“So,” Luke said, eyebrows up. “The great Hunter Bennett got himself tangled up in something real, huh? Never pictured you as the family type.”
Ben listened with his whole face, the way dads do when they’ve learned how to shut up and actually hear. “You love her,” he said. After slapping Luke in the back of the head like the older cousin he was.
I took a long drink. “Yeah.”
Luke cocked his head. “And she loves you?”
Everything in me flashed to the way she’d looked at me when I held the twins, how her shoulders dropped when I walked through the door with a bag of groceries, the night she fell asleep on my chest, and I stayed awake counting her breaths. “Yeah,” I said again, voice low.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Luke asked, not unkindly, just direct. “We both know fear’s loud. Doesn’t make it smart. And you running cross-country to ‘get space’….that’s not tactical, man. That’s just retreat.”
Ben leaned in, elbows on the table. “I had five kids in eight years. I never felt ready. Still don’t sometimes. But the trick is boring: you keep showing up. You say ‘I screwed up’ faster. You learn your tells, and you fix what you can fix. You don’t disappear when you’re scared.”
I picked at the water ring my glass had left on the wood. “I didn’t even come home after the divorce,” I said, surprised by my own confession. “And I came now. I don’t know what that says, but it doesn’t feel good.”
“It says you’re not done running yet,” Luke said. “But you could be. That part’s a choice.”
Silence shimmied in, not awkward, just present. On theTV, a hockey game halfheartedly fought itself into overtime. A woman at the bar laughed too loudly at something no one else heard.
Ben cracked a smile. “Also, we gotta say this for the record: three kids? You sure you’re not trying to get your ass kicked on purpose?”
I laughed, a genuine laugh. “You saying I can’t hack it?”
“I’m saying you can,” he answered. “But only if you want to.”
Luke knocked his knuckles against mine, a soft, precise tap. “And if you don’t go back and fix it, I’m flying out there, finding Cami, and telling her she can do better.”
I shot him a look sharp enough to cut drywall. Ben barked a laugh. The tension bled out of my shoulders by degrees.
We talked until the jukebox gave up and the bartender stacked chairs on tables with that gentle finality of small towns closing for the night. On the walk to the parking lot, our breath made ghosts in the air. Gravel crunched. Somewhere two streets over, a dog barked once and decided against it.
“You gonna call her?” Ben asked, hands jammed into the pockets of his Carhartt.
I looked up at a sky punched full of cold stars. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll book a flight in the morning.”
Luke clapped my shoulder. “Good. And Hunt?”
“Yeah?”
“When you go back, don’t show up with speeches. Show up with groceries and a plan.”
“Bossy,” I said.
“Effective,” he corrected.
Back at the house, the porch light was still on, because mymother never stopped believing I’d need it. I stood there for a long minute, the night pressing its chilled palm to my face. Inside, the clock in the hallway ticked steadily.
Back in my childhood room, I sat on the bed, pulled out my phone, and opened a browser.
One-way ticket back to California. The first flight I could get that wouldn’t send Mom into a full interrogation about why I was leaving at three a.m.
I booked it. Waiting for the confirmation ding to cast an echo in the room.
From the hallway, I heard the soft creak of the floorboard that always betrayed anyone moving past the linen closet. Mom’s small shadow paused in my doorway. “Booking a flight?” she asked, voice threaded with I-already-know.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good,” she answered, warm and fierce. “Now get some sleep. Tomorrow you’ll practice what you’re going to say. And then you say less of it and do more.”
