Chapter 22 #2
As Juniper Bend draws closer, the lanes narrow. The trees lean in. Fences run uneven along fields where cattle stand in the shade, their tails flicking lazily. The air changes when we lower the windows for a while. There's less exhaust, more cut grass and warm earth.
The farmhouse appears beyond the bend, small and sun-warmed, with its faded paint, uneven porch steps, and rows of buckets near the side gate. Coralee’s truck is already parked in the drive. Dale stands beside it with his arms folded, his face shaded by a ball cap.
Coralee reaches my door before Rourke gets around the car. “How are you?”
“Better,” I say.
She studies my face. “You look tired.”
“I am tired.”
“Dizzy?”
“No.”
“Hungry?”
“A little.”
“Good. I made soup.”
Rourke comes to stand a few feet away with my bag in his hand. He doesn't interrupt. He doesn't introduce himself as if his name should carry any weight.
Coralee turns her eyes on him. The temperature seems to drop by ten degrees.
“Mrs. Banacek,” he says. “Mr. Banacek.”
“Coralee,” she says.
“Dale,” Dale adds, with the tone of a man who might accept a handshake or might test the strength of Rourke’s bones with it.
Rourke offers his hand anyway. Dale takes it.
“Thank you for taking care of Mallory,” Rourke says. “I understand I have no right to expect your trust. I’m just grateful she had somewhere safe to go.”
Dale’s expression changes by a fraction. Coralee looks at me. I nod once, because I'm too tired to manage everyone’s emotions and too moved to pretend his words don't matter.
“Bring the bag in,” Coralee says. “Then wash your hands. Soup’s on.”
Over the next two days, he makes himself useful.
He carries grocery sacks in and asks where things belong instead of rearranging my kitchen.
He moves flower buckets from the shaded side of the house to the wash table and listens when I tell him which stems bruise easily.
When Dale points out the loose porch board, Rourke crouches in his expensive trousers, studies the problem, and then accepts a hammer with the solemnity of a man being handed a newborn.
“You ever fix a porch board?” Dale asks.
“No.”
“You ever use a hammer?”
“Yes.”
Dale eyes him. “For what?”
Rourke pauses. “I hung a painting once.”
Dale sighs. “Lord help us.”
Rourke looks at the board. “Hopefully.”
Dale shows him how to pull the old nail without splitting the wood. Rourke does it wrong the first time. Dale corrects him. Rourke doesn't stiffen. He doesn't laugh it off. He tries again.
I watch from the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands and something like hope blooming cautiously in my chest.
By dinner, Rourke has dirt on his knees and a splinter in his thumb. He lets Coralee remove it at the table while the kids ask him questions no adult in his world would ever dare ask.
“Do you have a bowling alley in your house?”
“No.”
“Do you have a house for your cars?”
“A garage.”
“How many bathrooms?”
Rourke looks at me. I lift my eyebrows. He answers, “Too many.”
Dale laughs into his iced tea.
When the plates are cleared, Rourke stands and starts washing dishes without announcing himself as a man who washes dishes. He rolls up his sleeves, asks which sponge is for what, and gets water on the front of his shirt.
Coralee sits beside me at the table, watching him with narrowed eyes. “Don’t look pleased,” she murmurs.
“I’m not.”
“You look pleased.”
“I’m tired.”
“You can be both.”
I press my lips together.
Rourke turns at the sink. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Yes,” Coralee says. "There's a list. Where should I start?"
His face tightens.
“She’s tired,” Coralee says, nodding toward me.
He sets the plate down immediately and looks at me. “Do you need to lie down?”
“I’m fine.”
Coralee makes a sound.
A sigh slips out of me. “I might lie down for twenty minutes.”
Rourke dries his hands. “I can finish here.”
Dale claps him on the shoulder. “You can. Badly, but you can.”
Rourke accepts that too.
The farmhouse is small enough that I hear him everywhere: his footsteps in the hall, his low voice in the yard with Dale, the creak of the porch when he steps outside in the morning and leaves his phone on the kitchen counter beside mine.
There's nowhere for him to disappear into a private office.
No staff to create distance. No elevator carrying him away from ordinary sounds. Yet he doesn't overwhelm the place.
At night, he takes up residence in the spare room. I know the bed isn't to Carmichael standards, but he doesn't complain. If anything, he seems relieved to at least have a bed.
I stand at the threshold of the door and think about how many nights we spent away from each other. The urge to ask him to come back to bed with me is there, but not tonight.
"You comfortable?"
"I'm good."
"Okay, I'm going to…" I gesture toward my room.
He nods, watching me. “Goodnight, Mallory.”
“Goodnight.”
My bed feels too large without him. Outside, crickets scream, and I wonder how Rourke is sleeping with the sound of insects instead of the sterile sound of the penthouse around him.
I miss him. I miss his body warm behind mine. I miss the weight of his arm across my waist. I miss his breath changing when he finally falls asleep. I miss reaching backward in the dark and finding him there.
More than that, I miss believing that finding him there meant he had chosen to stay.
I press my hand to my stomach and stare into the farmhouse dark. I don't call him in. But I imagine it until sleep finally takes me.
The next evening, Rourke sits beside me on the living-room couch with a small tear in the cuff of his shirt and clean hands that still look faintly rough from work.
Dale kept him most of the day. Repairing a fence latch, porch board, a delivery of feed sacks for Coralee’s brother.
I suspect Dale has begun inventing tasks to see whether Rourke will refuse one. So far, he hasn't.
The lamp beside the couch turns the room gold. The windows are open, and the night air brings in the smell of damp soil from the flower beds I watered before dinner. Somewhere beyond the house, Coralee laughs at something Dale says as they cross their own yard.
I stand before I can lose my nerve. Rourke looks up, no doubt thinking something is wrong, but I say nothing, walking toward the apron hanging on the hook by the kitchen door.
The apron fabric is faded from sun and washing. There are faint stains along the front from stems and soil and one stubborn smear of berry juice from the week Coralee’s youngest crashed into me with a pint of blackberries. I slide my fingers into the pocket and find the folded clinic envelope.
Rourke looks from my face to my hand.
He goes very still. I pull the photo from the envelope as I cross to him and then hand it to him, unsure what words are appropriate for this moment. He takes the image from me, still watching my face, and then he looks down as he pulls it to him.
For a long time, he only looks at it. The image is grainy and strange, a small blur inside shadow, precious in a way that has nothing to do with beauty. His thumb hovers near the edge but doesn't cross onto the picture.
“I couldn’t find the baby at first either,” I say.
His eyes lift to mine.
I sit close enough that our knees almost touch. “Here.” I point. “That’s where she showed me.”
He bends over the picture, searching. “There?” he whispers.
“There.”
His breath leaves him.
“She turned the screen,” I say. “And I thought I was looking at nothing. Then she said, ‘There’s your baby.’ Like it was the simplest thing in the world.”
Rourke’s eyes fill.
“The heartbeat was fast,” I say. “Almost too fast to count. I cried after. Not there. I held it together in the room because there was a couple in the hall arguing about insurance, and someone’s toddler was screaming, and it was all a little much.
But when I got back here, I took the picture out of my apron pocket and cried at the kitchen table. ”
His jaw flexes. “Mallory,” he says.
“I loved someone I could barely see,” I say. “Sometimes, it still doesn't feel real.”
His throat works. Finally, he looks back to me, his eyes shining.
“There’s something else,” I say.
I go to my bedroom and open the drawer where I put the small box after leaving the penthouse. For weeks, I couldn't look at it without feeling the old apartment around me. The dinner I cooked. The dress I changed out of. The watch on the dresser. The words I practiced and never said.
Now the box is just a box. Small, cream-colored, tied with ribbon I retied once after crushing it in my suitcase. I bring it to him. He looks at it, then at me.
“I bought them before the dinner,” I say. “The night I was going to tell you.”
Rourke’s face loses color. He opens the lid.
The booties are still folded in tissue, soft and impossibly small. Neutral cream yarn, little cuffs rolled down. I remember standing in the shop with them in my palm, feeling foolish, happy, and terrified, imagining Rourke holding them exactly like this.
He lifts them out with one hand while the ultrasound rests in the other. And then he understands. Not just the fact of the baby. He knew that already. He understands the moment that I lost when it all fell apart.
“I made you pack this,” he says, his voice breaking on the last word.
“I made you take the way you wanted to tell me and turn it into something you carried out of our home while you left me.” He looks at the booties, his mouth twisting with pain he does nothing to soften.
“I made silence feel safer than telling me we were having a baby.”
My eyes burn.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “Not because I missed a moment that belonged to me, but because I destroyed a moment that belonged to you.
You should've had joy. You should've had me looking at you first. You should've had a husband who made our child feel like they were arriving inside a safe marriage, not another Carmichael obligation you had to protect them from.”