Page 81 of Knot the Plan
And nobody wrote down when it stops, either, but I can feel it coming the way you feel weather. Four weeks, she said, back at the start. A campaign with an end date.
We're near the end of it now. One of these Wednesdays is going to be the last one, and she's going to thank us all very kindly and go pick the life she actually wants, and I've made my peace with not being sure I'm in it. Made my peace is the wrong phrase. I've stopped arguing with it. That's different.
So this one counts. It's mine, and she's coming out to the house, and I've swept the finished room twice and lit the fire and put a lamp where the light falls best. More than I'd admit to Finn.
I know that's too much. I did it anyway.
Finn and Hudson came by the site Monday, both of them, which never happens. They stood around pretending to look at my framing for a while. Then Hudson got to it, because Hudson always gets to it, but for once there was no joke in front of it.
We're not going to ask if you're in,he said.We know you're in. Thing is, so are we. Somewhere back there it quit being the arrangement and started being a pack. A real one. I think all three of us clocked it about the same week and just didn't say.
He looked at Finn when he said it. Finn didn't argue. From Finn, who spent a month swearing none of it was real, not arguing was the loudest thing in the room.
So here's the only problem left,Hudson said.She doesn't know yet. Still thinks it's the deal. And she's skittish, man, she's got one foot out the door already, we've all seen it. So we don't rush her. Nobody hands her the whole truth and spooks her off. We don't tell her. We show her. Slow, till she gets there on her own and it's safe to.
Finn said exactly one thing, quiet, to the framing and not to me.Don't declare it. She'll bolt.Then, after a second, like it cost him,just make it so she can't not see it.
I've been turning it over ever since. They're right. They know her. And that's the trouble with today, because I know exactly what I'm not allowed to do, and I'm going to want to do it anyway.
She's late. That isn't like her. Josie runs early to everything, alarms set fifteen minutes fast on purpose, and I'm standing at the front window watching the road like a dog when her little car finally turns onto the lot, and I have to make myself step back and not go out before she's even parked.
She comes up the walk slow. That's not like her either. Josie moves quick, always, quick and bright, hands going while she talks.
Today she comes up my path slow, one hand trailing the porch rail. When she gets close enough for the light to catch her, her face has gone soft and flushed at the edges, and her scent reaches me a beat before she does.
Brown sugar and warm oat. It always is. Except lately it's deeper, richer, gone thick and dark like it's been sitting somewhere warm.
It hits the back of my throat and drops straight through me, and I have to shift my stance on my own porch like a teenager. The smell of her does that to me now. Has for weeks. And I am endlessly, quietly ashamed of how little say I get in it.
I don't say any of that. It's not mine to name, and it's not mine to want this hard.
“You look wrecked,” I say instead. Stupid thing to lead with. She laughs, and it comes out shaky.
“Charming. You should put that on a card.” She stops at the bottom of the deck steps and looks up at me, and there's a decision working behind her eyes, close to the surface now. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I nearly didn't come.” She says it fast, like she has to get it out before she loses the nerve. “I sat in my driveway for ten minutes. Ten.”
“What stopped you? For ten minutes.”
“Wasn't sure I was still on the schedule.” She climbs the steps, light about it, but she doesn't quite meet my eye. “Reunion's over. Figured the whole thing might be winding down.” A shrug, and then a small smile that undoes the shrug completely. “But I wanted to see you. So.”
She's close now, close enough that her scent wraps all the way around me, and I have to hold very still.
She thinks she might not be wanted here.
Five years. Five years I've spent rearranging my life around the chance of her crossing a room, and she sat in her drivewaywondering if she was still invited. I don't have the first idea how to tell her without telling her everything.
I let her in.
The house is quiet in the afternoon, tools down, nobody but us. Most of it's still raw, bare stud walls and bare subfloor waiting on me, but the light comes in low and gold through the windows and the whole place smells like cut pine and woodsmoke.
She walks in and stops just inside the door the way she always does, taking it in. And I watch her take it in, because watching Josie notice things is a thing I could do for the rest of my life and call it a full one.
“You finished the whole front room,” she says, stopping in the doorway of the one space that's done, floor laid and walls up and trimmed out clean, a fire going in the grate under a mantel I built by hand.
“Last week.”
