15. Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Savannah
My phone rings a little after three.
Wyatt.
“Hey.”
“You have plans tonight?”
“Depends who's asking.”
“I thought we'd try something different.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I thought I'd ask you to dinner this time instead of making you do it.”
Heat creeps into my face even though he can't see me.
“Well, if you would ask me once in a while, I wouldn't have to.”
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
“So are you asking?”
“Savannah, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
“I'd love to.”
“Six?”
“I'll be ready.”
The diner is quiet, just us and a couple of regulars at the counter arguing about high school football like the season already started.
We slide into a corner booth, the same one we favored as teenagers. The red vinyl seats haven't changed. Neither have the laminated menus.
I pick mine up anyway.
“Mrs. Kessler still teaching?” I ask.
“Retired two years ago. They threw her a parade.”
I lower the menu. “An actual parade?”
“Floats and everything.”
“For a geometry teacher?”
“She taught half this town geometry. That buys you a parade around here.”
The waitress comes over with her order pad, and before I can say anything, Wyatt closes his menu.
“Cheeseburger, no mayo, curly fries, Diet Coke with lemon.”
He doesn't even hesitate over his own order before handing her both menus.
Fifteen years, and he remembers.
Not just cheeseburger and fries.
No mayo. Curly fries. Lemon in the Diet Coke.
“You remembered my order.”
Wyatt leans back against the booth.
“You ordered the same thing every Friday night for three years.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
I smile despite myself. “The lemon too?”
“Especially the lemon.”
The waitress walks away, and I keep looking at him.
“I'm impressed.”
“Don't be. You made enough special requests to make it memorable.”
“No mayo and a lemon are not special requests.”
“You used to send it back if they forgot the lemon.”
“Once.”
“More than once.”
I laugh. “You have a suspiciously good memory.”
His smile softens. “For some things.”
That quiets me for a second.
The waitress returns with our drinks, and there's a lemon hooked over the rim of mine.
Wyatt nods toward it. “See? Some things around here still work exactly the way they're supposed to.”
I squeeze the lemon into my Diet Coke. “I'm beginning to notice.”
Dinner stretches longer than it needs to. We talk about the football team's chances this year and the summer the drive-in flooded. Wyatt reminds me about studying at the library until closing because neither of us ever wanted to be the first one to say it was time to go home.
By the time the waitress clears our plates, we've been sitting there nearly two hours.
The last of the daylight is starting to fade.
“Neither of us is in a hurry tonight,” Wyatt says.
“Want to take a drive?”
I don't have to think about it.
“I'd like that.”
Tonight feels different.
We're parked at the overlook, engine off, both of us looking out at the valley, when I feel his hand find mine on the bench seat between us. He doesn't make anything of it. He just laces his fingers through mine, steady, like it's the most natural thing in the world, and I let him.
“You still haven't told me,” he says quietly. “About the wedding.”
“I appreciate you never asked. I needed some time.”
“Figured you'd tell me when you were ready.”
I focus on our joined hands. Maybe that's why the next part comes easier than I expected.
“I'll tell you now,” I say. “If you want to hear it.”
“I want to hear it.”
“Preston made sense on paper,” I say. “Successful, smart, steady. He came from a close family, and I liked that in the beginning. I didn't have much family left, and suddenly there were all these dinners and birthdays and people who showed up for everything.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was. Until I realized showing up for everything also meant having an opinion about everything.”
Wyatt smiles. “Ah.”
“Exactly. But it happened slowly. His mother had suggestions. Preston liked keeping her happy. I was busy with Blake Co. and good at telling myself things weren't worth arguing about.”
“Until you were planning a wedding with both of them.”
“Pretty much.” I shake my head. “By the end, I barely recognized it. Myself too.”
“Or the groom?”
“Maybe him too.”
I tell him about the interview three months before the wedding, when I realized I was more excited about taking two weeks off than becoming Preston's wife. The schedule taped beside the hotel room door. Preston stopping by for twenty seconds and leaving again.
“And his mother had basically taken over the wedding by then. Seating chart, vows, flowers, all of it. Every time I gave something up, I told myself it didn't matter.”
“But it did.”
“Yes it did.”
Suddenly, I'm remembering something else.
“You saw the pictures, didn't you?”
Wyatt tries to stifle a laugh. “Oh, yes. I saw the pictures.”
I groan, but I'm already laughing. “I cannot believe I did that.”
“You were moving pretty fast.”
“I was running down a busy street in a wedding dress with my shoes in one hand.”
“Don’t forget about the veil flying straight out behind you,” he adds.
That does it. I start laughing harder.
“Oh my gosh. I looked insane.”
“You looked determined.”
“That's a very sheriff-like way of saying insane.”
“There was one where you were halfway around the corner—”
“Stop.”
“—and I'm pretty sure a photographer must have been chasing you.”
“Wyatt.”
He's laughing now too, which only makes me laugh harder. I cover my face with one hand.
“Can you believe I did that?”
“Yeah.” His laughter settles, but his smile stays. “I can.”
“Why?”
“Because when you finally decide you're done with something, Savannah, you're pretty hard to stop.”
I smile at that.
Then it fades, because there is one part of that day that still isn't funny.
“There's one thing I wish I'd stopped for.”
Wyatt waits.
“My mother's necklace.”
I tell him how Preston's mother took it off my neck and replaced it with his grandmother's necklace without asking.
“I let her,” I say. “That's the part I'm mad at myself about. I stood there and let her take the last thing of my mother's I still wore.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don't know.” I look down at our hands. “I ran out of that hotel and never got it back. I don't know if it's sitting in a drawer somewhere or if she threw it away.”
Wyatt's hand closes more firmly around mine.
“I'm sorry.”
“That's what I think about more than anything else. Not the wedding. Not even Preston. That necklace.”
“Then maybe you should ask for it back.”
He’s right.
“It belongs to you, Savannah.”
I’ve spent so long thinking of it as gone, I’d never considered asking for it back.
“You have no idea what I'd give to have it back.”
“Are you okay?” he asks.
Not a question about Preston.
Not a question about any of the details.
Just that.
“I think I am.” I look over at him, and it's the truest answer I've given anyone about any of this.
“I wasn't ready to say any of it out loud before now. That's why I didn't tell you sooner. Yesterday, with the honey, with Ellie — I just wanted one day where I wasn't thinking about any of it. I wanted to gather eggs and taste honey off my own thumb and just breathe for a while.”
“I'm glad you came yesterday.”
His hand tightens slightly around mine.
“I wish I'd known, is all. Would've made some of it make more sense.”
“I know. I'm sorry I kept it from you.”
“You don't have to apologize for taking your time.”
He looks over at me, steady, nothing but patience in it.
“I meant what I said in the market. You're here now. That's not nothing.”
“I’m proud of myself for running. I knew it was the right thing to do. But I was embarrassed too.”
“About what?”
“How long it took me to figure it out. That I got all the way to my wedding day before I finally admitted I couldn’t marry him.” I shake my head.
“Coming back here, knowing everyone would hear about it, wasn’t exactly easy.”
“People talk.”
“I know. But no one’s made me feel like I failed. Everyone’s just been so nice.”
“People are glad you’re home.”
Home.
It was once.
I’m not sure why hearing Wyatt call it that makes me want it to be again.
He drives me home slow, hand finding mine again on the road back into town, and neither of us lets go until he pulls up outside Texie's.
We sit there a second, engine idling, porch light throwing its yellow square across the yard.
“Thank you for dinner,” I say. “And for listening. For not making it bigger than it needed to be.”
“Wasn't hard.”
He looks over at me; there's nothing complicated in his expression, just warmth, steady and plain.
“I just listened to somebody I care about tell me something true.”
I don't have a response ready for that, so I just squeeze his hand once before letting go and get out into the cool night air.
He waits until I'm at the door before he pulls away, same as always, headlights sweeping across the yard and gone.
Inside, Texie's left the hall light on and gone to bed, and the house is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and my own footsteps on the stairs.
I don't go straight to the guest room. I stop in the hallway instead, in front of the old mirror Texie's had hanging there since we were teenagers, and look at myself for a second — hair a little wind-tossed from the drive, no necklace at my throat, nothing there at all where it should be.
I touch the bare spot anyway, out of habit, the way you'd reach for a phone in your pocket that isn't there.
Somewhere, maybe, that necklace is still sitting in a drawer two states away. Maybe it isn't. There's nothing I can do about it from here except carry the loss a little differently than I did an hour ago.
What I can do something about is standing right here in this hallway, still warm from his hand around mine the whole drive home.