Chapter Twenty-One
~ Caleb ~
I stood in the framed-out master bedroom with both hands pressed flat against my belly and counted the days. Six weeks and four days since Sterling left.
I hadn’t stopped counting.
The morning air carried the smell of fresh-cut pine and sawdust so thick I could taste it, and somewhere overhead, Macon and Burke’s crew were hammering something that sounded both permanent and impatient.
The babies nudged against my ribs, insistent and rolling, the kind of movement that had started as flutter and graduated to something with opinions. My hand went sideways by instinct, reaching for a body that wasn’t there, and closed on empty air.
“Counter space is non-negotiable,” I said to the empty side of the room.
“I’m right here,” Mitch said, and he was, two feet away with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, surveying the framed walls with the proprietary satisfaction of a man who had argued for every square inch and had the nail-gun calluses to prove it.
“You’ve said that four times this morning.
I’m beginning to think you have a counter space agenda. ”
“It’s not an agenda. It’s a requirement.”
“It’s an obsession.”
“Those words mean the same thing when you’re pregnant.”
Mitch’s grin went wide and slow. “Fair.”
I moved through the framed rooms the way I did every morning, my hands on my belly like I was introducing the babies to their future, one two-by-six at a time.
The floor was plywood underfoot, still tacky with morning dew, and the walls were just studs and headers, open to the sky in a way that made the whole structure feel both temporary and inevitable.
A house in the making.
Our house.
The words still felt strange in my mouth, like a language I was learning one room at a time.
Mitch walked with me. He always walked with me.
His boots made a different sound on the plywood than mine did—heavier, more deliberate, the stride of a man who had spent his adult life covering ground and saw no reason to change his pace just because the ground was currently made of half-inch plywood and liable to give him a splinter.
The kitchen doorway was just a rough opening with a header beam, but I stopped there anyway. Had to. Every morning. “The counter space,” I said, pointing at the wall where the counter would eventually live, “is correct.”
“You measured it three times,” Mitch said.
“I measured it twice.”
“Three. I watched you.”
“That third time was confirmation.”
“It was obsession.”
“Requirement.”
We’d had this conversation so many times the words had worn smooth. Mitch knew the dimensions by heart. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew.
The ritual was the point.
We stood in the framed kitchen and argued about counter space because arguing about counter space was easier than arguing about the thing we weren’t arguing about, which was the empty space where Sterling should have been, measuring things with that flat, assessing stare and saying less than necessary.
Mitch hooked his thumbs deeper into his belt loops. “Sterling’s going to have opinions about the counter space.”
“Sterling’s opinions about the counter space are not load-bearing.”
The grin landed. Full wattage. The kind that said Mitch Pruitt had been waiting for that exact sentence and was extremely pleased with both of us for arriving at it on schedule. He didn’t argue. He just stood there grinning at the framed wall like the wall had done something clever.
We reached the nursery door frame last. It was just studs and a rough opening, no walls yet, just air and possibility contained by two-by-fours.
Mitch went quiet. Completely quiet, which from Mitch meant something significant had crossed the event horizon of his attention and was currently being processed with the seriousness it deserved.
We stood side by side for a long beat, both of us looking into the empty space where warm yellow would eventually live.
The morning light came through the studs in thin gold lines, painting stripes across the plywood floor, and I could already see it.
The cribs. The rocker by the window. The light that warm yellow walls would hold at three in the afternoon, the kind that made everything feel like it had always been there.
“Warm yellow,” I said.
“Not the sharp kind,” Mitch said.
“Obviously not the sharp kind.”
Another beat. The nail guns popped overhead, rhythmic and distant, and a crow called from somewhere beyond the ridge. The sound carried across the half-built house and died there, irrelevant to the two men standing in a door frame discussing paint.
Mitch’s shoulder pressed warm against mine. “Sterling’s going to walk in here and make a face.”
“Sterling is going to walk in here and feel something enormous and then immediately pretend he didn’t.”
“Same thing.”
“Basically.”
The can of warm yellow paint was already sitting in the bunkhouse. I’d bought it three weeks ago. Just one can, the test shade, because buying the whole supply felt like counting eggs before they’d even laid the chicken, and I had limits.
The can sat on the shelf above the washing machine where Sterling’s socks used to live, and every time I walked past it, I thought about the moment he’d walk through the door and see it and say nothing, because Sterling Callahan said nothing with more eloquence than most people managed with words.
I ran my hand along one of the rough studs in the nursery door frame. The wood was still green, still carrying the sap smell, and it left a faint resin tack on my palm that I didn’t wipe off.
From where we stood, I could see the east-facing window rough opening in what would be Sterling’s office.
Just a rectangle of sky framed by two-by-six, but I’d specified the placement myself—south corner, angled to catch the first light, wide enough for a man to sit beside with a mug of coffee and a classified document and the expression he wore when he was pretending not to enjoy the morning.
I’d told the crew where to put it without explaining why.
Nobody had asked.
Mitch followed my gaze. His eyes landed on the window, held there for a beat, and then he looked at me with that expression he got when he’d figured something out and was deciding whether to be smug about it.
“You’re building him a brooding station,” he said.
“It’s an office.”
“With a view specifically calibrated for brooding.”
“It’s east-facing. That’s just good sense.”
“It’s Sterling-facing. That’s what it is.”
I didn’t argue. He was right, and we both knew it, and the pleasure of being known by your brother was its own kind of warmth, reliable as gravity.
The babies moved again. A rolling double shift that made me press my palm harder against the curve of my belly, feeling the pressure from the inside out.
The house was taking shape around us, stud by stud, header by header, and somewhere beyond the eastern ridge a man I loved was doing a job I understood and hated in equal measure, and the distance between those two things was measured in days and in the physical progress of the thing we were building, and neither measurement was particularly comforting.
But the warm yellow paint was real. The east-facing window was real. The counter space—all of it, every inch, non-negotiable—was real. And Mitch’s shoulder was warm against mine in a door frame that didn’t have walls yet but would, soon, and that was something. That was actually something.
I kept counting. Six weeks and four days.
The hammering overhead didn’t stop.
* * * *
The phone rang at ten-seventeen on a Tuesday morning, and I answered on the first ring because I always answered on the first ring, and Sterling’s voice came through the speaker flat and careful, the tone he used when he was delivering information he knew would land badly and had decided to deliver it anyway because that was the job.
“We got him,” he said. No greeting. Sterling didn’t do greetings on operational calls. “Mid-level. Overlooked. Had access to everything he shouldn’t have.”
I sat down on the bunkhouse couch. The cushions were still warm from where Mitch had been sitting earlier, before he’d gone out to check the south pasture fence. The wood stove ticked behind me, patient, counting.
“Peterson and the contractors have been moved to federal custody,” Sterling continued. His voice had that compressed quality, like he was reading from notes he’d written himself and wasn’t entirely happy with. “Hughs too. Treason investigation.”
Which sounded like resolution and wasn’t, because I’d been paying attention. I’d been paying attention for six weeks and four days, and I knew what came after the treason investigation.
“Your team’s been tapped to work the investigation,” I said.
A beat. Then, quieter: “Yes.”
I was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that cost something and was worth the cost. Then: “How much longer.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Ballpark.”
“Caleb.”
“I’m asking for a number, not a guarantee. I understand the difference.”
Sterling went quiet on his end. I could hear something in the background—low voices, the murmur of men in a room making decisions—and then his voice came back, lower, stripped of the operational cadence. “A few more weeks.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You don’t sound okay.”
“I’m working on it.”
Quiet again. Then, so soft I almost missed it, “I know.”
The call ended. I set the phone in my lap and stared out the window at the pasture fence.
The morning light had thickened to something warmer, the kind that made the winter grass look almost gold, and beyond the fence the eastern ridge held the sky the way it always did, patient and certain and entirely unconcerned with whether Sterling was coming home.
I sat there for two hours. The phone stayed in my lap.
My hands stayed where they were. The babies moved—rolling, insistent, the particular double-shift that had become their morning routine—and I didn’t move with them.
I just sat and stared at the pasture fence and ran the math I’d promised myself I’d stop running.