CHAPTER TWO #2
“Should be ready by next month. I’ll keep an eye on her.” Emmett closed the folder and looked at me for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. “You’ve built something real here, Mrs. Langley. Don’t know if anybody tells you that enough.”
“You just did,” I said, and the small, plain compliment carried more weight than it probably should have, coming as it did on a morning that had already reminded me, twice before nine o’clock, how little of that currency I’d been getting from the one person whose opinion mattered most.
Lainey Jo called around eleven, her voice bright over the phone.
“You free for lunch? I’m dropping off feed samples at the co-op and thought I’d swing by after.”
“I’d love that.” I meant it more than the casual invitation probably warranted, hungry in a way I hadn’t fully named yet for an hour of conversation that wasn’t shaped, in some way, around Gibson’s schedule or Delaney’s crisis of the week.
We ate sandwiches on the porch, and Lainey Jo, who had known me since before I married into this family and had no reverence for the Langley name, watched me with the sharp, affectionate attention of an old friend clocking something before I’d said a word about it.
“You’ve got that look,” she said.
“What look?”
“The one you got right before you told me your daddy’s insurance business almost went under back in college. The holding-something-in look.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, and then, because Lainey Jo had never once let me get away with nothing, “it’s probably nothing. Gibson’s just been spending a lot of time helping Delaney get the Sutton place back on its feet.”
“Mm.” Lainey Jo took a slow bite of her sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. “And how do you feel about that?”
“I trust him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I didn’t have a good answer for her, not yet, not one I was ready to say out loud even to my closest friend, and Lainey Jo, wise enough not to push further than I could go, let the silence sit between us instead of filling it, which was its own quiet gift.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, gathering up the sandwich wrappers, “I’ve known Gibson Langley since he was fifteen years old and thought the height of romance was carving your initials into a fence post. I don’t think that boy’s capable of cheating on you.
I do think he’s exactly the sort of man who can love somebody completely and still manage to look right past them if something shinier and more urgent shows up in the corner of his eye. ”
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be comforting. It’s meant to be true.
” Lainey Jo squeezed my hand before she left, her car keys already jingling.
“You keep an eye on it, and if it’s still bothering you in a month, you say something plain, none of this trusting-him-into-silence business.
You’ve never been a woman who does well shrinking herself down to keep the peace, Shelby. Don’t start now.”
Maggie got home from school in a mood I recognized as her brand of triumphant, having won the class spelling bee for the second week running, and insisted on a celebratory ride on her pony before dinner, an old, patient gelding named Biscuit who’d carried half the county’s children through their first riding lessons.
“Watch this,” she called from the saddle, urging Biscuit into a proud, careful trot around the small paddock, and I stood at the rail cheering louder than the achievement probably warranted, because some days a mother’s job was simply to make a child feel like the center of the entire ranch’s attention.
“You’re getting so good,” I told her, helping her down afterward. “Better than I was at your age, and I’d been riding two years longer.”
“Can I tell Daddy when he gets home?”
“Of course you can, bug. He’d love to hear it.”
I thought about her words for the rest of the afternoon, turning them over while I finished the evening chores, and understood, with a clarity that unsettled me a little, that Lainey Jo had put language to something I’d been circling without quite landing on for weeks.
I wasn’t afraid of Gibson falling in love with someone else.
I was afraid of becoming so easy to overlook that he never noticed he’d stopped looking at me at all.
Gibson made it home by six that evening, later than most days but well within the bounds of ordinary, and found me in the kitchen finishing up a late supper while Maggie set the table with the seriousness she brought to any job she’d decided was hers alone.
“Smells good,” he said, coming up behind me at the stove and pressing a kiss to the back of my neck, unhurried, the way he still sometimes did when nothing was pulling at him. “Long day?”
“Ginny came by for breakfast. Beau too, eventually.”
“That’s a full house before nine in the morning.” He reached past me to steal a piece of cornbread off the pan, and I swatted his hand away out of long habit, and he laughed, easy, and stole it anyway. “You know my mother means well. Even when it doesn’t come out that way.”
“I know. Doesn’t make breakfast any shorter.”
“I’ll talk to her.” He said it lightly, and I believed, in that moment, that he actually would, that this was simply one more small thing a good husband handled on behalf of a wife who’d had a long morning.
We ate together at the table, the three of us, Maggie narrating her armadillo research at length, and for that hour, at least, the day’s earlier friction dissolved into something that still, thirteen years in, felt like exactly the life I’d built.
After Maggie was down for the night, Gibson found me at the sink finishing the dishes, and instead of heading to his study the way he often did, he picked up a towel and started drying, working alongside me in a comfortable, wordless rhythm we’d built over a decade of ordinary evenings just like this one.
The radio on the counter, an old habit from before either of us could remember, was playing something slow, and halfway through the second song Gibson set down the towel and held out his hand.
“Dance with me.”
“We’re doing dishes, Gibson.”
“The dishes will wait.” He pulled me against him anyway, one hand at the small of my back, the other laced through mine, and swayed us both slowly around the kitchen in a space barely large enough for the movement, humming slightly off-key along with the radio. “I don’t do this enough.”
“You don’t.”
“I’m doing it now.” He dipped his head, resting his forehead against mine, and for a few unhurried minutes there was nothing between us but the radio and the warm kitchen light and thirteen years of exactly this quiet, ordinary devotion, never showy enough to make it into any story anyone told about our marriage but, in fact, most of what had held it together.
The song ended and another one started, faster this time, and Gibson spun me out and back in with more enthusiasm than skill, nearly knocking a dish towel off the counter in the process, and I laughed harder than the small mishap probably warranted, breathless and lightheaded in a kitchen that suddenly felt, for those few minutes, exactly as full as it should have been.
“We should do this every week,” he said, catching his breath.
“You say that about a lot of things.”
“I mean this one.” He kissed my temple, unhurried. “Some weeks I’ll probably forget. Remind me when I do.”
I filed the promise away, half hopeful and half already bracing for the way his good intentions tended to fray at the edges once the ranch’s actual business reasserted itself, and told myself, drying the last of the dishes, that a man who at least wanted to remember was still better than one who’d never thought to make the promise at all.