Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
She looked at the text.
Jason: Walk?
One word. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was that Cecelia read it four times looking for the warmth in it, which was ridiculous, because it was just one word.
She’d known since her father took a call at breakfast and left the table with his coffee still steaming. The meeting was dead. The council was asking questions. And in that building was a nervous man named Kyle Sinclair who owed her nothing at all.
She could’ve told Jason first. She’d sat with her phone in her hand more than once, and every time she’d put it down.
There was a version of her that said it was because the story was complicated.
The truer version was simpler and uglier.
She hadn’t told him because once he knew, how he looked at her was going to change, and she’d wanted a few more days of being looked at like that.
He was waiting where the trail bent away from the parking lot. He didn’t kiss her hello. He stood with his hands at his sides and his hat set low, and when she stopped in front of him he looked at her as he looked at a horse he was meeting for the first time. Quiet. Careful. Reading.
“Ask me,” she said.
“Kyle Sinclair told the council somebody asked him to keep the meeting notices inside City Hall. He named you. Tate checked the sign-in book at the clerk’s office. Two visits.” A beat, and she understood the beat was him giving her the whole room. “I want to hear it from you.”
There it was. The moment she’d been running from. Or maybe since the day she’d walked out of City Hall with the job done and her hands perfectly steady.
Her father had taught her what to do and he expected nothing less.
Kyle misunderstood the request. You were confirming procedure. Get ahead of the narrative. She knew every one of those roads. She’d paved half of them herself, in six towns, over eight years, and she was good at it.
“Yes,” she said. “It was me.”
Jason didn’t move.
“My father told me to make sure the meeting stayed quiet. I went to City Hall and asked Kyle to hold the notices, and when I wasn’t sure he’d keep his nerve, I went back and confirmed it.
Nobody forced me. I wasn’t tricked. I knew exactly what it meant, that people who’d want to stand up in that room would never know the room existed.
I knew it was wrong while I was doing it.
” She didn’t shake, and she hated that she didn’t, because steadiness was one more thing she was too practiced at.
“And I did it well. That’s the part I can’t get around, Jason.
Not that I did it. That I was good at it. ”
The creek ran on below the trail. He took it in and said nothing, and she made herself keep going, because if she stopped now she’d never say the rest.
“I’m not going to explain it away. But you should know why, because the why is the part I have to live with.
” She wrapped her arms around herself against more than the cold.
“My mother left when I was little. She divorced him, gave him full custody, and never looked back. Not a card. Not a call. I’ve spent every year since being the one who doesn’t leave.
Whatever he asks, I handle it, because if I’m handling things, he has a reason to keep me.
” A small, terrible laugh got out of her.
“Twenty-some years of that, and it turns out the shape it makes of you is a woman who can bury a public meeting before lunch and still be charming at dinner.”
“Cece.”
“Don’t.” She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, hard. “Don’t be kind yet. I’ll fall apart, and I don’t deserve to fall apart in front of you.”
So he wasn’t kind. He gave her exactly what she’d asked for, which was the truth, level as a fence rail. “It was wrong. Those were your neighbors.”
“I know.”
“My neighbors, too.”
“You’re right.” And that was the one that finally bent her head. He was about to hang his name in front of this town and ask for its trust, and she’d spent an afternoon making sure that same town stayed ignorant of its own business.
The silence stretched, and inside it she found the only honest thing she had left to offer him.
“You should go,” she said. “I mean it. Not tonight. Altogether. Your business is about to be born in front of these people, and every day you’re seen with me costs you something. The price just went up.” She made herself say the rest. “Maybe we should stop seeing each other.”
“No.”
One word. It didn’t rise and it didn’t waver. It landed as a gate lands into its latch.
“Jason.”
“No.”
“You haven’t even thought about it.”
“I don’t need to.” He stepped closer, and there was nothing soft in his face, and nothing cruel in it either.
“I need you to understand something about me, so listen. I don’t make decisions fast. But I only make them once.
And I don’t unmake them.” His eyes held hers.
“I decided about you a long time ago. What you told me tonight doesn’t unmake it.
It just tells me what the next while is going to cost, and I’ve never once cared about the price of a thing I actually wanted. ”
Her breath came apart in the middle of that.
“Now hear the other half,” he said, “because I mean it just as much. What you did matters. I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t.
I’m not going to stand in front of it for you.
And I’m not going to tell you how to make it right, because it isn’t mine to fix.
” He reached out and took her hand at last, his thumb rough across her knuckles.
“You already know that. It’s why you couldn’t look at me just now. ”
She stared down at their hands. “What if the town never forgives me?”
“Then they don’t.” He said it plainly. “That’s tomorrow’s trouble. Tonight you stood there and told me the truth with nothing in your hands. No spin. No soft landing. I’ve watched you work a room, Cece. I know what it costs you to leave the tools in the box.”
He walked her back to the lodge the long way, her hand in his all the way. He didn’t fill the silence and neither did she.
At the edge of the parking lot he stopped and touched her cheek for just a moment and then he was gone. Cecelia stood alone under the coldest stars yet of the season. He hadn’t forgiven her, but he hadn’t left her. This was her mess and she was the only one who was responsible for fixing it.
And standing there, the beginning of an idea came to her about what to do with it. Not a plan yet. Just a direction, intuition.
It was going to cost her everything else.