Chapter 16 #2
"Then he cried." She stared at the table.
"Actual tears. And I sat there watching them, and I couldn't tell if they were real.
Eight years, Clay. I have known this man for eight years, and I cannot tell when he's lying.
" Her voice cracked. She caught it. "That's the part that makes me want to scream. "
You can. I wanted to say it. You got out. You drove three hours in the dark with your kid. You see him fine. But she wasn't done.
"He touched my hand. When he was leaving.
" Her voice dropped. "He reached across the desk and put his hand on mine and said, 'I just want us to be a family again, babe.
' And my whole body locked up. Every muscle.
My hands went flat on the desk, and I pressed down so hard my fingernails left marks.
" She held up her right hand. Four small crescents in the palm.
"These. I did these to myself because it was the only thing keeping me in the chair instead of under the desk. "
The kitchen was quiet. The fridge hummed. Down the hall, Maisie murmured something in her sleep — a word I couldn't catch, then silence.
"I called Savannah the second he left." She straightened in the chair — the paralegal, the fighter. "She thinks this is a playbook. Charm first. Then something legal. The flowers, the tears, the reconciliation offer — it's all documentation. He'll tell a judge he tried."
"You think he's coming for custody?"
"I think Preston doesn't do anything without a plan." She wrapped both hands around the mug again. "Savannah says we document everything. Every visit, every text, every interaction. We build our own file."
"I need you to not do anything."
The words landed like a hand on my chest.
"I can see it in your hands right now." She was right — my fingers were curled against the table, not quite fists. I flattened them. "If you confront him — if you so much as look at him wrong in public — he uses it. He makes you the problem."
I breathed. Let it move through me.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"I hear you. I won't touch him." I held her gaze. "But you need to hear me, too. Whatever Savannah needs — whatever you need — I'm in it. All the way."
The armor cracked. Her chin dipped and her eyes went bright, and the woman underneath — the one who'd been holding herself together with her fingernails all day — surfaced for one breath.
"I'm so angry, Clay." Her voice was barely there.
"I'm so angry that he can still do this.
That he can walk into my office and my body just — reverts.
Like everything I've built doesn't matter.
" She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
"And I'm terrified. Because I have this life now — this beautiful, messy, chaotic life with you and Maisie and this town — and he's going to try to take it apart.
That's what he does. He finds the thing you love, and he takes it apart piece by piece and calls it reasonable. "
I got up. Walked around the table. Sat beside her, my knee against hers.
"Look at me."
She dropped her hands. Red-rimmed and furious and scared.
"He walked into your office today, and you didn't break.
You threw his flowers in the trash and called your lawyer before his car was off the street.
" I put my hand on the back of her neck.
"That woman in Dallas? She's gone. The woman at that desk today — the one whose hands shook but whose voice didn't — she terrifies him. That's why he's here."
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against my collarbone and exhaled — long, shaking, the kind that empties everything.
"Just stay," she said. "Can you just stay tonight?"
I stayed.
Two a.m. Callie asleep against my chest. The cottage dark and quiet.
I stared at the ceiling and replayed the diner. Preston at the counter saying "our family" to June Parker, like the word belonged to him. The nod he'd given me — that dismissal, that nothing — like I was a temporary obstacle in a plan he'd already mapped.
I thought about the word "babe." Such a small word.
Two syllables. But it wasn't a word to Callie.
It was a frequency. A sound that her body remembered even when her brain had learned to fight back.
He'd used it in her office, in front of her colleagues, because he knew exactly what it did, and he wanted to watch it land.
I tightened my arm around her. She shifted in her sleep, pressed closer, her hand curling into my shirt.
Down the hall, Maisie breathed. Steady. Slow. The kid who corrected my Wilbur voice and told Oliver that gluing Sophie's hair was "premedicated." The kid who climbed into my lap at the Silver Spur and fell asleep against my chest like I was built for it.
Four crescent marks in Callie's palm. She'd done that to herself to stay in the chair. And she'd stood up afterward, thrown the roses in the bin, and called her lawyer.
This woman.
I held her tighter and thought: I have been the easy Blackwood my whole life. The one who charmed his way through everything because the world was good to me, and I never had to dig.
Not anymore. This wasn't eight seconds on a bull with a buzzer and a score and a crowd. This lasted months and happened in silence, and the only people scoring it were a child who didn't understand and a woman who'd already survived one man who failed her.
I pressed my lips to Callie's hair. Breathed her in.
I wasn't going to fail her.
Dawn. I slid out of bed without waking Callie. Made her tea, made my coffee, and stood on the porch while the sun came up over Copper Creek with my phone to my ear.
Weston picked up on the second ring. "Sav told me." No preamble. No six a.m. complaints. "How's Callie?"
"Holding it together."
"And you?"
I looked at my hands on the porch rail. Steady now. They hadn't been steady last night. "I want to drive to Dallas and take him apart."
"I know you do."
"I'm not going to."
"I know that too." A pause. "Listen to me. This is going to get worse before it gets better. You know that, right?"
"Yeah."
"And you're going to want to punch him. You can't."
"Yeah."
"Good. Let Sav fight the legal war. You fight the other one."
"What other one?"
"The one where you love that woman and her kid so hard that there's no room for Preston Ashford in their world. That's the war you win."
Through the screen door, I heard Callie's alarm go off. A shuffle. The tap running.
"I'm not going anywhere, Weston."
"I know. That's why you'll win."
I hung up. Drank my coffee. Watched the sun finish rising.
Inside, the kettle clicked on out of habit before she saw the mug I'd already poured. A pause. Then her voice, soft, through the screen door:
"Clay?"
"Out here."
She appeared in the doorway. My shirt. Bare legs. Hair everywhere. She looked at the tea on the counter, then at me on the porch, then at the tea again.
"You made tea," she said.
"I made tea."
She picked up the mug. Came outside. I was on the porch sofa, and she didn't hesitate — she curled into me, tucked her legs underneath her, pressed her back against my chest like she'd been doing it for years.
I put my arm around her, and she settled into it, both hands wrapped around the mug, her head fitting right below my jaw.
We drank in silence while the yard filled with early light — birds starting up in the pecan tree, the distant hum of someone's sprinkler kicking on.
I felt her body soften against mine, one degree at a time.
The tension in her shoulders loosening. Her breathing slowing until it matched mine.
She wasn't fragile. Her jaw was set. But she let herself lean into me like she'd decided, just for this morning, she didn't have to hold herself up.
And I held her like I had nowhere else to be. Because I didn't.
This wasn't the woman who'd driven into Copper Creek with garbage bags in the trunk. This was the woman who'd unpacked them.
"He doesn't get to have this," she said finally. Quiet. Not to me — to the street, to the morning, to whatever version of herself needed to hear it. "The office, the cottage, this town, you. He doesn't get to walk in here and dismantle what I built."
I put my arm around her. Pulled her against my side. She fit the way she always did — like my body had been waiting my whole life to learn her shape.
"Then we fight," I said.
"We fight."
She pressed her face against my chest. The morning was cold and the coffee was hot and the porch light was still on from last night because neither of us had turned it off.
We stood there until the sun was fully up and the tea was gone and Maisie's voice came floating from the bedroom — "Mommy, can Clay make the eggs?" — and Callie laughed. Once. Quiet.
Then we went inside, made the eggs, and started the war.