Chapter Two #3
I’d been careful. Careful with Caleb, because Caleb needed careful.
Careful with the ranch, because the ranch was paying our bills and giving us a roof and a place to call something adjacent to home.
Careful with my own wants, because wants were expensive and I had a history of wanting things that didn’t want me back, and that was a pattern I’d broken a long time ago, or thought I had, until Sterling Callahan walked through a door with a bad leg and a bag on his shoulder and looked at my flannel like it was a puzzle he wasn’t sure he was supposed to solve.
I was done being careful.
Careful was for people who had time. Careful was for people who could afford to wait for the right moment, the perfect opening, the set of circumstances that lined up like planets and gave you permission to reach for something you’d wanted all along.
I’d spent my whole life being careful. Careful with foster parents. Careful with landlords. Careful with bosses who could fire me and social workers who could move us and strangers who could decide, on a Tuesday afternoon, that we were more trouble than we were worth.
I was twenty-four years old. I had calluses on my hands from work that actually mattered.
I had a brother who trusted me with his life and a man downstairs who looked at Caleb’s coffee like it was a gift, and if those two things weren’t permission enough to stop being careful, then nothing ever would be.
I didn’t have a plan. Plans were for people who liked having their expectations met.
Plans were for situations that behaved the way you thought they would, and Sterling Callahan had never, not once, behaved the way I thought he would.
He’d surprised me every time. The coffee.
The flannel. The way he’d sat down when Caleb said sit down, like his body had made a decision his brain wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
I had a direction. That was always enough.
Direction was what got you through when the map was wrong and the weather turned and the thing you were heading toward didn’t look anything like the thing you’d left the dock for.
Direction was knowing, in your bones, which way to point yourself even when you couldn’t see the destination.
My direction was Sterling. Had been Sterling, probably, since the first time I’d watched him cross the yard with that long, unhurried stride that covered ground at a pace that surprised people, his hand resting on the gun at his hip not like he was showing off, but like he was checking to make sure it was still there, the way other men checked for their wallets.
My direction was the half-second of stillness before he took the coffee.
My direction was the creak from his room, and the way my body went still when I heard it, and the fact that I was lying in the dark thinking about it at two in the morning when I should have been asleep three hours ago.
That was enough of a direction. It would get me where I needed to go, or it wouldn’t, but sitting here being careful wasn’t getting me anywhere at all.
I closed my eyes. The darkness behind my eyelids was a different kind of dark—warmer, softer, the kind that lived inside your head instead of outside it.
I felt the corner of my mouth pull into a smile.
Not the one I deployed when someone needed a joke or Caleb needed a laugh or the situation needed a version of me that was easier to carry than the real thing.
The slow one. The certain one. The wide, unguarded smile I saved for moments that actually got through—for Caleb handing me a piece of bread he’d baked that turned out perfect, for the first tomato of the season ripening on the vine behind the bunkhouse, for the sound of the ranch going quiet at the end of a day when everything had worked the way it was supposed to.
I aimed it at the dark ceiling. The ceiling didn’t care, but I did, and that was the point. I was letting myself feel this. All the way down. No argument. No rehearsal.
Just the wanting, and the direction, and the decision that had been building for four months and had finally, somewhere in the last hour, landed where it belonged.
I let myself fall asleep to the sound of Sterling Callahan existing.
Unhurt enough.
His breathing, when I listened for it, was slow and even in a way that suggested the leg had finally stopped being enough of a problem to keep him awake, or he’d given in and taken something for it, or he’d just decided that sleep was a tactical advantage he couldn’t afford to pass up.
However he’d gotten there, he was there.
Asleep, or close to it. Existing in the same building as me and Caleb, under the same roof, behind the same walls that had kept the February cold out and the wood stove heat in and the three of us, somehow, in the same patch of Montana dirt for long enough that it had started to feel like something we could keep.
I fell asleep with that thought. Not carefully. Not patiently. Just all the way down, the way I did everything that mattered, and the last thing I registered before the dark took me was the certainty that tomorrow was going to be different, and I was going to be the reason why.