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40

Calista

After

When I woke up, Fane was already in the kitchen.

The sounds of pots and pans were clanging, and the low hum of music filtering in under the door.

I rolled out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen. My eyes were still half closed, and I didn’t stop my little steps until my face was pressed into the soft cotton of the shirt stretching across his back.

The fabric was warm and smelled like him.

His hand came up to cover mine where they were pressed to his chest, and he turned to face me.

“Are you sniffing me?” His voice had that rumble of disuse it always had in the morning, making him seem all rumpled and cozy.

“I am.”

I pressed my face deeper into the fabric and felt his quiet laughter reverberate through his chest as his hand settled against the back of my head.

When I looked up, his lips now curved in a small, swollen smile, still tender from last night. It flickered as his gaze swept over my face—the bruising on my cheek, the bandage on my neck, and the marks beneath the shirt I’d pulled on. The ones he’d only seen in the soft glow of moonlight last night.

His hand came up, fingers light as they moved across my cheek. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

My heart sank at his words because this was almost exactly what I had been worried would happen. I shook my head. “This wasn’t your fault, Fane.”

“No.” He shook his head too. “It wasn’t. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there.”

I hadn’t expected that.

I hadn’t expected it because it was everything I’d ever hoped he could believe—that he wasn’t responsible for the actions of those around him—that it was not his job to make amends for the sins of others.

This was new for us, because when I thought of us facing big things together, the reality was that…we didn’t. Not together.

I scrunched my nose at the tingling. The feeling, I knew, a result of that seed of hope that had been planted all those weeks ago reaching up to the sun. Growing and strong. Steady.

“Me too,” I said, because this whole being open and honest thing was really working for us.

That thought shot a pulse of guilt through me. At the words I had heard him whisper last night when he’d held me in his arms tight, the sound of his heartbeat steady beneath my ear.

Do you think you could love me again?

I had to be the worst kind of person to have held those words back from him. Words that were his anyway. I wasn’t even sure what it was that was terrifying me into not saying them.

Maybe it was the lingering fear that he could still leave. That even though it had broken both of us the first time, he’d still done it.

Maybe it was sitting and watching the bend in the street, waiting for him to fly around it and come home.

And he had. He’d come back to me.

Still, when I opened my mouth to say them, the total opposite came out instead. “I stabbed Declan in the ass.”

Fane’s head tilted back, laughter exploding out of him. Every note a splatter of watercolor dripping down the cabinets of our kitchen, and I stood there, grinning up at him in the same way I knew Jerry looked at him—like he hung the damn moon.

Maybe it was wrong, maybe it was totally fucked up to be laughing about the deceased, but there we were. Chuckling and hiccupping with laughter while the French toast—the reason I’d even managed to crawl out of bed—burned in the pan behind him. Me, incomprehensibly charmed by the boyish grin that bloomed across his face.

The silver lining here was that it was Sunday, which meant that this was the single day off I had during the week, and the moment we were fed and dressed, Fane and I walked down the street to his truck and drove straight to the vet.

Jerry was beside himself with glee at the sight of us walking through the door. He bolted toward Fane first, his tail wagging so hard he couldn’t control it. Eventually, it stopped moving from side to side and started twirling in a wild circle. Then he paused, his ears flicking toward me where I sat patiently and I held back the building pressure of sobs that were desperate to be released from my chest while my big, brave boy slowly walked over to me.

His steps were measured, like he was a little unsure.

Like he was disappointed in himself for what had happened.

His cold nose pressed to the bruised side of my face before gently sniffing the bandage on my neck and the other beneath my shirt that he couldn’t even see.

I knew my dog, and I knew that some people would probably think I was insane for thinking the way I did, but he was about as smart as they came. Smarter, actually.

No, we couldn’t talk the way people did, or even the way dogs did to one another, but we understood each other just the same.

With both hands holding his face, I leaned down and whispered into one of his floppy ears, my tears of terror, of worry, of relief, silently tracking down my face. His tail picked up speed slowly but surely until there wasn’t an inch of my face that wasn’t covered in slobber rather than tears, and the vet deemed him more than ready to come home.

Fane loaded Jerry into the back seat of the truck, carefully securing what had to be the largest dog harness known to man. On the way home, he turned to me with a knowing look, one brow arched.

“You told Jerry that you stabbed him in the ass, didn’t you?”

My grin stretched so wide it ached. “Yep.”

For the rest of the day, the three of us didn’t move from the couch, Jerry tucked between us and my hand in Fane’s. When the sun went down, we didn’t need to talk it through to know that when Fane got up, I would follow him into our bedroom to get our bedding and drag it outside.

This time, when Jerry started to make his nest before we’d finished setting up, we just walked back inside and got more blankets and cuddled in on either side of our four-legged giant.

The seconds ticked on, Jerry’s snores grumbling between us when Fane started to tell me about what the detectives had said. Who Declan really was and what he’d done. When he finally got it all off his chest, I squeezed his hand a little tighter, pushed the hair off his face, out of his eyes and murmured, “It’s not your fault.”

When he replied a quiet but strong, “I know,” that little flower of hope in my chest grew a little bit taller.

* * *

I still didn’t have a phone, and when Fane refused to take me into work, letting me know that Ash and Sammy had it all covered, I got up and out of bed, buck-ass naked, and started trying to tie his limbs to the bedpost again. With every limb I got situated, he was up and out of my double-knotted bunny ear bows before I’d even started on the next one.

When he grabbed me around the waist and hauled me back to the bed, every bubble of laughter died in my throat when he hovered above me and said, “Time to tick off number three on the sex list,” and reached for one of the lingering ties loosely hanging from one of his ankles.

My parents were still in Cullen Grove. They still didn’t know about what had happened with Declan, and I put it all down to the fact that it had been two whole years since my mom got her “new phone,” and she still thought the red button that popped up when she got a call was the answer button.

Every time without fail, she pressed it and muttered, “Dammit, I missed them again.”

They ended up calling Fane when they kept getting my voicemail to let us know that they were going to be out of town a little longer and that they were going to extend their stay, turning it into their first vacation in over a decade.

Cullen Grove was only forty minutes from Darling, but it felt like a world away compared to the cautious baby steps they’d been taking toward their new normal after everything they’d endured.

In a bittersweet way, the distance was good for me too. I had a chance to learn a little bit more about who I was without them, after so much of who I’d been had revolved around them for so long.

I gave in to Fane’s pleading and didn’t work for the rest of the week. We had, however, been into the café every day, and when I noticed that Ash had been eating up all my cookie ingredient stock again, I couldn’t have cared less.

I just ordered double what I had the time before, and when Fane received a message from him that said, Tell Cora I love her so much that my body is struggling to physically hold it all in, I didn’t even roll my eyes.

Okay, I did, but just a tiny, baby roll.

Fane made us breakfast-for-dinner nearly every night, so by Sunday, I felt like a living, breathing caramelized banana.

I was quickly running a brush through my hair, getting ready for our weekly dinner at my parents’ place now that they were back from their trip, when Fane called out from the front door.

“Hey, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to your parents for dinner,” he said, tugging on his boots. That made me pause because it meant he was still planning to leave the house.

“Oh.” I nodded as casually as I could. “Okay.”

“Do you want me to drive you, or will you take Delilah’s car?”

“No, no, I can drive.” I tried to smile, but he didn’t even look at me as he reached for his jacket. We weren’t glued at the hip or anything, though it had kind of felt like it since he’d been back. The man was hard-pressed to let me out of his sight—especially since I still hadn’t gotten a new phone. I’d been enjoying not being tethered to one, if I was being honest.

So, this sudden mention that he wouldn’t be coming to dinner—and the way he’d checked his phone four times in the last two minutes—made my stomach twist.

“Is everything okay?”

He looked at me finally, a small smile on his face. He just settled a broad hand on the back of my head and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “There’s something I have to do.”

I nodded, my fingers not wanting to let go of his jacket when he pulled back, but I did. “Okay.”

I locked up behind us, and we both got into separate cars, him going one way and me going the other.

It felt weird being away from him.

It felt weird that he wasn’t being weird about it, but then again, I was just going to my parents’ place. Something I was, admittedly, wildly excited about.

Their absence had felt necessary when they announced their extended stay in Cullen, but by the time Thursday afternoon rolled around, I missed them enough to send a message asking if we could move our usual Thursday night dinner to Sunday.

We talked for hours, just the three of us. Before, during, and long after our plates were scraped clean. It hadn’t been the three of us in a long time, and the conversation between us hadn’t been as easy as it was since before Mom got sick.

I knew I had to tell them about Declan, and I did—but in the most pared-down version of events imaginable. As I spoke, I found myself absently pulling my hair across the cut on my neck, the stitches for which I had thankfully gotten out the day before. The bruising on my face had faded to a yellowy-green by now, and while it was definitely out of place for a dinner setting, a full face of makeup did the trick in covering up what little evidence remained.

They both panicked for about thirty seconds, frantic and overwhelmed, before I managed to reassure them with the same story I’d given the police. The real details—the whole truth—were known only to me, Ash, Fane, and Declan.

Their relief was palpable, but so was the lingering worry in their eyes. I could feel it in the way my mom’s hand gripped mine across the table, her fingers trembling ever so slightly. It was harder than I’d thought it would be, not just sharing the story, but resisting the urge to soften it, to erase the worry so clearly etched into their faces. That worry, I realized, was universal. It existed in every parent for their children, no matter how old we got.

But, just like Fane was learning that the sins of others were not his to repent, their worry was not mine to carry.

When they hugged me good night, it was at least two hours later than it usually was when we parted ways. When my mom hugged me a little tighter and a little longer, I didn’t fight it. I settled into the skin of being her daughter. A child who had grown up and no longer got the benefit of being hugged by a mother who was taller than her, bigger than her.

I let myself sink into the way she smelled like bergamot and lemon and jasmine and lilies. She’d always smelled like that my whole life. It was constant, and I let it soothe something in me. A reassurance that we were going to be okay. That we had survived so much, and somehow, we would keep going.

“Love you, kid.” My dad hugged me tight, the way he always hugged me, and with a promise to see me tomorrow for his coffee, they sent me off, waving at me from the porch.

The whole drive home, I was calm and settled. I turned the radio off, rolled the windows down, and let the blistering cool air outside wrap around me. Waking me up.

Finally, it felt like I was aware of the days I was living, not just shocked at how many of them were passing by without me realizing it.

I pulled into the gravel drive, unable to stop the pleased little hum from coloring the air around me. The tires crunching creating the well-loved soundtrack of every arrival home. It was then, when I looked around, that my smile slowly melted from my face.

Fane’s truck wasn’t parked where it should’ve been.

Jerry’s wagging tail thumped a steady rhythm, the sound carrying from inside the house. He was still waiting, just beyond the threshold of the door, for someone to walk through it. The realization rooted me to the spot, frozen next to Delilah’s car, a knot twisting deep in my gut.

He hadn’t come back.