CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
RYAN

I’ve been staring at the same water stain on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom for three hours. It’s shaped like nothing. I’ve been trying to make it into something since I came home and it’s still nothing. Just water damage I need to add to the list. She waited for me.

I check the time on my phone. 2:00 am.

I roll onto my side, facing the wall on the opposite side of the room because the ceiling had nothing useful to say.

Apparently the wall doesn’t either.

2:45 am.

I roll onto my back.

She waited forty-five minutes. The memory of how her dress matched her eyes hits me and I have to work to catch my breath. It was a deep, rich blue. The color of the ocean, just before twilight. It wrapped itself around her like it was made for her and no one else, hugging her curves before spilling down into a long, sweeping skirt. The neckline dipped into a soft curve, gathering at her chest in a way that made my throat run dry back then.

Still does.

I remember every detail of that moment because I was paying attention. I was always paying attention. But then I left her standing there because I couldn’t understand why she’d want to be there with me.

She looked like something out of a dream.

My dream.

And I never told her how I felt. She never knew how badly I wanted to ruin that perfect dress by pulling her into my arms.

But still…

She wanted me to come back.

She waited for me to come back.

I didn’t.

But I did. Ten years later, but I did.

I roll over, flopping onto my back again. Yep, the ceiling stain is still there. Mocking me. Like it’s saying, it’s too late. The damage is done.

At four-fifteen I give up entirely on the concept of sleep, which has clearly given up on me first and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.

I wasn’t there when she needed me.

She stood there waiting for me to come back and I didn’t. Not after that. Nothing was ever the same between us. I came up with excuses every time because I couldn’t be in the same room as her without cracking. It was too much, so I left. I got the hell out of Oak Valley and went somewhere that every single thing didn’t remind me of Dani Wright. Then I spent ten years in a job I hate in a city I loathe entirely telling myself it was ambition.

I guess it was ambition.

But it was also the other thing.

Both can be true and that somehow makes it worse.

By five I’ve moved from the edge of the bed to the window, which looks out over the inn’s back garden and the valley beyond it going from black to the particular gray that means morning is on its way. I’ve run the conversation on the picnic table approximately forty times. The way she kept looking at her sneakers. The loose thread she pulled from her hoodie. The way she said, That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Then the one that stung the most… I said yes because I wanted to go with you.

The corners of my eyes sting as I press my forehead against the glass and suck in a deep breath. The smell of bacon hits my nostrils, which means they’re up and it’s time to start the day.

My grandmother is already at the stove when I come down stairs. “Sit,” she says, without turning around.

I grab a chair and do exactly as I was told, mostly because I’m exhausted and not sure I can keep standing upright until I have food and caffeine.

My grandfather is at the kitchen table with his coffee and the classifieds, which he reads every morning cover to cover including the classifieds even though he hasn’t bought anything secondhand since before I left for college. He looks up at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Rough night?”

“Went for a walk,” I say, which is technically true and covers about four percent of the actual situation.

He nods then goes back to his paper, turning the page but peeking at me over the rim of his glasses.

My grandmother sets a plate in front of me without asking what I want, which is how she’s always operated and has never once been wrong. 

Eggs. 

Bacon. 

French toast.

And coffee.

My mother comes in at six forty-five with damp hair and goes straight to the stove, nudging my grandmother aside with her hip the way she’s always done, taking over the toast without being asked. My grandmother lets her, which is its own kind of language between them. They work around each other for a minute as my father falls into the chair opposite my grandfather. “Morning,” he says, reaching for the carafe of coffee in the middle of the table.

My mother looks over her shoulder at my father, “I’ve been thinking,” she says.

“About?” he asks, taking a sip.

My grandfather turns a page.

“About moving back.”

The coffee mug in my father’s hand freezes in mid air.

My grandfather looks up, glancing over the wire rim of his glasses at my father.

My grandmother freezes in place, keeping her eyes on the eggs.

“To Oak Valley,” my mother adds, like there’s any ambiguity. Her chin is tilted up slightly, something she does when she’s said the most unhinged thing and is now waiting to see what he does with it.

“Hm,” he says.

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking since before I said it,” she says. “I can tell by your face.”

He looks at his coffee. “The Williams listed their place on Birch Street.”

She blinks. “How do you know that?”

“Rowdy mentioned it at the hardware store yesterday.”

“You went to the hardware store?”

“He went with me to pick up some string for my weed eater,” my grandpa says, still looking at his paper. “The Williams place is nice. Sturdy.”

My mother stares at him. “I brought this up literally ten seconds ago.”

“You brought it up three days ago,” my father says with a glimmer of mischief in his eye as he brings his coffee mug back to his mouth.

My grandfather makes a sound from behind the classifieds that might be a laugh.

My grandmother turns around from the stove with a smile on her face. “Eat your eggs before they get cold,” she says, to no one in particular and everyone specifically.

My mother looks at her. Something passes between them that I don’t understand fully, but I’m starting to think I’m catching up.

“It’s a good lot,” my father says into his coffee.

My mother takes a bite of my toast and looks out the window at Oak Valley doing its morning thing outside.

My phone lights up on the table.

Marcus. Video call.

I grab the phone and push myself back from the table. “I have to take this.”

“You haven’t—”

“I know.” I shovel my eggs into my mouth as I stand up, which satisfies nobody including me, and move into the hallway. Marcus fills the screen before I’ve cleared the doorway. Jacket on and probably two meetings deep already.

“You look terrible,” he says.

“Good morning to you too, Marcus.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like the building fell on you.”

“Was there a reason you called me?”

He clicks his pen once with his thumb. “Patterson came in Friday with a concept deck for Meridian.”

I take a sip of my coffee.

“Nobody asked him to.” Click. “Wasn’t good.” Click. “Proportions were off, load specs were wrong,” he snorts.

“Of course they were wrong.”

“I told him that.” Click click. “But he showed up, Ryan. The partners want—”

“Marcus.”

“What?”

“I heard you.”

“Good.” He sets the pen down. Picks it back up. 

“If you click that pen one more time I’m going to block you.”

He pauses, glances at the pen in his hand and drops it dramatically onto the desk in front of him. “They don’t care that the specs were wrong. Those can be updated. They care about who’s in the room, Ryan. Do you know who was not in that room?”

From the kitchen my mother says something about the bathroom fixtures upstairs. My grandmother responds. A cabinet closes with emphasis.

Marcus’s eyes move toward the sound.

“Family breakfast.”

“It sounds like a committee meeting.”

“Same thing.”

“Two weeks.” He leans forward and cups one hand over the speaker to muffle the sound of his voice from anyone lurking around in the office. “After that the board makes decisions I can’t influence and Patterson makes moves I can’t stop.”

I think about the east wall. The chalk tree. The clerestory window my great grandfather drew in a margin a hundred years ago and never got to build. I think about a handprint wall and a journal full of people who existed somewhere and needed someone to remember that they did. I think about a picnic table at midnight and a loose thread and the way her voice sounded when she said she had wanted to go to prom with me.

“It’ll be fine, Marcus,” I say. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”

He looks at me and wrinkles his nose like the words I just spoke thoroughly disgusted him. “Uh huh.” He clicks the pen again. “Two weeks,” he says. “Don’t make me come down there.”

“You’d hate it.”

“I would absolutely hate it.” He cocks an eyebrow and points at me through the screen. “Eat something. You look terrible.”

He hangs up first.

I stand in the east corridor with the floral wallpaper and two weeks and Patterson’s unsolicited deck and the specific weight of a man who has been wrong about something important for a very long time and is only now starting to understand the full scope of the damage.

My grandmother appears in the hallway with my barely-eaten plate in hand. “Your breakfast is getting cold,” she says.

“I know.”

She hands it to me anyway.

I eat my cold bacon in the east corridor and look at the wall where the clerestory window is going to go and try to figure out what you do when you’ve been building on a cracked foundation for your entire adult life.