And I’m alone.
And missing Neely like it’s my damn job.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NEELY
Excuse me,” I say, trying to slip by a handful of people on the street. Horns honk so loud around me, sirens wailing in the distance, that I’m not sure anyone even heard my voice. Or maybe they did and didn’t care. Either way, I get knocked sideways by only one person as I duck into my favorite coffee shop.
I spent last night strolling around my neighborhood, trying to get the energy of the city in my blood again. For some reason, the smells percolating through the manholes make my stomach crawl in a way that’s more violent than ever before.
Spying Grace at a little table in the corner, I make my way through the line.
“You’re home,” she gushes, giving me a quick hug. “I went ahead and got your coffee so you didn’t have to wait.”
“Are there always this many people here?” I grumble, sitting across from her.
She slow blinks. “Yes. Have you been gone that long?”
Shaking the cobwebs from my head, I take the coffee across from me. It’s rich and aromatic and everything a coffee should be. I bet Claire wouldn’t agree.
“So . . . ,” Grace prods, flipping a lock of hair off her shoulder. “What happened in the country?”
I open my mouth to tell her something, but it comes out as a tired exhale. Grace sets her cup down. There’s a bright-pink lipstick stain along the top.
“Okay. What’s going on?” she asks.
“Nothing. We aren’t ruining our reunion coffee with tales of my heartache.”
“Heartache?” She leans back in her chair, a tiny diamond stud glistening in her nose. “We need to get to the bottom of this.”
“There’s nothing to get to the bottom of,” I tell her. “I saw Dane a few times, as you know, and spent some days with him and his little girl.”
“The little girl who is a product of the reason you left in the first place?”
I ignore that. It’s not important. “Mia is adorable and a gymnast like me. What’s the chance of that happening?”
“You do realize you’re all gooey-eyed over a man and a little girl, right? I mean, if you’re cool with it, I’m cool with it, but I am worried about you.” She looks bewildered. “Out of all the potential things I saw happening with you going back there, this was not one of them. I’ll say that.”
I take a drink of my perfectly brewed coffee. It’s so spot-on, it’s almost annoying. “It doesn’t matter. I came back here.”
“Which thrills me because I was going nuts without you.” She throws up her hands. “When I got your text, I lost my cool in the middle of the salon. No one has any sense in this city, Neely. No one.”
“Well, I lost it in the middle of my apartment last night. You should’ve come over. We could’ve flipped out together.”
She furrows a brow. “What was wrong with you?”
“Oh, the people who live above me were pounding around all night. More car alarms went off than I thought possible. The hot water took ten years to warm. Need more?”
Grace laughs, her bangles clamoring together on her wrist. “You spent way too much time in the boonies.”
“No joke. It’s definitely going to take some time to readjust.”
To readjust. What a nice way to put it. I don’t need to adjust again to life here. What I need is to figure out why I feel like something is missing. Or wrong. I didn’t leave on the oven or a curling wand, and I picked up all my mail at the post office. So why on earth do I feel like something needs to be done?
“Neely?”
“Yeah,” I say, coming out of my daze. A dull throb taps away at my temple. I just want to close my eyes and go to sleep.
“Tell me about Dane.”
My eyes snap to my friend’s. She’s drinking her caffeine, watching me carefully.
I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to go there at all. But knowing Grace, this conversation will have to happen, so I might as well get it over with.
“He’s gentle and kind, but fierce and loyal,” I say, the words coming easier as I go. “Watching him with Mia will melt you in your shoes. He reads her bedtime stories and spoils the crap out of her, but she has chores to do and he makes her do them.”
I get settled in my chair.
“Mia has him wrapped around her little finger, but how could you not be? She’s the cutest little girl ever. A little sassy but all sorts of sweet, and she loves tumbling, so that’s right up my alley. And she has a thing for koi fish, which is random, but that’s her grandfather’s fault.”
“I’m with her on the koi,” Grace says. “They’re gorgeous.”
“Right? And Dane’s brother, Matt, is like a giant teddy bear. I actually think you’d like him a lot, Grace. But stay away from Penn. He’s . . .”
“What?”
I laugh. “I can’t decide if you two would get along or hate each other.”
Her eyes light up as she leans forward. “Ooh. What’s he look like?”
“He’s muscly in a carpenter kind of way. Dark hair. Blue eyes. Tattoos probably everywhere, but I don’t know that to be a fact,” I say.
“Sounds cute.”
“You would totally think he’s cute. Trust me.”
She nods, a satisfied grin on her face. “How’s your mom?”
“Good. She has a boyfriend now, which is weird, but he’s a nice guy. Claire made a joke about my mom making him pie—I’m sure you can imagine what it is—and now I can’t think of pie or him without that line in my head.” I laugh at the memory. “You should go down there with me sometime, Grace.”
The glow from talking about Dogwood Lane flickers away. The chill that’s been inside my soul for a day now comes back. I shiver, lifting the coffee to my chest and holding it with both hands.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” She leans forward on the rickety pub table and looks at me with a seriousness that startles me.
“Is what what I want?”
“This.” She holds her arms to her sides, her bangles catching the light from overhead. When they drop to the table, they jingle. “Don’t get me wrong. I want you here. But do you want you here?”
I sit, stunned. My jaw hangs open as I look at my best friend. “What are you talking about? Of course I want to be here.”
She sips her coffee, eyeing me over the cup. Her question leaves me irritated, and rather than call her out, I take a drink of my overpriced coffee.
Finally, right before I’m ready to lose my mind, she sighs. “Look, Neely. All I’m saying is that I’ve never seen you as animated as you were a little while ago. You’ve been excited about articles and opportunities, but I think you just went ten sentences and didn’t even breathe.”
I look at her like she’s lost her mind. Still, her stupid words cause my mind to drift back to Dogwood Lane. My heart pangs for the smell of fertilizer, the taste of Mom’s pie. I’d do almost anything to see Dane’s smile and hear his voice whispering at the shell of my ear.
“That. Right there,” she says, pointing a pink-painted finger at me. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
My stomach rolls as I look at the manicure and think of Mia. “Enough, Grace.”
“I can’t let this go. Trust me, I’d like to. I’d like to tell you what concert tickets I bought us and fill you in on my dating life. But none of that is important, and this is. And as your friend, I have to be honest with you even when I’ll lose in the end. You need to go home, Neely.”
“I can’t. I go to see Frank tomorrow.”
“I get that. And you deserve that job. But if anything in the world made me smile like you do when you talk about Tennessee, I’d never leave it.”
I lean forward and look at her earnestly. “But this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted. To be at the helm of something big. I’ve waited my whole life for this moment.”
“You don’t think I understand that?” She arches a brow. “I kill mysel
f for the same thing you do. I bust balls every day so I can feel like my life means something. But you know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t have anything else.” The light in her eyes dims as she glances down at her cup. “I don’t have a Tennessee. I don’t have a mom who bakes pies or a Dane who adores me. Or a Mia, but I’m kind of happy about that.” She makes a face. “But if I did have them, I’d walk away from all this.”
My throat squeezes shut as I think of all the things she’s just said. There’s a pull on my heart I almost can’t bear.
“You have waited your whole life for this,” Grace says, standing. It takes a second to get her balance on her two-inch heels. “But which moment do you mean?” She grabs her purse and coffee and kisses my cheek. “Call me later. I’m late for a meeting.”
I watch my best friend exit the café and hail a cab. I won’t see her again until the weekend because there won’t be time. There never is here.
I get to my sneaker-clad feet, happy not to be wearing heels today, and take my phone out of my pocket. A picture of Dane, Mia, and me at Mucker’s is my screen saver, and as much as it kills my heart to look at it, I can’t change it. It’s my last thread to a few days of my life that will always feel like some of the best.
Before I tuck my phone back in my purse, it lights up. I don’t know the number, just that the area code is Tennessee. With bated breath I answer. “Hello?”
“I heard ya left.” Penn’s voice glides through the line. “Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“You kind of piss me off with this shit.” He tries to say it like he’s joking, but the grit on the back end proves he’s not. Not entirely, anyway.
“Penn, I’m sorry. It was a last-minute decision, and I didn’t have time to make the rounds.”
“Yeah, I know. You never have time for us peons down here in the sticks.”
My heart splinters. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Maybe not. I mean, I know you like me even if you don’t like the rest of them. Can’t say I blame you,” he jokes.
“I will come back and see you. Maybe for Thanksgiving? We could rent out Mucker’s and have our own holiday. All of us.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.” He sighs. “I have a lot of shit to do today. But I thought I’d call you and make sure you had my number. Don’t take it personally, though. I always make sure women have my number.”
My eyes water as I laugh at his very Penn-like way of being nice. A woman with a bag as big as a truck bumps me, and I don’t even care. I don’t even look at her. I just stare at the dirty window in front of the coffee shop and wish it were the Dogwood Café.
“I’ll call. I promise.” I sniffle.
“Do that. Not too much, though. That might be weird. But if you need something, give me a holler. I’d like to know you’re alive every now and then.”
“Okay.”
“Good. Now I gotta go because this guy I work for is a complete fucking asshole today, and he left Matt with a list of shit for me to do, and I have to figure out how to get out of it.”
Laughing, I grab a napkin off a table and dab at my eyes. “Take care of yourself.”
“I will. You too.”
“Bye.”
The line goes dead. Somehow, it feels like my connection to anything that makes me smile is also terminated.
CHAPTER THIRTY
DANE
It’s a hand-wash-the-dishes kind of night.
Rinsing the last few cups and setting them on a towel, I look out the window. It’s a beautiful summer evening. Although the sun isn’t quite set yet, there are lightning bugs going to town in the field outside. Neely would love it.
I flip off the water, irritated with myself, and grab a towel to dry my hands. All day, I’ve tried to retrain myself to not think of her. To not associate things with her. To not let my mind wander to a place where she exists.
There’s a chance I’ll have to buy a new truck. And burn most of my clothes. And sell the house.
Shaking my head at my own stupidity, I toss the towel back on the counter.
It hurts worse this time. Before, when she left, I was already prepared for it. She was leaving for school even before the whole Katie mess, and we had a rough plan for us to stay connected while she was gone. The key was this: She was coming home. That, and she wasn’t leaving me specifically.
Both keys are lost now. She’s not coming back, and it feels like a total rejection of a life I could’ve offered her, a life I live and wanted her to share with me. But that was my mistake. I hoped too much and I knew better.
Mia’s feet hit the floor above me. I listen to her rummage around the bathroom. Each moment that goes by tightens the knot a little harder in my stomach. She’s asked for Neely a few times tonight, and I wouldn’t humor Haley by listening to how many times she asked for her today. I have to tell her the truth, some version of the truth, and I don’t know how to do that.
If she cries, and I bet she will, I’ll probably break. This is my doing once again. This wound I’m getting ready to inflict was done at my hands even though I promised myself I’d never do it again.
I guess you can’t trust anyone. Not even yourself.
I wait for her feet to hit the hallway and for the mad dash to her bedroom. I wait and wait and wait, but it never comes. Heading for the stairs, I look up toward the hallway. Just as I put my hand on the banister, trying to decide whether I should check on her, her little voice calls out my name.
“Dad.” She says it in a way that’s not a shout and not a normal talking voice either.
I’m to the bathroom door in a half a second. “You okay, rascal?”
The door opens. Her eyes are filled with trepidation as she looks up at me, her hair wet from the shower. “Will you walk me to bed?”
“What’s this about?” I ask.
She shrugs. We make our way silently down the hall and to her room. She wastes no time climbing into her bed and getting buried under the blankets. Once she’s settled, I take my perch on the edge of the mattress.
Smoothing her hair off her forehead, I search her little eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Where’s Neely, Dad?”
“Home, I guess. I’m not sure.”
“Is she coming back?”
Emotion swallows me, sitting right across the bridge of my nose. I blink rapidly. I pray faster. I will myself to stay strong even though I want to go to my own room and fall face first into the mattress.
“She always told us she was going back to New York,” I say carefully. “We were expecting this, right?”
“No,” she says, the words padded with unshed tears. “She has to come back, Daddy. We have the Manicure Day.”
“And she really wanted to do that with you,” I tell her. “I know she did. She was really looking forward to it. But her boss called and needed her back soon, so she had to go.”
A solitary tear trickles down her freckled face. “She didn’t say goodbye?”
“She didn’t have time, baby girl. She told me to tell you she would miss you and she hated going, but she had to. She didn’t have a choice.”
I grip a handful of sheets and squeeze it with everything I have. Sitting here and answering her questions, lying to her, breaks my heart. I fight back tears of my own, both from watching her pain and acknowledging my own.
“Can’t you go get her?” Mia asks.
“I can’t. It’s not my place.”
“Why isn’t it? You’d go find me if I ran away, wouldn’t you?”
I take a deep breath. “I would find you in a second because you’re my child. It’s my job to find you.”
“Well, Neely is our family. Doesn’t that mean it’s our job to find her?”
“I know you love her. Heck, I do too,” I admit. “But she’s not really our family. It doesn’t work the same.”
Mia sits up in bed. Her pajamas, a gift from Haley decorated with little girls doing various gymnastics events
, remind me of Neely too.
“But she is our family,” Mia insists. “I feel it in my heart.”
I give up. Batting back tears, I watch her eyes fill with her own. I want to tell her I feel it too. That I love her unlike any way I’ve loved someone before. That if I could go to New York and throw her over my shoulder like a caveman and carry her home, I would.
“You should find her, Daddy. Please.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Yes, it does,” she insists, her voice beginning to break. “If you love somebody, you look for them. You look and look and look until you find them. And I know you love her just like she loves you.”
My nose burns as I fight my emotions from getting the best of me. Instead, I pull Mia into my arms. She climbs on my lap and puts her arms around my neck. Her tears dampen my T-shirt, and I just want to hit a button and rewind some of this crap. Make it not happen. Unbreak our hearts.
I hold her like I used to, back when I had to walk her from the bathroom every night. Seeing my strong, sassy preteen hurting like this, so unsure, rips at the fibers of my soul.
“Madison ran away,” she sniffles. “She hid in the doghouse outside because her brother was being mean to her.”
“Running away is never good. You always talk to me if you have a problem. Got it?”
She nods. “Madison said she just wanted her brother to find her. That’s why she hid where she did, because she knew if he looked he’d find her there. He said he hated her and wished she wasn’t alive. It hurt Madison’s feelings. So maybe this is Neely’s way of doing that. Maybe we hurt her feelings.”
“No.” I pull her back so I can look her in the face. “We didn’t hurt her feelings. Her leaving isn’t about that.” I want to shake her, drive this point into her so deep she doesn’t forget it. “This has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”
I exhale, the weight of our world embedded in the sound. I hold Mia tight, as though if I squeeze her enough, it’ll put our hearts back together again.
We sit in the silence for a while, each of us lost in thought. I don’t know how to replace Neely in our lives. Certainly not with another woman. But there is a void that I don’t know how to fill, and I know Mia feels it too.
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