Chapter 15
ROURKE
By the third Saturday, my shoes stop looking new.
The first Saturday, every vendor in the Juniper Bend market watches me as if I've arrived with a clipboard and a threat. A man selling honey pauses with a jar in his hand. The woman with the egg cartons narrows her eyes. Coralee plants herself beside Mallory’s flowers and doesn't move until I leave.
I buy one bouquet. I take my change. I say thank you. Then I go back to the motel room with basil and zinnias on the passenger seat and sit on the edge of the bed staring at the bouquet my wife made.
The next Saturday, Cathy at the diner remembers my coffee order.
“Still taking it black, honey?” she asks, already pouring.
“Yes, thank you.”
The coffee is burned and mean. I drink it anyway.
At the market, the honey man tells me the sourwood is better than the clover if I'm buying for someone who actually tastes things instead of displaying them in a pantry. I buy the sourwood.
The Saturdays shape me slowly, like water wearing down stone.
The market teaches without caring whether I learn.
Mr. Hale sells honey and gives opinions as if they're another product under his tent.
Mrs. Larkin complains about the weather every week, regardless of what the sky is doing.
A child named Ben asks Mallory for a free flower every Saturday with no shame at all, and every Saturday she makes him earn it by identifying one bloom correctly.
“Zinnia,” he says today, chin lifted.
Mallory tilts the stem. “That’s a marigold.”
He frowns at it. “It’s orange.”
“Try again.”
I wait behind a woman buying two bouquets for a church luncheon and keep my hands at my sides.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to bundle Mallory up and take her home.
Fix it. But that's the past talking and if there's one thing I've figured out, it's that Mallory isn't going to willingly go back to what she ran from.
Mallory finishes with the church bouquets, wraps Ben’s marigold in a strip of brown paper, and takes his quarter with solemn seriousness. When she looks up, her eyes find the market entrance first, then me.
A month ago, my body would've crossed the space too quickly. I would've taken that glance as permission, as proof, as something I could build a whole foolish hope around. I stay where I am until the woman behind me gets her flowers.
Mallory chooses stems before I reach the stall.
“You bought snapdragons last week,” she says.
“I did.”
“They lasted?”
“Four days.”
Her mouth tightens. “You changed the water?”
“Every morning.”
“And trimmed the stems?”
“Yes.”
She looks at me then, narrow and suspicious. “Who taught you that?”
“You did.”
Her fingers still on the paper.
Not now. Don't press. Don't grab for the opening like a dog begging for scraps.
I clear my throat. “Also a paperback on your shelf. The heroine was very strict about tulips.”
Mallory blinks. “You read Petals at Promise Creek?”
“Yes.”
"The book with the mayor who proposes during a pie contest?"
"That's the one. I thought his timing was poor, but who am I to argue with the romance of pie?"
For one dangerous second, something almost happens to her mouth. Almost.
“Beatrice forced you,” she says.
“No. I found them.” I pause. "Found them when I went looking for you in the closet the day after you left. Just…something to be near you."
She stares at me for a moment, hands going still. Then her hands resume folding the paper. "That almost sounds like something that mayor would say."
"I suppose. But it's true."
She looks down at the bouquet as if it's become difficult to tie.
Another Saturday, she mentions a movie because a customer in loafers complains that the market has no chilled sparkling water and calls the flower buckets quaint.
“He’s one linen blazer away from being the city boyfriend in Autumn at Laurel Falls,” Mallory mutters after he leaves.
"He's lacking an assistant in tow. That guy never left anywhere without his assistant."
Mallory stares at me.
“You watched it.”
“Yes.”
“You hate movies like that.”
“I don't think I understood what they were.”
“And what are they?”
I look at the buckets between us. “Women saying clearly what would make them happy while men with overly polished shoes refuse to hear them until the last twenty minutes.”
Coralee makes a sound behind her table that might be approval or indigestion. Mallory wraps my bouquet and charges me eight dollars. I take the change.
I ask near closing, when the crowd has thinned and Mallory is counting small bills into the cash box. Not in front of customers. Not while Coralee is watching with both hands on her hips.
“One meal,” I say. “One conversation away from the stall.”
Mallory’s fingers flatten over the cash. “Rourke.”
“I’m not asking you to come home.”
Her shoulders lift with a breath she doesn't release.
“I’m not calling it a date,” I say. “I’m asking if you’ll have dinner with me.”
She looks toward the square, then back at me. “There isn’t a Michelin-starred restaurant within a hundred miles.”
I look across the square at the diner with the pie list taped crookedly in the window. “Then take me there.”
“The coffee is terrible.”
“I know.”
“The menus are laminated.”
“I’ve seen them.”
“Nothing arrives arranged artistically on the plate.”
“Aware of that, also. I want to go where you go.”
Her face changes by less than an inch. I feel it anyway. Coralee stops pretending to organize tomatoes.
Mallory closes the cash box. “One dinner.”
“Yes.”
“We walk there from the market.”
“Yes.”
“I am not discussing returning to the penthouse.”
"Don't expect you to."
“This meal does not mean I forgive you.”
“Understood.”
“I can leave whenever I want.”
“Of course.”
Coralee steps closer before Mallory can move away from the stall. Her gaze fixes on me with the flat calm of a woman who's already decided where the nearest heavy object is.
“She has somewhere safe to go if you give her a reason to walk away,” she says.
“I’m glad she does.”
Coralee studies me long enough that the back of my neck heats. Then she turns to Mallory. “Call me if you need me.”
Mallory nods once.
Mallory chooses the booth in the corner. I sit across from her.
Cracked red vinyl catches slightly on my palm when I slide in. The table rocks until Mallory folds a napkin and tucks it beneath one metal foot. The menu is laminated and faded at the corners, with photographs of food that appear to have been taken at least a decade ago, if not more.
Cathy appears with coffee. “Evening, honey.”
She sets a thick ceramic mug in front of me.
Mallory raises an eyebrow at the familiarity, then opens her menu, though I know she already knows every word on it. “Patty melt. Fries. The apple pie, if there's any left. Water.”
I shut my menu. “Patty melt. Fries.”
"And the pie?" Cathy asks.
"When in Rome."
"I don't know about Rome," Cathy says, taking our menus, "but in Juniper, we have the pie."
Cathy disappears, then reappears with a glass of water for both of us, and then disappears again.
The coffee is worse at night. Older. I don't wince as it goes down.
Mallory watches over the rim of her glass, guarded, tired, and so beautiful in the diner light that my hand curls against my thigh beneath the table.
Don't reach. Don't ask. Don't turn longing into pressure.
Locals greet her while we wait. A woman asks if she sold out of the daisies. A man tells her his wife liked last week’s bouquet so much she made him move it from the kitchen table to the bedroom at night. Mallory smiles at that, small but real.
“You sold out again,” I say when we’re alone.
“Almost.”
“I’m proud of you.”
Her expression closes so fast that I feel a momentary flash of panic.
I add, carefully, “You're good at this, Mallory. But I always knew you would be. I just didn't let you know enough."
Her fingers loosen around the glass.
“I’m proud because I watched people come to your stall for something only you could make.”
She looks out the window, toward the square gone darker with evening. “It’s a market stall, Rourke.”
“It’s yours.”
Cathy brings the food. The patty melt is hot enough to burn my fingertips through the toast. The fries are crisp and salty. Mallory watches me take the first bite as if waiting for disappointment.
I swallow. “That’s good.”
“You sound surprised.”
“That's funny, because I’m trying not to sound surprised.”
Her mouth twitches.
Later, I make the mistake of saying the mayor in Autumn at Laurel Falls was the only rational man in town because he knew the cider press was structurally unsound.
“The cider press was symbolic,” Mallory says.
“It was also unsafe.”
“That's not the point of the scene.”
“It became the point when they let children climb on it.”
She stares at me for one stunned second. Then she laughs.
Not politely. Not by accident disguised as a cough. A real laugh, quick and bright enough to make me grip the seat beneath me.
I remember having that laugh in my kitchen, in my bed, across hotel balconies and rental cars, and at one beachside bar where she quizzed me on my favorite yacht rock. I remember thinking it would always be there.
I pick up a fry and keep my mouth shut until I can trust it.
Mallory’s laugh fades. She looks down, but she doesn't run. So I do the thing I came here to do.
“There’s more I need to apologize for.”
Her hand stills near her plate.
“I left you sick with the flu for a lunch that could've waited,” I say. “You said you were fine. I should have known better.”
Mallory’s face goes very still.
The diner keeps moving around us. Forks against plates. Cathy laughing near the register. The sticky sugar dispenser between us.
“I promised to come home for dinner and let calls and meetings take priority. Again and again. I let you leave events alone while I stayed beside another woman in rooms you had built for me.”
Mallory’s throat moves.
“I accepted that stupid watch because I assumed my intentions were the only boundary that mattered. I hid what happened at Ridgeline because honesty would've required me to admit that I'd stopped putting you first a long time ago.
“Nothing physical happened,” I say. “But I failed to protect your place in my life. My not wanting Jocelyn doesn’t make your humiliation less real.”
"You hurt me, Rourke," she says, and the words feel like a punch. Not because I want to argue them, but because hurting her was the last thing I wanted to do. And looking at everything in hindsight shows that I did nothing to protect her from that hurt. "I watched you two…"
Her face falls and there's no disguising the hurt.
I want to reach across the table and pull her to me.
More better, I want to go back in time and knock the foolishness out of the older version of me.
If anyone had made her look like that, I would have wanted to throttle him. Want to put him out of his misery.
Knowing that the person who did that to her is me?
It makes me sick at my stomach.
"I don't know if I can do this, Rourke." Her voice is so small.
I take a breath, determined to choose my next words carefully.
"I'm not here to put on a show, Mallory. I'm here because I now know what life is like without you and it's no life at all."
She looks away first.
After dinner, I walk her back to the car she drove to Juniper Bend. It's the same old car from my memory, though the back seat is cleaner now. No flower buckets wedged around her knees tonight. Just a folded market tablecloth, a roll of brown paper, and one stray stem caught near the floor mat.
She stops beside the driver’s door.
I gesture toward the door. “May I?”
Mallory studies me, then gives one small nod.
I open the door. She doesn't get in immediately. Across the square, someone laughs, and a dog barks.
I want to kiss her. I want to kiss her so bad that I can nearly taste her.
I school my face and take a deep breath.
“Thank you,” I say, “for the worst coffee I’ve ever had.”
A laugh catches her before she can stop it.
Mallory slides into the car. I close the door gently and step back. She starts the engine. For one second, her eyes meet mine through the window.
Then she drives away.
I stand in the parking lot until her taillights turn at the corner and disappear beyond the diner sign.
One laugh. One dinner.
It's not enough. But for the first time, I may be earning my way back to her.
I put my hands in my pockets and stay where I am, because earning one laugh doesn't entitle me to the next.