CHAPTER SIX
RYAN

Tripp Wright is standing on the front porch of the inn holding a bag branded within an inch of its life with Tripp’s Pizza on the side, the top, the handle, probably the inside lining if I had to guess. 

I haven’t seen him since he was maybe twelve. He’s taller now. Still has the same grin though. Some things don’t change.

“Ryan Calloway,” he says.

I open my mouth to respond but before I can Tripp attempts to hug me, while still holding that family-sized insulated catering bag, which means I get one forearm across the shoulders, the bag swinging into my ribs and the unmistakable smell of garlic bread approximately two inches from my face. That part’s fine. I love garlic bread.

“Good to have you back, man,” he says.

I pat him on the back once. “Hey, Tripp. Long time no see.” 

He steps back, holds up the bag. “Family pasta tray, no olives, and two family size orders of garlic bread.”

“Ryan, move, that must be heavy.” My mother appears behind me and reaches past my already outstretched arm to take the bag from Tripp. She looks at him and her whole face lights up. “The videos,” she says, like that’s a complete sentence.

Tripp’s grin gets wider somehow. “You saw those?” he asks, setting the bag on the porch and unzipping it, unloading the order one container at a time. I was right about the logo. It is plastered all over the interior lining.

“Saw them?” She reaches out with both arms level, so he can stack the containers on them. “I’ve shown everyone I know. My book club. Ryan’s father. Our neighbor Linda.” She lowers her voice like she’s sharing classified information. “Linda sent it to her daughter in Phoenix.”

“Linda’s daughter in Phoenix,” Tripp repeats, deeply satisfied. “Didn’t know that.”

I look between them. “What videos?”

They both look at me with blank stares.

“Tripp’s marketing,” my mother says, in the tone she reserves for when she assumes everyone already knows something she knows. Most of the time I don’t have a clue what she’s talking about but this time it’s a new level of FOMO.

“It’s not really marketing,” Tripp says, waving a hand. “I mean it is, but it started as just a bit of fun on a slow day.”

“He dances,” my mother says.

I glance at Tripp. “You dance?”

“I do. I dance,” Tripp confirms, looking at his phone as he scrolls to find the one he’s looking for.

“While making pizza,” she adds.

“The pizza’s still good though,” he says. “That’s the important part.”

I stare at him.

He stares back with the expression of a man who still thoroughly enjoys confusing the hell out of me.

My grandmother appears in the hallway behind my mother, tea towel over her shoulder, and her face does the same thing my mother’s did when she sees him standing there. “Tripp,” she says, reaching around me to wrap her arms around his neck.

“Mrs. Sewell.” He softens and bends down, just slightly, to make sure she can reach. “Tiramisu’s in there. On the house.”

She puts her hand to her chest. “You didn’t have to do that, Tripp. I can pay—”

“No ma’am.” He shakes his head. “You fed me a cookie every day after school,” he says. “I can feed you tiramisu now.”

She huffs and shakes her head, but takes the container he’s offering her anyway. “You’ve always been a good boy,” she says, shuffling back toward the kitchen with her family sized order of her favorite dessert.

My mother follows with her own armload of containers. The two of them are still talking about the videos, my grandmother apparently also having seen them, both of them with opinions about the footwork in the third one specifically.

I look back at Tripp.

“Am I the only one who hasn’t seen these?”

“Probably,” he says, completely cheerful about it. “You’ve been gone a while.”

He says it easy. No edge to it. Just a fact, like time is something that happens to us. I suppose in some ways it is, but isn’t it also a choice how we spend that time?

That thought makes me uncomfortable, so I bristle and change the subject immediately. “Saw your sister earlier.” What the hell? That wasn’t what I wanted to say. I had intended to ask how the football team’s been doing. Talking about Dani Wright is the last thing I want to do, because it’s been a decade.

How did I let ten years go by without talking to her?

Oh, I don’t want to think about that either.

He smirks. “I heard about that.”

Ugh! I can only imagine what she would’ve told her brothers about that.

“Anyway, I gotta get back to the restaurant. You should come by sometime,” Tripp says, already heading back down the steps. “On the house. Consider it a welcome back.”

“I might take you up on that.” I wave one hand over my head as he hops into his red delivery truck.

“Do it.” He points at me while leaning out of the driver’s side. 

I let out a long exhale as I close the door and follow the smell of freshly cooked pasta and bread.

The dining room looks like it’s a crime scene with Jake’s folding table pressed into service, mismatched folding chairs my grandfather pulled from the garage and a tablecloth my grandmother found in the linen closet that’s been washed so many times it’s original color is anyone’s guess. My feet fall on the drop cloths draped across the floor, echoing against the sound of chatter as my family discusses portions and seating arrangements. 

My grandmother sets containers in the center of the table like she’s been doing this her whole life, which she has, just usually on the solid wood table passed down through her family for generations but it had to go into storage during the renovation to protect it. “I wanted to cook,” she says.

“The oven isn’t connected,” my mother says.

“I know it isn’t connected.”

“So next time—”

“I said I wanted to.” She opens another container. “I didn’t say I could have.”

My grandfather makes a sound that lands somewhere between agreement and amusement. My father finds the garlic bread and goes quiet in the specific way of a man who has strong feelings about choosing life instead of getting in the middle of a squabble between his wife and her mother.

Grandma reaches for the tiramisu next and tells my grandpa that it’s from Tripp. He goes still for just a second, then smirks. “That boy,” he says.

That’s all. 

But it’s a lot, coming from him.

The conversation moves the way it always has—sideways and overlapping, nobody waiting for anyone to finish. My father and grandfather resume what sounds like an ongoing disagreement about the dropped ceiling that has been running since before I was born. My mother blurts out her opinions about the upstairs bathrooms. My grandmother asks if anyone wants more pasta before anyone has touched the pasta they have.

I eat and listen and feel something that’s alarmingly uncomfortable and that I’m not going to look at directly right now.

My phone buzzes.

New message received from Jake.

I tap to read it.

Rowdy had the fittings. Enough for first phase. Second order Friday. Dale can start rough-in tomorrow.

I read it twice.

The plumbing moving forward means the timeline moves, the walls can close and before long the inn stops being a blueprint and becomes a building again. 

A home. 

For my family.

When I glance up, my grandmother is watching me from across the table. “Good news?” she asks.

“Plumbing update. The supply issue got sorted.”

She nods once then glances around taking in the fragile, exposed nature of the building surrounding us. “The first winter we ran this place,” she says, “we had no idea what we were doing.”

My grandfather keeps eating. 

He’s heard this story. 

He’ll hear it again.

“Opened in October. Thought we were ready.” She smooths the tablecloth with one hand. “First cold snap hit in November and a pipe burst in the east wall at three in the morning. Water went everywhere.”

My father puts down his fork.

“Your grandfather went down into the crawl space in his pajamas with a wrench. I held the flashlight. Two hours.” She looks at my grandfather. “But he fixed it.”

“I turned the water off,” he says with a scoff. “And used some spare parts to patch it until the plumbers could get here.”

“You fixed it,” she repeats.

He shrugs.

A small smile forms at the corner of her mouth. “He said, this place has good bones. Just needs someone to believe that.”

“I think he’s still right about that,” I add.

The dining room goes quiet for a split second then my father reaches for another slice of the garlic bread and my mother asks about the water damage from the pipe burst and my grandfather says something to my grandmother low enough that it’s only for her.

I look at my phone again and type out a quick reply.

Me: When can Dale can start?

---

My grandfather falls asleep in his chair mid-conversation with my father. Chin dropping and hands going loose in his lap between one sentence and the next. Just like that. My mother catches it happening and gets him to bed. Something she’s done enough times that it doesn’t need words—a hand on the shoulder, a slow walk down the hall followed by the quiet click of a door. I watch them move around each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe it is.

Ten years in a city that rewards a certain kind of self-sufficiency that almost makes you forget what it’s like to be part of something bigger than yourself.

I go back to clearing the table of boxes and our disposable plates. My grandmother allows this without comment, which means she’s tired. Something she’ll never say out loud, which everyone in this family knows and nobody mentions.

My mother finds me on her way back through. “Don’t stay up too late,” she says.

“I won’t.”

She looks at me like there’s something she wants to say but she holds it in. Maybe she doesn’t want to spill whatever it is in the lobby of a building that’s already got enough going on.

She kisses me on the cheek instead.

Goes to find my father.

I listen to the sound of their footsteps falling on the stairs as they retire to one of the guest rooms upstairs.

Then it’s just me and the inn left.

Old buildings sound different at night than they do during the day, especially this one. During the day its competing with Jake’s compressor and power tools and the general organized chaos of a renovation in progress. At night it just gets to exist and settle into itself. Making the small sounds of wood and plaster doing what they’ve been doing for a hundred years sound louder.

I stand in the lobby for a minute just listening to it.

Then I tap on my phone’s screen to text Marcus.

Me: I need more time.

I send it before I can second guess the wording and pocket my phone and stand in the lobby listening to the inn settle around me.

Six weeks.

That’s what I need to do this right. Not fast, but right.

I should probably add a thirty day buffer to that timeline though, because I have never once seen a renovation go according to plan. These old buildings just don’t care about our timelines or corporate agendas.

The heavy wood door closes behind me as I step out onto the front porch and position myself on the front steps. Main Street is quiet in the way small towns go quiet after nine. Not empty, just done with life for the day.  A car passes. Then nothing. Just the crisp fresh night air and the particular stillness of a place that actually sleeps.

I stretch my legs out in front of me. 

My left knee pops.

Apparently that’s just something that happens now. The interns in the office call it my big age. I call it bullshit, but whatever.

I’ve been out here long enough for one leg to start going numb when I hear footsteps on the sidewalk.

She’s got her tablet under her arm and a black It’s not a phase hoodie that looks a lot like the one I bought for her seventeenth birthday pulled over her head. She’s looking at the inn’s facade with a focused squint like the one she used during our shared science projects. Dani’s halfway up the walkway before she sees me.

“Whoa!” She screeches as the tablet slips and she reaches for it, grabs it momentarily but loses grip then with both hands fumbles it back and forth until it finally settles just inches from the concrete path.

A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it. I press a hand to my mouth, trying to stifle it but it’s pointless.

She looks up, cheeks red and a look that says she could kill me and help them search for the body. She straightens her spine and adjusts the hoodie back into position. “Roofline assessment,” she says. “For the… exterior lighting plan.”

“At ten-thirty pm?”

“Shadow distribution reads cleaner without competing daylight.” Chin up half an inch. Completely committed. “It’s a thing.”

I nod. “Right. Of course.” I shift just slightly on the step.

She glances at the inn then back at me. The corner of her mouth does something she shuts down fast then she sits down on the other end of the step.

Neither of us says anything for long enough that it stops being awkward.

“I called Jake,” she says.

“He texted me.”

“I have conditions.”

“I figured.” I swipe my hand across my pant leg. There was definitely some lint there… “I have conditions too.”

She glances over as a car rolls down Main Street and the headlights sweep the porch, letting me see her clearly for one second. Her eyes are on me and her gaze is soft in a way that makes my breath catch in my throat.

The car moves down the road leaving us in the darkness again.

“Jesse and Marge deserved better than what happened to this place,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s something we can agree on.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Same.”

“Professionally.”

“Yep. Same.”

She stands. Brushes off her jeans. Looks up at the roofline and nods once. “We can go over the details tomorrow,” she says.

“Sounds good,” I say.

She goes back the same way she came. 

I watch her walk away until Main Street swallows her image whole and it’s just me and Oak Valley with the inn at my back.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and look at the notification.

Four unread messages from Marcus.

I stuff it back into my pocket.