6. Bryson
brYSON
She's gone.
Three days and she hasn't come back. No cookies.
No raffle tickets. No blue sweater, no humming in the kitchen, no bright laugh ricocheting off the bay walls.
The station feels quieter than it should, which is insane because she was never that loud—she just filled space differently.
She made it warmer. She made it feel like someone was home.
I'm grumpier than usual. I know this because Tanner tells me, directly and without preamble, the way he handles everything.
"You're worse than normal," he says on Monday morning, pouring coffee with the relaxed ease of a man whose life is going well because he has Bridget and muffins and the uncomplicated confidence of someone who said what he felt and got the girl. "What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Something happened Thursday night. You and the cupcake teacher were the last ones here and now she's not coming back and you look like someone stole your engine." He takes a sip. "Talk or don't. But fix it."
I don't talk. But I think about what he said—fix it—while I spend the next six hours under Truck 7 doing maintenance that doesn't need doing, and by two o'clock I've made a decision that goes against every instinct I've developed in four years of deliberate isolation.
I drive to Ember Falls Elementary.
I park in the lot and lean against my truck and I wait.
I'm still in my station uniform because I came straight from shift, and I'm aware that I look like every brooding movie cliché, and I don't care.
I'm not here to be smooth. I've never been smooth.
Claire told me that often enough, and she was right—I don't have moves, I don't have lines, I have hands and intentions and a willingness to stand in a parking lot looking stupid until the woman I can't stop thinking about comes out of a building.
The doors open at three-fifteen. Kids pour out in a chaos of backpacks and shouting. Parents cluster near the entrance. Teachers trail behind in ones and twos, and then she's there.
She's wearing a dress covered in sunflowers. Yellow sunflowers on a white background, and she's got a tote bag slung over one shoulder that says Reading is my cardio and her hair is down and the afternoon light is hitting it in a way that makes something in my chest physically hurt.
She sees me. She stops dead on the sidewalk.
I push off the truck and walk toward her because I'm done waiting for courage. I don't have eloquent speeches. I don't have poetry. I have the truth, which is the only thing I've ever been able to give anyone, and it has to be enough.
"I don't do this." I stop three feet from her.
Her eyes are wide. A parent hurries past us, glancing back.
I don't notice. "I don't chase. I don't feel things.
I made a decision four years ago that I was done with all of it because the last time I tried I failed and I decided I'd rather be alone than fail again. "
She opens her mouth. I keep going.
"Then you walked into my station with cupcakes and this laugh that goes everywhere—into the walls, into the engine bay, into my chest—and you wrecked my entire life.
" I take a breath. It's not big enough. "I held a door for thirty seconds.
I refilled your coffee. I stood between you and a draft that didn't exist because I wanted to be close to you and I couldn't think of another way.
I'm bad at this. I'm bad at words and feelings and—" I gesture vaguely at the space between us. "All of it. I'm bad at all of it."
Her eyes are wet. She's gripping the strap of her tote bag so hard her knuckles are pale.
"But I'm not pretending Thursday didn't happen.
It happened. It was the best thing that's happened to me in four years and I'm not going to stand here and watch you disappear because you got scared, because I'm scared too and I showed up anyway.
" I shove my hands in my pockets because they're shaking.
"Come to my place for dinner. I'll cook.
You don't have to talk, I don't have to talk, we can sit in complete silence for all I care.
I just—" I stop. Swallow. "I just need you to be there. "
The longest pause of my life. The sounds of the schoolyard fill the silence—kids yelling, car doors closing, a teacher calling someone's name. She stares at me with those blue eyes and I watch something shift behind them, a wall coming down in real time, brick by brick.
"You cook?" she asks, and her voice wobbles on the word in a way that tells me she's trying not to cry.
"Yeah."
"What are you making?"
"Whatever you want."
A tear slides down her cheek. She wipes it with the back of her hand and hitches the tote bag higher on her shoulder and says, "Okay. Yes."
I nod. I walk her to her yellow Beetle and I open the door for her, and when she slides past me I smell vanilla and I close my eyes for one second—just one—and let myself have it.