by Amelia Wilde
“Are you coming?”
She’s still standing in the doorway. “When are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What’s going on with you?”
“I only have an hour for lunch. Do you want to go to Buddy’s?”
Mom rolls her eyes, but decides to save this battle for later. Probably when the food comes. “All right. Let’s go.”
The lunch rush at Buddy’s is in full swing when we get there, and the server puts us right up front by the picture window so everyone in Lockton who happens to be walking by right now can watch my mother interrogate me about my “sullen attitude.” She started in on it on the way over and hasn’t let up.
“I don’t have a sullen attitude. I have a lot to do. I’m tired, Mom. Isn’t that enough?”
“I’ve known you for twenty-eight years.” She flicks her eyes up and down the one-page menu, then drops it to the table. “What. Happened?”
“How’s Dad?”
This is usually a surefire way to get her talking about her absolute favorite subject for the last couple of years.
“He’s fine. I’m more concerned about you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
If she’s not going to take the bait, there’s only one thing left to do.
“Fine.” She presses her lips together and lets the silence linger between us. Well, two can play that game.
Mom looks out the window until the waitress comes to take our order, and then she turns back to me and crosses her arms.
“You look heartbroken, Addison.” Her voice is softer now, less confrontational, and one of the walls in my chest crumbles to the ground.
“Maybe I am.” I wonder absently what it is that I ordered less than a minute ago. It’s a detail that seems totally irrelevant to my life. I guess I’ll be surprised. I could normally make a joke about something like that, but today…
“Does it have to do with Brett Miller?”
“No.” I lie instinctively, but who the hell cares if it has to do with Brett Miller or anyone else? She didn’t shed any tears when Jamie left, either. “Yes.”
She leans back in her seat, but the silence this time isn’t nearly so heavy.
“We saw each other a little bit, but I decided that it wasn’t a good time. So I ended it.”
“You decided?”
“Yeah.”
“Why wasn’t it a good time?”
“Because…” Now that someone has actually asked me the question out loud, the answer slides right out of my mind. It seemed so obvious, so right, the other morning when I woke up. Now, no matter how much I claw through all of my extremely reliable emotions and the logical reasons I’d gone over again and again before Brett showed up at my door, I’m drawing a blank. I put my head in my hands and cover my eyes. My chest aches, my heart throbbing against my ribs, and tears threaten to break at the corners of my eyes.
I cannot do this. I cannot burst into tears in front of my mother and the entire town of Lockton. For all I know, Brett could be walking down the sidewalk at this very moment. He could be standing right outside the massive picture window and looking in at me right now, seeing me for exactly what I am: an idiot who thought she was protecting herself, when in reality…
In reality, what? I am better off, right?
“Maybe…” My mother said, and I jerk upright, cutting my eyes to the sidewalk. Brett’s not there. I feel a strange twist of relief followed by a sinking disappointment. “Maybe you made a mistake.”
My laughter is bitter. “That’s an insane thing for you to say. You never liked him much, remember?”
She shrugs a little, brushing me off. “I can be wrong.”
I give her a look.
“You don’t look happy, Addison; you look devastated. If it was the right choice, shouldn’t it feel like one?”
Chapter Forty
Brett
There’s nothing else for me to do but to finish the house.
I receive one rejection from the slew of job applications I submitted online and it barely affects me. I don’t give a fuck. Once again, the house is all that matters.
Actually, Addison is all that matters, but Addison isn’t here.
I spend my days wanting to run across the lawn and break her door down, explain everything, but I don’t have the words. I can’t figure it out for myself. How am I supposed to tell her about it when I don’t even know? How can I describe how desperate I was when I left Lockton? How can I describe how desperate I felt when I decided to come back?
My muscles ache when I lay down at night. I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and the house slowly takes shape around me. All of this is work that should take months, and I’m doing it in days. I wasn’t even this fucking insane in boot camp, or when I was in training to become a pilot. Not even by half. It’s either this or think about…
I can’t.
It dawns on me, after three days of not seeing her that maybe this is all stemming from someone else. My father.
The meeting in the hardware store rankles my insides, infects my dreams, combines with images of standing on her doorstep and being turned away. That day in the hardware store—it was so fucking ordinary. It was so fucking normal, like I hadn’t ripped myself out of his life for ten years before showing up at his local nails and hammer joint.
I drop the sandpaper and abandon the last bit of trim.
I don’t bother to shower, don’t bother to put on clean clothes. I keep on my paint-covered jeans and t-shirt and throw on a ragged hoodie to protect me against the wind.
The guys outside, hustling to finish the siding before the weather turns for good and so they can get out of my damn house forever, stop when I go past. Marcus calls out to me as I stalk past.
“We good to keep going?”
“Don’t stop until it’s done, you lazy bastard.”
He laughs, his voice booming across the lawn, and the sound cuts me to the core. “Tomorrow!” he says as I climb into the car. I’ve got to fucking buy my own one of these days instead of paying for the rental. Marcus, at least, doesn’t flinch from making promises. Unlike yours truly.
God, I’m such a fucking asshole.
I drive without thinking toward my father’s house. I’m assuming he still lives in the same place—a tiny, boxy two-story place on a quiet street. It’s all the way on the other side of town, all of a fifteen-minute drive once I get stopped by two red lights.
By the time I pull into his driveway and park behind the little blue Ford, my heart is leaping out of my chest and my jaw is clenched so tight that it hurts. He didn’t invite me here. I’m just going. I left and now I’m coming back on my own terms.
I leap out of the car and take the porch steps two at a time before I lose my goddamn nerve.
My fist feels huge and powerful against the cheap door. It might as well be made of tinfoil.
“Just a minute,” he calls from behind the door and my heart about leaps out of my throat. There’s a shuffling from inside, and then he’s pulling the door open, his eyebrows rocketing up into his forehead when he sees me.
“Brett? Do you want to come—”
“Yeah, I want to fucking come in,” I say, pushing past him. He shuts the door gently behind us and I turn in the narrow hallway, standing next to the stairs I went up and down a million times growing up here. My hands are clenched into fists and I can’t relax them.
“I am so fucking pissed at you,” I say when he turns to face me, and he doesn’t look surprised at all, just nods. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Is it something specific, son?” His voice is soft and level, the anger from my high school years completely gone.
“Why didn’t you think I was worth anything?”
His eyes go a little wider. “What makes you think that?”
“What you said to me just before I left for college.”
His wrinkled face splits into a grin. “You
went to college? Damn, son. How did you ever afford that?”
“I joined the Air Force,” I spit. “I was a pilot in the Air Force. ROTC, all of that shit. I worked my ass off.”
My father laughs, throwing his head back. It’s a sound filled with pure joy and I don’t fucking understand it at all. When he comes down from his high, his eyes are watering from the laughter, and I stand speechless.
“Well, are you going to tell me about it?”
“Was that enough for you?” Something in my chest cracks open because fuck, fuck, I care. I care that he thought I couldn’t be enough for Addison. I care that he thought I was dead weight.
Suddenly his expression is dead serious, and he comes toward me until we’re only a couple of feet apart. “Son, listen to me carefully. Whatever opinion you think I had of you, all I cared about was that you came home at the end of the day.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Say what?”
It’s been ten years. Why the hell did I expect him to remember?
“Just before I left. You were pissed off at me. You told me not to take Addison Gray down with me, whatever the fuck that meant.”
One corner of his mouth quirks upward, and he runs a hand through his hair just like I do. “You spent every waking moment with her, but yet you’d never bring her around. You never wanted to say she was your girl. All I meant was that you shouldn’t break her damn heart with those kinds of shenanigans. I knew you’d be whatever you wanted to be, Brett. I thought your life would take you far and wide.” His eyes get damp again. “I didn’t count on seeing you much anymore. Can you blame me for being thrilled that you’re back?”
The tension seeps out of my shoulders and escapes through the floor. It’s like I’m seeing my father—the real man—for the first time in years.
I can’t blame him. I can’t.
I can only blame me.
Chapter Forty-One
Addison
My entire body is so tense, every muscle, that I feel like a giant, walking bruise. When five o’clock rolls around on Friday, I can’t take sitting in my seat for another minute. The rest of my emails and paperwork can wait. They can just…they can wait. I have to go.
I put on my coat, grab my purse, and flick the lights off in my office. On the way past Carla’s office, her voice floats out into the hall, stopping me short.
“What did you say, Carla?”
She grins at me from behind her desk. “Good for you.”
“Thanks?” I can’t help but smile, but what is this?
“You go above and beyond. But it’s okay to take the evenings off.”
There’s a flicker of unwinding in my chest, but not enough to make my shoulders relax, and the pain jumps to life again in my lower back.
“Thanks, Carla.”
“See you on Monday.”
The moment I turn away she starts typing again, furiously and without pause, and the clicking of her keyboard follows me all the way to the end of the hall.
My car is slow to warm up, again, and my jaw clenches while I rub my hands together over the steering wheel. We’re heading squarely into late fall now, but I feel no relief after the sweltering heat of the summer. I want to go back to those days before I saw Brett at O’Malley’s, when the days were long and my hands were never cold.
You could move.
The thought rings in my mind like a bell. I could move.
The idea blooms while I maneuver the car through the already fading light toward home. I could go somewhere warm. I could go anywhere, really, as long as I could find a job. I could leave here, and I could never come back.
It was convenient, two years ago, to take the job with the city, and it seemed like the best of both worlds. A real career in the hometown I’ve always loved.
Now, though…
When things with Jamie fell through it felt like I was back at square one. Nobody wants to be in that kind of holding pattern, waiting for life to actually begin. Career-wise, things are fabulous, but with everything else, I’m just going through the motions.
I can’t waste any more of my life like that.
And I can’t spend the next several years looking out my window at Brett’s house, seeing him come and go. The thought of it sends a bolt of pain straight through my chest, so sharp it actually blocks out the low-level ache covering my skin.
The only solution here is to get into a warm bath.
About once a year, I decide that a warm bath is the solution to whatever problem it is I’m facing, which is why I’m damn diligent about scrubbing down the tub every single week. Of course, there are seldom days when I have time for more than a quick shower after my morning run, but today—today that tub is going to come in handy. I think I even have a leftover candle from a gift bag somewhere to really set the mood.
Yes, the perfect mood to sulk until I go to bed.
“Nope,” I say out loud, as I pull into my driveway. I might be brokenhearted as hell, but I’m not going to waste the rest of Friday evening sulking. I can joyously watch a good lineup of whatever’s on Netflix, thank you very much.
Then the headlights hit my rearview mirror, and my heart springs up in my chest, absolutely pounding. Brett? Brett?
Ten seconds later, Leah raps on my car window with her knuckles. I respond with a glare.
“Get out,” she says, her voice muffled through the glass.
“No.”
“Get out. I have wine.” She holds up a bag from the local liquor store, which also carries a ridiculous wine selection. “And food.” In her other hand is another paper bag. “Indian food.”
The fact that Lockton has an Indian restaurant is still a miracle, and my stomach growls. I picked at lunch, whatever it was, and so, with a show of irritation just for her, I climb out of the car and grab my purse, fumbling for my keys.
Leah heads toward the house.
“There is such a thing as personal privacy,” I say, while she reaches for her own set of keys to unlock my front door.
“You’ve been moping forever,” she says, as she balances both bags in one arm and pushes the door open. “I’m over it.”
“Me, too. Let’s not talk about it.”
“Yeah, right.”
We go inside and split off—Leah to the kitchen, where I hear her opening two bottles of wine, and me to my bedroom, where I dig out a clean pair of yoga pants and a hoodie. When I emerge, she’s seated on the couch, flicking through Netflix, two plates on the coffee table heaping with chicken korma and naan. My heart literally warms when I see it. Deep down, I know that Leah’s the kind of friend everybody wants, even if everybody doesn’t want that person showing up at their house every single time they’d rather sulk in private in the bathtub.
As soon as I’ve picked up my plate and made myself comfortable, she says, “Spill.”
I don’t bother with stall tactics. “I was seeing Brett but he got obsessed with his house, and it felt like high school all over again. So I ended things.”
“Stupid.”
Her assessment is so immediate and so sharp that my jaw drops. “What?”
“You’re being kind of a dumbass, Addison. I love you, but…think about it.”
I shake my head.
“Not a single man has been able to measure up to him in ten years, and then you kick him to the curb because…what, he gets a little carried away with home renovations? Don’t you at least think this deserves a conversation?”
“I—”
“And don’t even start with me about how ‘bad’ he was for you. You were leaving work at a reasonable hour for the first time in months. You were happy.”
“I wasn’t always happy.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that when all this went down, he wasn’t trying to change things.”
I can’t. Instead, I stuff a piece of naan into my mouth.
“I thought so.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Brett
I need to sor
t this out in my mind, my reeling, clouded mind.
I can’t fucking believe it’s taken me this long to see what was staring me in the face this entire time.
The rented car pulls smoothly away from my dad’s house, the lights from his living room windows shining into the dark of the street. Most of my body feels light as a goddamn feather, so light that my hands almost float above the steering wheel, but there’s a lump in the back of my throat that gets more painful with every moment that goes by.
All I meant was that you shouldn’t break her damn heart.
The words echo again and again in my mind until they blur into a fucking unintelligible phrase, but the meaning still drives itself deep into my chest.
What in the literal fuck have I been thinking? This was my shot with Addison after all these years, and I’ve blown it on a house. A house that was meant to prove something to my father that he never really thought in the first place.
He hugged me when I went to leave. Pulled me in close. Didn’t let go for a long time. And I knew I was the jackass in this situation. I was the one who wasted ten years avoiding the only people on earth who actually matter.
I get to my driveway without remembering any of the roads I’ve just driven on. All the words—Addison’s and my father’s, my drill sergeant’s in the Air Force, my own—careen around in my head until I slam my hands down on the steering wheel. Finally, finally, a moment of fucking clarity.
There are three things I absolutely need to do: finish the one remaining room in the house, throw away all the building shit, and then show Addison what I’ve done.
Addison has been looking for a space in my life since the moment we met. And even if it’s too late, I’m going to give her one. Even if it’s the last thing I do before I lose her completely.
I tear into the house, a man on the most important fucking mission of his entire life. At some point during the last few weeks, I bought a container of oversized trash bags at the hardware store. I find them stuffed under the sink and whip out two of them, then fly through the house, stuffing all the paint-covered drop cloths into them with one hand. Paint trays and paintbrushes all go into the bag after the cloths. I don’t give a shit—I just need it out of the way, out of the house.
