16. Rae
RAE
I knelt beside the Cessna's landing gear assembly and wiped grease from my knuckles with a rag that was already ruined.
The heat in Ruben's shop was oppressive, even with the bay doors open to the field.
Sweat stuck my shirt to my spine. Birds chirped outside, and somewhere across the field a prop engine coughed to life.
I'd been back at work for seven weeks now, taking on the jobs that used to be mine before I married Nash and moved to Austin. Before I walked away from him.
The landing gear needed new seals, and I was elbow-deep in the assembly when Ruben appeared beside my workbench. He didn't say anything, just stood there with a slip of paper in his hand and waited until I looked up.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Lawyer sent this over for you." He handed me the paper, his expression carefully neutral. "Courier dropped it at the office."
I stood and took it, my fingers leaving a smudge on the corner.
The letter was short — three paragraphs, legal language that boiled down to one simple fact.
Nash wasn't contesting the divorce. No response had been filed on his behalf, and the deadline had passed.
Mine expected it to finalize within two weeks.
My chest went tight, like someone had wrapped a fist around my ribs and squeezed.
I read the paragraph twice, but the words didn't change. He wasn't fighting it. I'd asked him for the divorce, and he'd let it go. Clean, simple, no argument. Like closing a business deal he'd already lost interest in.
"You okay?" Ruben asked.
"Yeah." I folded the paper and shoved it into my back pocket. "Fine."
He gave me a look that said he didn't believe me, but he didn't push. That was Ruben — he never hovered, never pried. He'd given me my job back without asking questions, let me show up early and stay late, and didn't comment when I worked through lunch. I was grateful for that.
I crouched back down and reached for the wrench I'd been using.
My left hand was bare, and I touched the place where my ring used to sit.
The skin there still felt wrong, like I was missing something.
Nash had my ring — I'd left it on the kitchen counter the night I walked out, and he'd picked it up.
I had no answer to that.
Ruben cleared his throat. "Saw your husband the other day."
I froze. The wrench slipped in my grip, and I had to tighten my hold before it clattered to the concrete floor.
"On the field," Ruben continued. His voice was even, factual, like he was reporting the weather. "He was asking Pete Harmon about composite repair. Watched him work for about an hour. Took notes."
I didn't look up. "Nash doesn't do composite repair."
"Didn't," Ruben said. "Looked like he was learning."
My stomach flipped. I set the wrench down carefully and wiped my palms on my jeans, buying time. Nash didn't work on planes anymore — he ran the company, signed the contracts, made the deals that kept McCallister Aviation running. He hadn't turned a wrench in years. Maybe longer.
"He's been out here three times that I've seen," Ruben said. "Asking questions. Taking notes. Learning the work you do."
I finally looked at him. "Why are you telling me this?"
Ruben shrugged, his hands in his pockets. "Thought you should know."
He walked away before I could ask anything else, his boots scuffing against the concrete floor. I stared after him, my pulse kicking up in a way that made me feel ridiculous.
Nash was learning my work. Or at least, he was trying to learn it. Coming out to the field, asking Pete Harmon — who had no reason to teach him anything — about composite repair. Taking notes like a student.
I didn't know what to do with that information. It didn't fit with the man who'd let Adriana into the penthouse, who'd admitted everything I accused him of and then let me walk away without a fight.
It didn't fit with a man who wasn't fighting to keep me.
I tried to focus on the landing gear, but my hands were shaking and I couldn't get the seal to sit right. After ten minutes of making no progress, I gave up and wiped down my tools. Ruben didn't comment when I told him I was done for the day. He just nodded and went back to his own work.
The drive to Enid's house took fifteen minutes.
She lived on the same street as the little house in Cibolo Heights — the house Nash and I had bought together when we were young and stupid and believed in the future.
I'd been staying in Enid's guest room since I left him.
She didn't ask for rent, didn't ask questions.
Just made sure I ate dinner and didn't spend every evening staring at the walls.
When I pulled into her driveway, she was on her porch with a glass of iced tea. She waved me over before I could make it to the door.
"Come sit," she called.
I climbed the steps and sank into the wicker chair beside hers. The late afternoon sun was brutal, but her porch had shade, and there was a breeze coming through the oak trees in her yard.
Enid handed me her glass without a word. I took a sip — sweet, the way she always made it — and passed it back.
"Something you need to see," she said.
My throat went tight. "What?"
"Your house." She nodded down the street. "Something's been happening over there."
I followed her gaze. The little house was three blocks down, barely visible through the trees.
I hadn't been near it in weeks — couldn't stand to.
It was too full of memories I wasn't ready to touch.
The porch where Nash proposed. The yellow bedroom I'd painted myself, thinking it would be a nursery someday.
"What kind of something?" I asked.
"Go look," Enid said. "Then come back and tell me."
I wanted to argue, but she was already sipping her tea and staring out at the yard like the conversation was over. I stood, my legs unsteady, and walked down the porch steps.
The street was quiet. Nobody out watering their lawns, no kids on bikes. Just the sound of my footsteps on the pavement and the hum of cicadas in the trees. My heart was pounding by the time I reached the mailbox.
When I stopped at the edge of the yard, I couldn't breathe.
The porch didn't sag anymore.
I stared at it, my chest going tight. Some of the boards were new — pale wood that hadn't weathered yet, still smelling faintly of sawdust and stain, interspersed with the older boards he'd kept and refinished.
The railing was straight and solid, none of the rot I remembered from the last time I'd been here.
Someone had painted the trim, too, a crisp white that made the rest of the house look shabby by comparison.
I climbed the steps slowly, one hand on the new railing. They didn't creak. Nash had proposed on this porch, and it had creaked then. It had creaked every day we'd lived here.
Now it was silent under my feet.
The windows were clean. Not just wiped down, but clean — the kind of clean that takes hours and a bucket of soapy water and a lot of elbow grease. I cupped my hands around my face and peered through the glass into the living room.
The walls had been painted. Fresh, warm color — a soft gray that made the room look bigger. Not the faded beige we'd lived with for years. The floors were refinished, too, the old scratches and water stains gone. The baseboard I'd tripped over a hundred times had been replaced.
My breath hitched. I stepped back from the window and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in.
The yard had been mowed and edged, the grass cut short and even.
The flower beds I'd planted three years ago and let go to weeds were cleared out, mulched, replanted with something green and hopeful.
Lavender, maybe. The mailbox at the curb had been straightened — it used to lean to the left, and Nash always said he'd fix it but never did.
Now it stood straight.
This wasn't hired work. I knew what contractors left behind — efficiency, speed, a crew's collective effort. Tools scattered, work done fast and impersonal.
This was something else. This was one person, working alone, taking their time. This was someone sanding the porch boards by hand, scrubbing the windows until they shined, digging out the flower beds and replanting them one by one.
This was care.
This was him.
I pressed my hand to my mouth, my eyes stinging. He'd done this. All of it. Nash, who hadn't set foot in this house in five years, who'd let it sit and rot while we lived in the penthouse in Austin — he'd come back and put his hands on it. Fixed it. Made it something worth living in again.
And he hadn't told me.
I walked down the steps and stood in the yard, staring at the house like it might explain itself. My chest ached in a way I didn't have words for. I'd asked him for a divorce, and he'd given it to me. No fight, no argument. But he'd done this.
I didn't know what it meant.
No — that was a lie. I knew exactly what it meant, and I was terrified of it.
I turned and walked back to Enid's house, my throat tight and my eyes burning. She was still on the porch, waiting. She didn't ask if I'd seen. She just looked at me and knew.
"You saw," she said. It wasn't a question.
I nodded and sat down hard in the chair beside her. My hands were shaking.
"He's been at it for weeks," Enid said. "Every weekend. Sometimes during the week, too. I see his truck there in the mornings before I leave for work. He's always gone by the time I get home."
"He didn't tell me," I said. My voice came out hoarse.
"No," Enid agreed. "He didn't."
We sat in silence for a long moment. I could feel her watching me, but I kept my eyes on the street, on the little house three blocks down.
"Rae," she said finally. "Do you truly believe he's changed?"
The question hung in the air between us, heavy and impossible. I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it again. I didn't know what to say.
Did I believe it? Did I believe that Nash — the man who'd buried himself in work and let me disappear, who'd let Adriana into our home and then admitted it to my face — had changed?
I wanted to. God, I wanted to.
But wanting something didn't make it true.
I thought about the porch that didn't creak anymore, the windows scrubbed clean, the flower beds replanted. I thought about him on the field, learning composite repair from Pete Harmon. Learning the work I did, the work I loved. Taking notes.
And I thought about Adriana's perfume in the penthouse. The smudge on his collar. The look on his face when I asked him if she'd been there and he said yes.
Enid reached over and squeezed my hand once, then let go. She didn't push. She never did.
I went inside after that, up to the guest room that had become mine. Enid didn't follow. She knew when to leave me alone.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my hands. They were still stained with grease, my nails ragged from the day's work. The kind of hands Nash used to hold like they mattered. Like they were something to be proud of.
My chest hurt. A deep, relentless ache that spread through my ribs and into my throat. I pressed my palm there, like I could hold the feeling in.
What if he'd changed? What if the man I'd fallen in love with — the one who used to sit on the creaky porch with me and talk about the future, who'd proposed on those same boards — what if that man had come back?
And what if it didn't last?
That was the question I couldn't get past. What if this was temporary? What if he was just doing what he thought he needed to do to win me back, and the moment I believed him, the moment I let myself hope, he'd slip back into the man I'd left?
I couldn't survive that. Not again.
I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. The image of the little house rose up behind my eyelids — the porch, the windows, the yard. All of it fixed. All of it waiting.
For me, maybe. Or for the life we used to have.
I didn't know if I could go back to him. I didn't even know if I wanted to. But I knew, sitting there in Enid's guest room with my heart in pieces, that some part of me still did.
Some part of me still loved him.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes and let the grief come. Quiet, private, the kind of crying that doesn't make noise. The kind you do when you're mourning something that isn't quite dead yet but isn't alive either.
The divorce was going through. Two weeks, and it would be final. Nash wasn't fighting it. He hadn't responded, hadn't contested anything. He'd just let it go.
But he'd fixed the house. He'd learned my work. He'd done all of it without telling me, without asking for credit, without making it about what he wanted.
I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know if it was enough.
All I knew was that I wanted him. I wanted the man who'd done those things. I wanted to believe in him again.
And I was terrified that if I did, he'd break me all over again.