Page 5

4

Calista

After

I stared right at the spot Fane had been occupying only seconds before for an unhealthy amount of time.

I stared so long that by the time I locked up to head home, I was certain he was a mirage that I’d hallucinated on the grounds of smelling too many coffee beans.

The drive home was done on one hundred percent instinct. I couldn’t even recall the turns I’d made or the signs I stopped at, but pulling onto my gravel drive, the sight of the little cottage was like a balm to my always-aching heart.

My house was perfect. So, so perfect.

I mean, sure, it was falling apart, and I didn’t actually own it, and I was also pretty sure I was paying way too much for it. Mrs. Antinello was my landlord, and she was (respectfully) so old I’m certain no one had actively celebrated a number for her birthday since I was in single digits.

She also lived directly across the street and loved to swat literally everyone on the ankles with her cane.

To put it plainly, she frightened me. When she told me the rent, I smiled super wide to make sure I didn’t cry and shook her hand, which felt like if I gripped it too firmly, it might detach from her body.

In saying all of that, she did allow dogs. And that was really all that mattered.

Most people might’ve had someone on speed dial to call and immediately talk to about hallucinating their ex. Not me.

I hadn’t had a real conversation with my sister in years. When Mom got sick, I ran home, and she ran for the hills, which just about sums up the pair of us.

Delilah might have been my person once, but that was before I came back a stranger—to myself and everyone else.

Not anymore, though, and that was all on me.

My reality was that I lost every single person that I relied on all in the same night. All for different reasons, but I lost them, nonetheless.

But then there was Jerry. My big, beautiful, pony-sized Great Dane.

“Oh, Jerry!” It would be a cold day in hell when he peeled himself off his couch and met me at the front door like any other regular dog.

Yes, Jerry had his own couch. Mainly because he was too damn big to share one with me, and after the third time he launched me onto the floor with a firm kick to the spine, I decided enough was enough.

His groan of delight reverberated through the house, along with the solid thumping of his tail. In what I was sure was every dog trainer’s nightmare, I answered the call of his unspoken demand to come hither and practically threw myself onto him.

With his big head between both my hands, I smothered him with kisses, his tail picking up speed with each forceful smooch.

Jerry was supposed to be a gift for Fane.

I know. I know. But we were a few weeks past our two-year anniversary, and Fane had always wanted a dog. More specifically, he wanted a Great Dane named Jerry. I searched high and low for this incredibly large canine, and the moment I saw his little gangly frame at a gentle and pure two months old staring at me from the other side of a plexiglass wall, I knew.

He was the one.

That was the night my dad called me.

“Invasive ductal carcinoma.” My dad’s exhausted voice cracked through my phone like the words weighed a thousand tons. “She’s got breast cancer, darlin’.”

That was the first and last time I ever heard Dallas Grey cry, and I hadn’t even been there to hold him. To be someone who could carry that weight with him, so he knew he wasn’t alone in the fear that he could lose the love of his life.

I stormed into the apartment Fane and I shared in a panic. Tears blurred my vision with nothing on my mind but this painful, aching need to get home. Every tether I had to sanity slowly snapping at the idea that I was losing hours, minutes, seconds with my mom.

“Calista.” Fane’s voice had been strong, just like the hands that held my face. That clutched me to a hard, familiar chest that continued to resound with the steady thumps of his heartbeat.

I’d never given much thought to heartbeats before, but right then, I was terrified that I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to his. That I hadn’t been marking them down and remembering them in case one day I ever had to live without them.

“Baby, you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong or else I can’t fix it.” Fane had always been calm in situations where I’d only ever been able to feel panic. He was well-balanced. Thoughtful. He was unwavering. A lighthouse amid a raging storm.

“My mom,” I croaked out, unable to see him clearly through the heavy onslaught of tears. “She’s sick. We have to go home. Fane, my dad—” My voice broke, and he held me while the sobs racked my body. I didn’t even try to pull it together. I knew that this would be my one and only chance to break down because I would do everything I could to do for my dad what Fane did for me.

Keep steady.

And that’s when my whole world shattered. All it took was a single second and one word.

“No. Cali…I can’t.”

I almost missed them. I think I wanted to miss them, but I’d heard those words leave his mouth and had enough respect for myself that I didn’t ask him to repeat them. I remembered stepping out of his hold, turning around, and closing the door to our room.

Something snapped inside me. I didn’t understand the how or why or what. I didn’t even remember packing. I refused to look at him when I walked out on silent feet, setting my key to our first and only apartment on the kitchen island as I left.

I picked up Jerry on my way back to Darling, and he didn’t make a peep for the whole five-hour drive. Not even when my hand held onto his fur with maybe a little too much force.

He just looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew that it could take some time, but we were going to save one another.

I groaned into the fur of his stomach. “I hallucinated a man today. The worst man.” Jerry’s tail stopped wagging, and he eyed me with the perfect amount of wariness. The look was made entirely more dramatic on account of his face being held down by gravity and the whites of his eyes on full display.

“Oh, don’t you worry. You won’t ever have to meet him,” I patted his stomach. “But I think it might be karma for accidentally crushing Mrs. Antinello’s tulips when I tripped over them yesterday.” I looked up to gauge my dog’s silent opinion, mostly because he had been the one to nudge me directly into the flower bed.

Jerry had fallen back asleep at some point between his concerned stare and my admission of unintentional vandalism.

“Holy shit, I need to stop waiting for him to reply,” I mumbled to myself. Doing my best to get up without jostling the couch too much and waking him up.

It was five forty-five p.m., and hallucinations or not, I wasn’t going to have my ass handed to me by the infamous Isla Grey for being late to a dinner date.

Now that she was better, she was even more passionate about being on time.

Mom’s treatment had been brutal and fast-paced. From the moment she was given her diagnosis to her tests and biopsies, through to her treatment plan, and then to the decision she made to get a double mastectomy.

She’d faced it all with this unfaltering determination and grace that I was so in awe of. I didn’t know how she did it, but I’d never been so proud to be her daughter as I was watching her go through one of the most harrowing things I think you can watch someone you love endure.

She did six months of chemo, and in April of last year, she was officially declared to be in remission. Though the road was long and so much of her life still revolved around hospital visits and medication, I’d seen so much of the woman she’d been before come back to life in the last twelve months that it was hard not to cry every time I saw her.

That included her fiery disposition regarding tardiness.

My parents lived in the same house that I’d grown up in. A beautiful, older-style farmhouse that had been renovated slowly and consistently over a couple of decades so that nothing was ever new at the same time. It had baby-blue shutters and a porch that wrapped all around the outside.

The moment you looked at it, it made you feel like you could take a deep breath.

At least, it used to.

I couldn’t look at this house without my chest tightening. Without being gripped by the looming presence of a grief that hadn’t descended but lingered on the outskirts of my sanity, ready to consume me at any moment.

“Mom! Dad!” I called before I even closed the car door behind me. It was exactly twelve minutes past six and I would be damned if I was clocking in a moment later.

“Cali girl!” I could hear my mom’s sing-song voice trickle out of the kitchen through the open front door. The house already smelled amazing, and my stomach chose that moment to rumble, reminding me that I hadn’t remembered to eat lunch… again.

Being wrapped in a hug from my mother turned me into a little girl again. She was warm and soft, and everything that haunted me outside of her embrace had no standing whatsoever when she slowly rocked me from side to side. I was enveloped in notes of bergamot and lemon, of jasmine and lilies.

“My big girl,” she whispered into my hair, placing a kiss on my temple.

“Hi, Momma,” I whispered back before she let me go and headed back to the kitchen.

“Your father is washing up, but you can set the table. He won’t tell me why I’m cooking for four.”

The way my asshole clenched was actually comical. It was also probably a health hazard. My only conclusion was that the universe was playing a joke on me because, right at that moment, a knock came from behind me. I didn’t need to look to know who’s hulking figure now encompassed the entire doorframe.

“Oh no,” I gasped, squeezing my eyes shut like I’d hopefully disappear if I did it hard enough.

“Oh my god . Tell me I’m not seeing things!” The only way I knew she’d rushed past me was because I was encompassed with a fresh wave of her scent and not so subtly shoved out of the way so she could get to the not-hallucination and very much real man who had just knocked on her open front door.

“I wish I could,” I thought I murmured too low for anyone to hear, but by the grunt behind me, I was pretty sure Fane had caught it.

“Mrs. Grey.” Fane’s voice moved through me like it was inspecting every cell in my body. I felt it behind my eyes, the way it made my skin prickle and heat and feel too tight for my body.

“Don’t you start that.” She gripped his arms and took a small step back as if she could both inspect him in his entirety and keep a hand on him at the same time. You couldn’t, but she gave it a wonderful attempt.

“I can’t believe it. How did you get away from the mines?”

Fane’s eyes snapped to mine, and I took that as my cue to turn swiftly on my heels and head for the kitchen to find a job that I could do that didn’t involve being anywhere near him.

“Right,” I heard him say, not trying to hide the grin of satisfaction at the no doubt uncomfortable situation he was now in, even as I felt the hole that he was burning into the back of my head. “Yes, the mines.”