24. Jessica
Jessica
The thing about small towns is that eventually everything folds into everything else, and by the end of the second month back in mine, Garrett Calloway had stopped being a disruption and started being part of the wallpaper.
It had happened so gradually, I couldn't tell you the day it had switched.
He'd just kept showing up at the edges of every event I was running, and he'd kept being polite, and he'd kept not doing the things I'd been bracing for him to do, and somewhere along the way I'd reset.
The town was small. We were both on the festival committee.
People overlapped, lives intersected, faces repeated until they stopped being new and started being known, and eventually you ran out of energy for vigilance and you let the wallpaper be wallpaper.
I noticed how thoroughly I'd let it happen halfway up a ladder in four-inch heels in the middle of the town square, which was exactly as practical as it sounded and absolutely non-negotiable, because if you couldn't run an event in heels, you had no business running an event, and that included climbing ladders.
The metal rung pressed thin and hard into the arch of my foot through the leather.
The October sun was sitting low and warm across the back of my neck, and the strand of fairy lights I was wrestling kept twisting itself into a personal vendetta against me.
I leaned out, one hand on the rail, the other bullying the wire into the clip Roy had nailed too high three years ago and never bothered to fix, and the ladder gave its small, annoyed sway underneath me — not enough to be dangerous, just enough to be irritating, unless you factored in the shoes, which I was absolutely not factoring in.
"Jess. Hold up."
I glanced down. Garrett was at the base of the ladder with one hand already braced against the side rail, steadying it before I'd even processed the wobble, his face tipped up toward me with the kind of mild concern you'd give any woman doing electrical work in stilettos.
"I've got you," he said.
"I'm fine."
It came out fast, the way it always came out, because fine was the default setting of any Williams woman on a ladder and also because the alternative was admitting that the rung was actively bruising my arch.
"Yeah." A small pause. "I was gonna make a comment about you doing this in those heels."
I lifted an eyebrow at him from above. He held my eyes.
"But I value my life," he said, deadpan. "So I'm choosing silence."
A laugh got out of me before I could button it.
It was a surprised laugh, an honest one, the kind that meant he'd timed the joke right, and it wasn't lost on me that his joke had landed where ten different versions of be careful, sweetheart from ten different men would've made me throw the lights at his head.
"Smart man."
"Survival instincts."
"Rare in this town."
"Underrated."
The clip finally gave under my fingers, and the wire slotted into place with a small, satisfying snap, and the line of lights ran clean and even all the way to the corner of the square, the way it had been refusing to all morning.
I leaned back to check the spacing, the breeze coming up the back of my neck, the warm weight of late-October light on my forearms, and the whole thing looked exactly the way I'd seen it in my head three weeks ago when I'd been sketching it on a napkin at Dottie's with a cold coffee and a felt-tip pen.
I came down the ladder slower than I'd ever admit, because the rung had hurt more than I'd let on, and the second my heel touched concrete, Garrett let go of the side rail and stepped back.
No commentary. No, You sure that was a good idea, sweetheart.
No drawn-out hand on my elbow. He just let go, like the job was done, which, frankly, earned him points he hadn't started the day with.
"Thanks."
"No problem." He picked up the toolbox he'd set down on the curb and tipped his head toward the far side of the square. "I'm headed over to help Billy with the smoker setup. You need anything else while I'm here?"
It was such an ordinary question. Such a useful one.
The kind of question I'd been asked a thousand times by every dad and uncle and contractor in this town when I was a girl, the kind that came with no agenda underneath it, just a man heading to his next job and clearing his current one with you on the way out.
"I think I'm good. Thank you, Garrett."
"Alright. Shout if you need a hand."
He nodded once, easy, and crossed the square with his toolbox swinging at his side, and I watched him go for half a second longer than I'd meant to, the way you watch any departure to confirm it's actually a departure.
Then I turned back to the lights and didn't think about it again for the rest of the afternoon.
It kept happening like that.
Not big moments. Nothing I could point to and call a thing. Just the small accumulating courtesies of a man who'd decided to be useful, and who had stopped, somewhere in the second week of festival prep, registering to me as anything other than another helpful body.
He held the door of the community hall open for me on Tuesday when my arms were full of binders, and Roberta, the receptionist, was on the phone.
He hauled the box of bunting up from the basement when Roy's back went out on Wednesday, which Roy had been threatening to use as an excuse to go home early all morning.
At the Thursday setup meeting, he raised his hand at exactly the right moment to suggest moving the live music stage two feet to the east so it wasn't blocking the fire exit, which everyone else had been too polite to mention to me directly, even though I'd known I'd put it wrong on the schematic.
He didn't make a thing of being right. He just said it, and people nodded, and we moved on.
A woman I didn't recognize came in through the side door of the hall a little after that, halfway down the volunteer roster I was working through with Clara Mae.
I caught her in the corner of my eye, no more than a flicker — small, thirty-something, soft brown hair, a school district lanyard around her neck, and a canvas tote on her shoulder.
She didn't cross the hall. She went to Roberta at the back, and the two of them spoke quietly for less than thirty seconds.
The woman handed Roberta something that disappeared into the pocket of Roberta's apron, and then the woman left through the same side door she had come in through.
I didn't think about it. People came into the community hall all morning to drop off flyers, signed waivers, and missing volunteer forms. It was that kind of room.
Roberta came over to my elbow at the end of the meeting after the rest of the table had cleared and Clara Mae had gone for her coat. She didn't sit. She slid a folded square of paper across the corner of my binder under the cover of her hand.
"For you, sweetheart. From a friend."
“Who?"
"She didn't say. She came down from Abilene to see her mother at the home on Oak. She said her name was Madeline." Roberta's hand stayed flat on the corner of my binder a beat longer than it needed to. Her eyes met mine. "She seemed real anxious to get back on the road, hon."
She lifted her hand off the binder. The folded square of paper sat there. Roberta didn't say anything else, and I didn't say anything else.
I tucked the note under the corner of my binder without opening it. I gathered my things. I said goodnight to Clara Mae at the door. I didn't open the note until I was alone in my truck in the parking lot with my keys in my hand and the engine off.
Jessica — I taught at the elementary school here for one semester, eight years ago.
I left for reasons I don't want to write down on this paper.
I'm asking you to be careful around Garrett Calloway.
I'm not making accusations. I'm only saying what I would have wanted a woman to say to me, and what no woman did.
Be careful around that man. Be careful around his mother. — Madeline
The handwriting was small and tight, the kind of handwriting a teacher uses. The morning sun was coming through the windshield.
I folded the note back the way it had been. I slid it into the inside pocket of my jacket. I drove to the ranch.
Hunter was at the workshop. He came out before the truck had stopped. I handed him the note through the open driver's door without getting out, and he leaned his forearm on the doorframe and read it with his other hand and his jaw working slow.
"Madeline Reeves."
"You know her?"
"I knew her one semester. She was the elementary school teacher I told you about. The one who left in the middle of the year." He let out a slow breath through his nose. "She came to find you."
"She did."
He folded the note back the way it had been. He kissed my forehead through the open driver's door. He didn't say anything for a long second.
"Come inside. I'll text Liam."
I came inside. He sat me on his stool by the bench and put a bottle of water in my hand without asking, and thumbed something into his phone and put the phone face down on the bench.
His hand came up and rested between my shoulder blades the way he sometimes rested it on a horse he was trying to settle, warm and steady, and after a minute, the tightness at the top of my spine moved a little under his hand.
“Liam will loop in. We'll figure it out."
I peered up at him. ”You're not going to put me on a leash, Hunter."
“Wouldn't dream of it, baby."
"Good."
His gaze hardened, letting me know there was no room for discussion. ”Eyes up, though."
I nodded once. ”Eyes up."
He kissed the crown of my head in approval.
I went home that evening with the note still in my jacket pocket. I poured myself a glass of wine and opened my laptop, and I had been waiting on a callback from the marquee linen company, so I picked the phone up without looking at the screen when it rang.
"Jessica Williams."
"Jessica, sweetheart, it's Penny Calloway."
I set the wine glass down.
“Penny...hi."
"Oh, honey, I won't keep you. I've been meaning to thank you for two weeks, and tonight I finally made myself pick up the phone.
Garrett told me last week the two of you had moved past whatever awkwardness there was at the start.
He said you'd been so gracious about him pitching in around the festival prep.
He used that word twice, sweetheart. Gracious.
And I just — Jessica, you cannot know what it means to a mother to hear her grown son speak about a woman with that kind of admiration. I had to pick up the phone."
The skin at the back of my neck registered the temperature change before the rest of me caught up. I stayed quiet for a moment, struggling to find words that weren’t leave me alone. ”Penny."
"Yes, sweetheart."
"Garrett and I haven't really had any conversations of substance. He's been polite at events. I've been polite at events. That's the extent of it. Strictly professional.”
A small pause.
"Of course, sweetheart. Of course. I think he just meant the two of you had found a rhythm. That's the word I should have used. Either way, you've made a mother very happy tonight. Goodnight, honey."
"Goodnight, Penny."
The line went dead. I sat there with the phone in my hand and the laptop screen gone to sleep, and Madeline's note still folded in my jacket pocket on the back of my chair.
That just might've been the most unsettling phone call I'd ever had.
I called Hunter.
He picked up before the second ring. "Jess."
"He's telling his mother things, Hunt. She just called to thank me for being gracious about a friendship that doesn't exist."
He was quiet for a second. "Yeah."
"That's not nothing."
"No."
"What does it mean?"
"Don't know yet. Liam's coming up Sunday. Maggie too. You and I are gonna sit at Mom's table tomorrow night, and we'll all talk it through. Until then, eyes up. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Anything else lands strange this week, you call. You don't sit on it for a day."
"I won't."
"I'll see you in the morning."
"Yeah, baby. See you in the morning."
He hung up. I sat at my kitchen counter for a long time with the phone in my hand, trying to figure Penny and Garrett out, but there was no figuring them out.
Then I got up and walked across the apartment to the chair where my jacket was hanging and slid the folded note out of the inside pocket and pinned it under a magnet on the front of the fridge, because Madeline had told me I could tear it up, but I'd decided I wasn't going to.
The week that followed was an ordinary week. Hunter beside me at events. Garrett at the edge of two committee meetings, polite, distant, the same nod he'd been giving for weeks. Penny smiling at me across rooms in her cream blazers, no more phone calls.
By Friday afternoon, the festival was twenty-four hours from opening and I was getting dressed for the Silver Spur with my hair down and my favorite jeans on and Stephanie's name on the lineup that night.
The note was still on the fridge. The tightness from the call and the tightness from the note had loosened some, but not completely.
But I wanted to go dance with my boyfriend and his family, so I went out to dance.