting in the front of his shirt without me telling it to.
I taste coffee and something clean under it, and the small salt of a man who came a long way to stand hatless on my porch.
When he pulls back, only a little, his forehead comes down against mine.
“Six days,” he says.
“Six days.”
“I thought — ”
“Don't tell me what you thought. Tell me what you know.”
“I know I'm not leaving,” he says.
“Okay.”
“I know if you send me away I'll go, and I'll be a decent man about it, and I won't stop loving you, ever, in any life I have.”
“Bastien.”
“I know,” he says, “that Opal's bread is on the board.”
I laugh again, into his shirt this time. My shoulders shake and I feel his hand move up and down my back once, twice, and I feel the way his chest moves when he laughs with me — that small ribbed jolt of a man laughing quiet.
I lift my head.
“Upstairs,” I say.
His eyes go dark. Not in a way that scares me. In the way of a man who's been holding a door shut for six days.
“You sure?”
“I've never been more sure of a thing in my life.”
He bends, and he lifts me.
I don't expect it. I've been a working woman my whole life — I've thrown hay bales and hauled feed sacks and carried a full water bucket the length of the barn without noticing.
Nobody's picked me up off my kitchen floor since I was probably nine years old.
He does it in one motion — one arm under my knees, one at my back — and I make a small startled sound against his throat that I'll never in my life admit to Opal was a giggle.
“Bastien Lorne.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“I can walk.”
“I know you can,” he says. “Let me carry you anyway. One time. Just this.”
I put my arm around his neck. His hair's at my wrist. I set my mouth against the corner of his jaw and close my eyes.
“Okay,” I say. “Just this.”
He takes me up the stairs.
The stairs are narrow, and he goes slow.
He steps up one, and then the next, and then the next.
My weight in his arms isn't a weight. Halfway up he stops and rests his forehead against mine again, and he says, quiet, “I love you,” and I say, “I know,” because it's the first thing that comes out of me and it's true, and then he goes on, up.
He carries me down the hall. He knows the hall. He nudges my bedroom door open with his shoulder because his hands are full of me. He sets me down on my feet at the foot of the bed like I'm made of something breakable, which I'm not, and I've never been, and he looks at me anyway like I am.
The west light comes through the curtains in long soft bars. It falls across the quilt at the end of the bed — the one Opal's mother made — and across the wooden floor and up his shirt front and along his throat. I put my hands on the front of that shirt.
“Slower,” I say. “This one. Slower.”
“As slow as you want.”
I undo the top button. He watches my hand.
“Yes?” I say.
“Yes.”
I undo the next. And the next. He lifts his hands and lets me. I push the shirt back off his shoulders and he shrugs it down his arms, and he catches it before it hits the floor and lays it careful over the bedpost like it matters where it lands, and then he lifts his hands to me.
He unbraids my hair.