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31

Calista

After

“This is so depressing,” I whimpered, standing next to Fane in my driveway, staring at my car. “She was still so young.”

“Cali,” he sounded so unimpressed. “This car is like, thirty years old.”

“Thirty, flirty, and thriving,” I whispered, sliding my hand along the side of it.

“The airbags didn’t even deploy.” His hands were on his hips, and he was facing me fully now. “Do you understand how crucial that is for a car to do?”

“If she had some, I’m sure they would have!” I grumbled and turned to head inside. Ideally, I would have had a little more flair, but the doctor said that it would take at least a week before I started feeling more like myself again.

“I’m sorry.” Fane didn’t sound sorry at all. “You mean you knew there were no airbags in it?”

“I paid three hundred dollars for this car, Fane,” I sighed. “Of course I knew.”

“I—” He did this tai chi-looking move like he was pushing down all the frustration in his body. “You are going to give me an aneurysm. This isn’t something to joke about, Calista.”

The words came out low, almost a growl, and his entire demeanor shifted. The air between us grew heavier, darker, like a storm had rolled in without warning. His body went rigid, tension coiling through him as his hands clenched at his sides until it all just disappeared.

Poof. Gone.

Like he was the eye of that storm now, at ease with the chaos it brought. That easy frustration he’d shown moments before was gone, replaced by something far more dangerous.

I swallowed hard, my earlier humor evaporating under the weight of his quiet anger. For a moment, I forgot to breathe, caught between the overwhelming intensity in his eyes and the way his chest rose and fell like he was fighting to hold himself back.

“I know,” I said softly, my voice barely above a whisper. “I know it’s not a joke.”

The good news was that Ash managed to get a ping on one of Declan’s cards a few hours away from Darling around midnight and then another back in Artington in the early hours of the morning.

“But he’s not coming back, Fane,” I added, my tone lighter, trying to ease the crackling tension still hanging in the air. “If we can’t laugh about it, I’ll have an aneurysm too.”

He didn’t say anything else, just closed the distance between us and wrapped me in a hug for the third time today. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, but also like these weren’t things that were meant for me. Like they didn’t belong to me. Not really.

He held me anyway, strong and steady, just like he’d done a thousand times before. Like he’d do a thousand times again if I let him.

Regardless, I was the sort of girl who kept her word. So, after a very hot shower, some painkillers for the bitch of a headache, and finally calling my dad back after we’d left the hospital before he managed to arrive, we were hauled up in Fane’s truck heading for the park right in the middle of town.

I wasn’t trying to avoid my dad. The opposite, in fact. I knew that if I did anything but play it off as a minor ding and nothing more, then he would try to tear himself in half to be at my door every morning instead of with my mom, where he was supposed to be.

“Dad, I promise. Keeping me overnight was overkill. Fane and I are almost at the Autumn Fair.”

“You should be at home, Cali.” He sounded gruff and like I was about to give him an aneurysm too.

“I made a promise to Mags. Fane has already made me swear that all I will do is sit down and take people’s cash.”

“She won’t get up off her…back end.” He gave me this look that said, Is saying ‘back end’ to your dad any better than saying ass? and I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to muffle the aggressive-sounding chortle trying to escape.

“I’m hoping she might even nap,” he continued, voice dry as ever. “I bought a set of noise-canceling headphones and a pillow just in case.”

“You didn’t!” I turned my head slowly toward him.

“Sure did, baby.”

“You’re so dramatic,” I mumbled, but honestly, the thought of a midday siesta kind of spoke to my soul right now.

With a final reassurance that I was okay and settling on Tuesday next week for our next dinner date on account of Mom’s doctor’s appointment, Fane pulled into the designated vendor parking.

“Now,” I said, trying to slip back into my Cali: Tour Guide of Darling persona while swatting his hand away like the world’s most annoying fly every time he tried to tuck some hair behind my ear. “I need you to focus.”

“I am focusing.”

“No, you’re not.” I swatted his hand away again. “The purpose of this tour is so that you can meet the people of the town, not as someone trying to infiltrate their sacred space.”

“That sounds super sexual.” He leaned in, his lips quirking into a mischievous grin. “Sacred space?”

“ Fane!” I whined.

“ Cali! ” he whined back, his smile so stupidly handsome I had to hold my hand up in between us to stop my view. “You need to stop.”

“Why?” He tried to look around my hand, and I just matched his movements.

“Because you’re…making this hard. I can’t focus when you’re—”

“Smiling at you?”

“Yes.”

“Being nice?”

“ Yes. ”

“Professing my love for you?”

I groaned and covered my face with my hands instead. “Stop saying that. It’s—”

“Confusing?” His tone softened, a thread of seriousness weaving through his teasing.

“Fane, please— ”

“Okay, fine.” He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “But even though I am looking forward to our day, you should know I made up my mind about the fate of this town before I even arrived.”

I literally felt my face fall. My heart skipped over itself, the feeling was like my chest caved in a little as the weight of his words settled over me. “W-what?”

“I was never going to let anything happen to your town, baby.” His voice was steady, unshakable, as if the statement should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

Before I could find the words—or the breath—to respond, he was already out of the car. He circled around to my side, opening the door with a smile that should have eased the tightness in my chest but only made it worse. His hand was warm and firm as he helped me out, leading me into the swirl of townspeople and straight to Mags’s tent.

I was so fucking confused .

It wasn’t new—being at a loss when it came to Fane—but it didn’t make it any easier. I tried to focus on the people at the festival, speaking with them and thanking them for their thoughts and that they were so glad I was okay when they heard about the accident.

Fane, on the other hand, slipped into the rhythm of the festival like he belonged there. He poured beers at Mags’s tent with the kind of ease that made my stomach twist. It wasn’t surprising. He may not have always loved working at Heavenly Horns, but he’d always been good at it. The sight of him laughing and chatting with the locals felt…wrong. Like he was seamlessly inserting himself into a place I wasn’t sure he had the right to be.

The more the day ticked by, the more I couldn’t shake that feeling, that sinking dread.

I’d come into this with a plan, a clear idea of how today would go. How I’d show him the heart of Darling, how I’d prove this town wasn’t just a mark on a map but a living, breathing community worth preserving. That plan was in tatters now.

All the headway I’d made in seeing his actions and his words sync up felt like all half-truths I’d conjured up in my head. Like things I’d convinced myself of because I wanted to believe in him so badly.

How na?ve I’d been.

He’d made me believe that he was here to ruin the only thing I had left that was mine .

Was it fun for him? To watch me scramble and figure out a way to convince him that this one, tiny slice of the world deserved to be left untouched?

Even if it had been a game at the start for him, what about after? What about now? He’d had his fun. He’d clearly had his answer on what he was going to do since well before he even showed up, and instead of making it quick and easy, he dragged it out.

Blew up my whole fucking life.

A life I had painstakingly put together with pieces that I knew didn’t fit right, but they’d held nonetheless.

I felt his eyes on me the whole day. The further I sunk into myself, the harder he stared, and I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Cali, what’s wrong?” His voice was gentle enough to make my eyes prick with the onslaught of tears of anger, tears of pain, tears of fucking frustration and humiliation. Of telling my stupid heart not yet. Not fucking yet. And having to face the truth that it went ahead and leaped for him anyway.

“I want to go home,” I said, my voice trembling with the weight of everything.

“Cali—”

“Take me home, Fane.”

The car ride home was silent, even though I could feel how desperate he was to break it. Jerry didn’t even bother to get off the couch when we walked through the front door, a sure sign that he was getting as used to having Fane in his life as I was, and that alone felt like another twist of the knife.

“Are we going to talk about it?”

“I have nothing to say to you.” I crossed my arms, standing across from him in the same pointless entry room that had witnessed all the different ways this man had torn apart my heart, and it still didn’t make the room any more useful.

“I don’t get it. What happened? Is this about what I said in the car?”

“Oh.” I perked up, finger flying into the air like I’d never had an idea before in my life. “You mean when you said that you’d already decided that you weren’t going to touch Darling for any sort of development?”

“Yes?”

“So, you thought it was a good idea to just roll into town anyway. To show up unannounced after two whole years like that would be a completely fine thing to do?”

“I—”

“That you thought it would be fine to dismantle the brand-new foundation I had created for myself. To move into my house. To sleep in my fucking bed!” All those tears from before started to run down my face, and I smacked them away furiously.

“I created a life here. A life without you. How dare you come here and ruin it all. I was fine, Fane. I had become fine. ”

“The Calista I knew would have never settled for ‘fine.’” He even did the air quotation marks, and I wanted to scream at him because he knew how much they infuriated me.

“The Calista you knew,” I spat the words at him. “Had her heart shattered into a thousand pieces and had no one to help her pick any of it up. It might just be me, but that sort of thing tends to change a person.”

He looked like I’d slapped him. Like maybe if I had, it would have been better than forcing him to hear the words.

“Cali.” He took a step toward me, hands limp at his sides and face utterly devastated. He took a deep breath, and I realized whether I wanted it or not, whether I was prepared to hear it or not, I was about to get his ‘why’ .

“I was twenty-six,” he began. His voice was raw and jagged and tortured. “And you scared the shit out of me.”

I scoffed.

“You don’t think I was scared too?” I threw the words back at him, uncaring that the neighbors were likely witnessing the way my heart was breaking all over again. “I was terrified, Fane. I barely even knew who I was when I met you, and all of a sudden, there you were. This person who had so fucking quickly become everything . Maybe it was wrong of me to put that pressure on you, I’ll own that, but it doesn’t change the fact that you were . And when my whole world started to crumble, you were the last fucking retaining wall, and you walked away from me.”

“I didn’t.” The muscle in his jaw twitched, and I was positive I heard his bones creaking.

“You did,” I shot back. “You—”

“I had nothing to offer you, Cali. Nothing,” he cut me off, taking another step toward me. “I was a kid with no sense of responsibility, no fucking idea of how to look after someone the way I wanted to look after you. And when I needed to, I didn’t know how. ”

“There was nothing for you to fix, Fane!” My throat hurt from the way the words tore at it. Slicing through the same way they’d ripped me apart just from sitting in my chest. “I just needed you. ”

He shook his head vehemently, determined not to hear my words. Like he’d had this conversation in his own head a thousand times already.

“You know what ran through my head the moment you told me your mom was sick and you had to go? I thought, ‘Where will we live?’ I thought about how I was supposed to support us both so that you didn’t have to worry about me, about anything. How I was supposed to make sure that you didn’t have to think about a single thing so that you could be there for your family? And I came up with nothing. Nothing. Me being there only made everything heavier when I should have been able to take it all from you. That’s what you do for the people you love. You share their burden, take it entirely if you can, fucking fix it! Not add to it.”

A hand went through his hair, fingers unrelenting in the way they pulled at his chestnut strands while he kept talking. “Because I had more pride than any man ever should, and I was scared, and didn’t take the opportunities being handed to me because of some stupid idea that being the opposite of my dad would be a sure way into making sure I never ended up anything like him, even though I know I’m nothing fucking like him. I know because you loved me. You loved me . This…this person who is everything. Fucking more than everything, and you loved me . That’s all I needed, and instead, I didn’t believe it was enough.”

His chest was heaving now, and I was frozen, rooted to the spot as his words tore me apart.

“Without me, you would have been looked after. Cared for. Fucking supported. ” He choked the words out because we both knew that’s not what had happened. That I had been alone, left to drive myself to the emergency room when I fell off a ladder trying to clean my own gutters forty minutes to the next town over so my parents wouldn’t find out. “That’s why I let you go. Because every other scenario was better than anything I could have given you.”

God, he was so wrong . So, devastatingly wrong.

“When I woke up and found you fucking gone — ” His voice broke, and I covered my mouth to stifle the sob that it pulled from me. “I panicked. I called you over and over and over again. I messaged you, and then finally I messaged your sister, and she said you were home. That your dad had just called her. She asked when I was joining you.”

He let out a choked laugh. “I told her soon. Then I hung up, got a tattoo, and went home to bed. I didn’t get up until Ash banged down my door. I just kept thinking about how you were gone. How I let you leave.”

Fane cleared his throat and then kept going. I’d never heard him talk so much before, but he always said he would speak when it was important.

“No one would give me work. I had no experience, no connections. My résumé was a joke—a bartending job I couldn’t even get a solid reference for. So, I walked into Mackenzie Co. and asked for a job. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I spent years trying to be the opposite of him, and the only thing it got me was losing you.”

His jaw clenched, his voice growing rougher. “He was so fucking happy to hire me it made me sick. I worked every day, taking overtime, training—anything to climb my way up. I finally started making good money. Great money. And then he wanted Darling.” His voice trailed off into a cracked sort of whisper, and it was like I was watching him rip his entire soul open for me, letting me see every part of him.

There was nothing I didn’t want. No matter what came next, I didn’t care. I wanted everything.

“And the first thing I thought was, No . Not Darling. Your Darling. I walked right into his office and told him I wanted it, and that’s all I needed to do. The project was mine, and finally, I was going to see you.” His hand dragged down his face, and he let out a choked laugh. “I refused to let myself see you again until I was sure I could be the sort of man that was worthy of at least a tiny chance at giving you the life you deserved.”

Fane stood directly in front of me now, there was almost no space between us. Almost.

“And if I’d gotten married?” My voice was stronger than I felt.

“Then I would have made sure you were happy.”

“You would have turned around and walked away?”

“If that’s what you wanted.”

I just stared at him, realizing that I was wrong before. That my heart wasn’t breaking all over again. This was what it felt like to have someone help put it back together.

“Do you want me to walk away, Rose?”

He would, I realized. He’d grin and bear it. Turn on his heels and never come back if I asked him to.

“No,” I said. The very word that had once broken me turned into the very thing that made me whole again. “No, I don’t want you to walk away.”

“So, you’re saying—”

“I want you to kiss me, you infuriating man.”