“Only when it suits him.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Ruffy’s never had a friend before. Another dog, I mean. At the shelter, he kept to himself.”
“Rex isn’t exactly friendly either. He tolerates other dogs, but he doesn’t seek them out.”
“Maybe they recognized something in each other.”
“Maybe.”
The marsh behind the yard is doing its evening thing—insects humming, a heron standing motionless in the shallows, the water going pink in the fading light. Ruffy’s breathing evens out between us, though he’s definitely not sleeping.Just waiting.
“I’m working on a song for the ceremony,” I say. “For Dean and Jo. It’s not going well.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Everything. Nothing.” I stare at my coffee. “I keep landing on clichés. ‘When you find the one’ and ‘love is patient’ and all the stuff that’s been said a thousand times. It doesn’t feel like them.”
“So what does feel like them?”
I think about Dean. Gruff, steady, reliable. A man who runs into burning buildings but couldn’t admit he had feelings until Jo practically beat them out of him.
“Dean spent years convinced he didn’t need anyone,” I say slowly. “He thought being alone was safer. Then Jo just...crashed into his life. With her projects and her book club and her complete refusal to let him stay closed off.”
Delilah’s quiet for a moment. “That sounds like Jo.”
“She didn’t fix him. That’s not how it works. But she made him want to be different. To let someone in.”
I hear what I’m saying. I hear the parallel, loud and obvious, and I want to take the words back. But they’re out there now, hanging in the air between us like a dare.
“That’s the song,” Delilah says.
“What?”
“What you just said.” She turns to look at me. “That’s the song. Someone who crashes into your life and makes you want to be brave enough to let them in.”
I stare at her.
She’s right. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. Not love at first sight. Not fate or destiny or any of that. Just two people deciding to be vulnerable with each other. To stay when everything in them says run.
She would know about that. The running part.
The thought is mean and I’m ashamed of it the second it forms. But it’s there, lodged in the space between what I feel and what I’ll say, and I can’t pretend it isn’t.
“That’s...” I shake my head. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“You were thinking it.”
I was. I am. She just handed me the key to a song about two people being brave enough to stay, and she’s the one who never could. The irony is so thick I could choke on it.
Ruffy shifts, andfor a moment I tense. Instead, he stretches out, his back paw barely touching my shoe.
It’s not affection. It’s grudging tolerance at best.
But it’s something.
“He’s warming up to you,” Delilah says, eyebrows raised.
