He doesn’t say “I know” again. Just nods once. Sets his jaw in a way that tells me he’s thinking about his own losses—his first wife, the years after, the walls he built so high he almost missed Jo entirely.
“I’m not doing this again.” I set my beer down harder than necessary. “I can’t. I came here for the wedding and to try to find my music again. That’s it. A couple months, then I’m gone.”
Dean is quiet for a long moment. Then: “You remember what Dad used to say? About your mom?”
I go still. We don’t talk about my mom. Not ever. She left when I was eight, ran off to LA to start a new family, and Dad never once said a bad word about her. Just: “Some people aren’t built for staying. Doesn’t mean the love wasn’t real.”
“He said loving her was worth it,” I manage. “Even though it ended.”
Dean nods. Finishes his beer. Sets it on the coffee table like he’s closing a book he’s done reading.
But I hear what he’s not saying. Dad loved a woman who left, and he never once called it a mistake. Dean’s sitting in my living room drawing a line between my mother and Delilah, and he’s not wrong, and I hate him alittle for it.
“It’s about the music,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
Dean just looks at me. Doesn’t argue. Doesn’t need to. The look says everything.
I don’t answer.
Dean stands, stretching like a man twice his age. “Jo’s waiting for me. But hey—you should come to dinner this week. She’s planning some wedding thing, wants input from the wedding party.”
“Will Delilah be there?”
“Probably. She’s doing the flowers.”
“Dean.”
“What? It’s Jo’s wedding. You’re both in it. You’re gonna see each other.” He heads for the door, then turns back. Gives me a look I can’t quite read—part sympathy, part challenge. “You say she’s the one who ran.”
Then he leaves. No follow-up. No explanation. Just drops that grenade and walks out.
Which is annoying, because now I’m standing in my living room replaying the sentence on a loop, trying to figure out if my brother just calledme a coward in six words.
The house is tooquiet after he’s gone.
I pick up my guitar again. Sit on the porch in the fading light, as the waves crash against the shore. The ocean doesn’t care about my problems. It just keeps doing what it’s always done—pushing and pulling, advancing and retreating. Never quite the same twice but always essentially itself.
I think about Delilah’s face when she realized it was me. The shock. The flash of something that might have been pain. The way she said my name like it was a word she’d forgotten how to pronounce.
Levi.
My fingers find a chord. Then another. Something unfamiliar. Something that doesn’t sound like everything else I’ve written in the past three years.
I chase it for a few bars before it dissolves into nothing.
But it was there. For a second, it was there.
I haven’t felt that spark since?—
Since the last time I saw her. Ten years ago. When she walked away without looking back.
“Ugh,” I mutter to no one.
I just have to survive a couple months.
Then I can go back to LA and forget all about Delilah Smart and her flower shopand her face and the way my heart still skips like a stupid teenager every time she’s in the room.
A couple months.
