8. Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Wyatt
The seam won't sit right.
I've done this stitch a thousand times — same awl, same waxed thread, same pocket on the same style bag I could build with my eyes closed — and tonight my hands keep drifting off the line like they've got somewhere better to be.
I pull it out and start again.
The workshop's quiet this time of night, just the hum of the space heater in the corner and Moose sprawled by the door, twitching through some dog dream that's clearly more interesting than watching me fail at leatherwork. I line the needle up. Push through. Pull tight.
I'm not thinking about the stitch. I'm thinking about her hand landing on my arm at the honey booth, right above the elbow, the day she found out about Ellie.
Two seconds, maybe three. I didn't move my arm the whole time she left it there, and I've spent an unreasonable amount of the last two days wondering if she noticed that or if it was just me.
The thread snags. I pull it out again.
Dad comes in around nine with two glasses of iced tea, sets one down next to me without a word, and watches me rip the seam a third time before he says anything.
“You usually don't argue with the leather.”
“It's not arguing. It's just not sitting right.”
“Mm.” He pulls up the stool across from me, unhurried, the way he does everything. “That's the same pocket you've stitched for years.”
“I know how many times I've done it, Dad.”
He doesn't push. He just sits there, drinking his tea, letting the quiet do the work he's too smart to do himself. Outside, gravel crunches—somebody's car passing on the county road—and for half a second, I think it might be her.
Dad clocks it anyway. He doesn't say anything about the seam again.
The thing about a memory you thought you'd put away is that it doesn't ask permission before it shows back up.
It gets me around the fourth stitch—not a whole scene, just a flash.
Savannah's hand fitting into mine on this same porch step the summer before she left. Her shoulder against mine. Crickets loud in the grass. Me thinking, in the stupid certain way you think things at nineteen, that I had all the time in the world to tell her what I wanted.
I didn't.
Then she was gone, and the porch step went back to being a porch step.
Except now my brain has clearly decided to update the memory.
Her hand on my arm at the market.
The woman she is now layered right over the girl I remember.
I set the needle down.
That's the part I'm not prepared for.
Missing who we were is one thing.
Wanting her now is something else entirely.
“You alright?” Dad asks.
“Fine.” I pick the needle back up. “Just tired.”
He doesn't believe me. I can tell by the way he doesn't say anything at all, just finishes his tea and leaves the second glass on the bench for me, condensation already pooling under it, and heads back inside without another word.
Millie catches me at the diner counter the next morning, coffee in one hand, order pad in the other, grinning like she's got something loaded and ready to go.
“You two looked awful comfortable at that market.”
“We've known each other a long time, Millie.”
“I know how long you've known each other. I was here for most of it.”
She refills my coffee without asking, which is her way of buying more time to keep talking.
“I'm just saying. People noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“Wyatt.” She says my name the way you'd say it to a kid who spilled something and is standing right next to the mess pretending not to see it. “You sat next to her for a whole bluegrass set. You gave that dog of yours more personal space than you gave her.”
“We were on a bench. There weren't a lot of options.”
“Uh huh.” She's still grinning. “Whatever you say, Sheriff.”
I don't have a good answer for that, so I drink my coffee and let her win, because arguing about it any further is only going to prove her point.
I tell myself, driving out to check on a fence line that afternoon, that none of this means what it might look like it means.
Savannah came home because the life she'd built stopped feeling like hers.
That's reason enough to keep my distance.
She doesn't need me turning fifteen years of history into one more thing she has to sort through. She needs room to breathe. Time to figure out what she wants when nobody else is standing there telling her what that should be.
And I've always been pretty good at giving Savannah room.
Maybe too good.
I've told myself some version of that about four different ways since the market.
It hasn't stuck once.
Back at the farm, Ellie's on the porch steps with a coloring book, Moose flopped across her feet like a rug that occasionally sighs.
“Are we going to see Savannah again?” she asks, not looking up.
“I don't know, El.”
“She's nice.” A crayon scritches across the page. “She talked to me like I wasn't a baby. Most grown-ups do the baby voice.”
“She's good at that.”
“You like her.”
It's not a question.
For half a second, I almost expect Savannah to come up the driveway just because Ellie said her name.
“Everybody likes her.”
Ellie's crayon stops.
“That's not what I said.”
Of course it isn't.
“She's an old friend.”
Ellie gives me a look that's got a little too much of her mother in it.
“Okay.”
She goes back to coloring.
I stand there another second, bothered by how badly I wanted to give her a different answer.
I take the truck into town the next evening for a supply run I don't strictly need to make tonight, and somewhere on the county road my foot eases off the gas before I've decided to let it.
Texie's mailbox comes up on the right, faded red flag, same as it's been for twenty years. There's no reason to slow down for it. Nobody's out front. No car in the drive I don't already recognize.
I slow down anyway.
I catch myself doing it, annoyed all over again, and press the gas back down, and drive the rest of the way into town telling myself that meant nothing, that a man can ease off a gas pedal near a mailbox without it being about anything at all.
I don't believe myself. I haven't believed myself in about four days now.
I tell myself I'm not looking for her.
My truck disagrees. It slows down every time it passes Texie's mailbox.