Chapter 5 #2
"You remembered that."
"River." My voice is barely above a whisper. "I remember everything."
The silence that follows is a living thing. It fills the cab, presses against the fogged windows, sits between us with the weight of everything—the bonfire and a promise I broke before dawn.
His hand lifts from the steering wheel. Slow.
Deliberate. Not a grab, not a lunge—the careful movement of a man reaching for something he's not sure he's allowed to touch.
His fingers find the strand of hair plastered to my cheek by rain, and he pushes it back.
Behind my ear. Gently. His fingertips graze the edge of my jaw, and his thumb settles against my cheekbone, and my entire body goes still.
Not frozen. Still. The way the air goes still before lightning.
The last time he touched my face like this was the bonfire. The field. His hands cupping my jaw in the dark while he said I love you, stay, and I said I will, and I meant it with every cell in my body right up until the moment I didn't.
My breath comes out shaky. His thumb moves. One stroke across my cheekbone, wiping mud or rain or both, and the gentleness of it—the devastating, unnecessary gentleness—cracks something open in my chest that I've been sealing shut since I drove back into this town.
He sees it. He sees me freeze, sees the memory land, sees the flinch I can't quite hide. His hand drops.
"Sorry." The word comes out rough. Quiet. Carrying all of it.
"Don't be." My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like a woman standing on the edge of something. "Don't be sorry."
Neither of us knows if I'm talking about the touch or the past or both.
His radio crackles. "River, dispatch. Second line down on County Road 9, near the bridge. Crews are tied up. Can you respond?"
His eyes close. One breath. Two. The muscle in his jaw works like he's biting down on something he wants to say.
"Copy, dispatch. En route."
He looks at me. One second. Long enough to say everything the moment didn't have time for.
"Be safe," I manage.
He nods. I grab my hard hat and step back into the rain like I'm stepping into another life—the one where he's the lineman who goes when the call comes and I'm the architect with an exit date in October.
The drive home is a blur of wet roads and wipers and a shaking that has nothing to do with cold.
The apartment is dark. The bathroom mirror shows a woman I barely recognize—mud-streaked, hair plastered, mascara running.
Rain gear puddling water on the tile. And underneath all of it, in the eyes, something that hasn't been there in years.
Something that looks a lot like the girl who sat on the overlook bench and told a boy with an arc-burn scar the real version of her life.
Clean clothes. Wet hair twisted into a knot. The bed is cold and the rain has settled into a rhythm that sounds like breathing, and I lie in the dark with my fingers pressed to the spot on my jaw where his thumb rested.
My phone buzzes.
Lila: Heard you and River were both at the site during the storm. Hope everything's okay. Also: Doris saw you leave the hardware store at midnight and called me. This town, I swear.
I stare at the message. It's two in the morning and the gossip network is already operational. These people don't sleep. They photosynthesize from other people's business.
Me: Site is fine. Equipment is fine. Everything is fine.
Lila: That's a lot of "fine" for 2 AM. Noted.
I close my eyes. Somewhere across town, River is working a second downed line in the dark. Doing the job his father did. The job that killed his father. The job he chose anyway because he's the kind of man who stays.
That's the thing I couldn't face when I left.
Not the town, not the small life, not my mother's plan or the scholarship or the road out.
The thing I ran from was this exact feeling—the specific, permanent terror of loving someone whose work can kill them.
Whose father's work did kill him. Who climbs into storms because that's what Dawson men do, and who would never ask me to watch, but whose eyes, every single time he comes down from a pole, find mine first.
I ran from it because I was too young to carry it.
I said "I will" and I meant it, and then I lay in his bed with his arm around me and the night humming outside and I felt the weight of what staying actually meant—not the town, not the co-op, not the life.
The waiting. The calls. The someday phone call that starts the same way his started. I'm sorry, there was an accident—
And I left before dawn because leaving was easier than learning to live with that fear.
All these years later, the fear is the same.
The same weight, the same shape, the same cold certainty in the chest. The only thing that's different is the guilt.
Because I know now what leaving cost. I saw it in his face at the base of the pole after the arc flash.
I saw it in the way his hand reached for me and stopped.
I saw it tonight in the cab when he said sorry like a man who's been apologizing for wanting things his whole life.
I did that. I taught him that reach-and-pull-back. I taught him that sorry.
Five and a half months. The plan is the plan.
The plan has never felt more like a lie I'm telling myself in the dark while the man I left wakes up every morning and does the bravest thing I've ever seen, and I count the days until I can leave again.