He stops. Doesn’t turn around.
“Talk to me,” I say. “Don’t walk. Talk.”
He turns. His face in the porchlight is stripped of every defense I’ve ever seen him wear—the humor, the charm, the easy confidence that makes him seem like he’s never once doubted his place in a room. All of that is gone. What’s left is raw and young and furious and terrified.
“You had no right to do that.” His tone is lower now but the edges are sharper. “It wasn’t your place.”
“Not my place? We’re sleeping together. You’re living in my home. You keep referring to the baby asours. Do I still not have aplacein your life?”
He flinches. “That’s not what I?—”
“That is what you said.”
“Celeste, this is why relationships rarely work out for me. Why being an escort made sense for a while. I get that myrelationship with my mum makes women uncomfortable. They usually do one of two things when we get to this point: they run away or they overstep. No one understands what mum is going through like I do. No one gets what she needs.”
“Because you won’t let them,” I say. “What your mom said earlier…I don’t know, Saylor. Do you think you’re using your mom’s situation to avoid having to grow up?”
“Grow up?” he practically hisses. “Because you know everything about growing up? That’s the point you love to make, isn’t it? That’s the reason you think you know what’s best for my mum?”
“Well, are we going to pretend like I’m not older than you? Yes, in this situation, I do believe I know best. You have a shot, take it.”
“Been there. Did that. Lost everything.”
“But this time, Rina vetted it. I vetted it. You have protection, Saylor. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you or your mom.”
He forces out a deep breath. “You know what, Celeste? Stop worrying so much. You’re going to be a wonderful mother. You’re being one right now. Except I already have a mum. I don’t need a second one. What I do need is a woman who respects me and my choices. A woman who trusts me instead of trying to control me by saving the day.”
“That’s what you think I’m doing? Trying to control you?” I take a step toward him. Then another. Close enough to see the pulse in his throat, the way his hands are trembling at his sides, the way he’s looking at me like he’s daring me to answer and begging me not to. “What do you need right now?”
“Space.” The word comes out rough. Scraped. “Just some space. To clear my head.”
“Is this what I can expect from you?” I ask, and the question is quiet but it isn’t gentle. “Running away when it gets hard?Because I’m about to go through the hardest year of my life, Saylor. I’m losing my company. I might lose this baby. And I need to know—can I depend on you? Or was this always just a means to an end?” My voice doesn’t break but it wants to.
“A means to an end for who? Because I could ask the same question.”
He stares at me. The porchlight catches the wet in his eyes. For three seconds—three seconds that last longer than the three minutes I spent alone in the conference room—he doesn’t speak.
Then he crosses the distance between us in two steps and pulls off his jacket, wrapping it around my shoulders. He presses his mouth to mine. Quick. Firm. Not a declaration. A promise condensed to its smallest possible form.
“I’m not running away. Sometimes you need space when you know what you need to say but don’t know how to say it yet,” he tells me. “That’s all. I’m leaving to think.” He touches my face. His thumb traces my cheekbone once. “But I’ll be right back.”
He turns toward the truck. Opens the door. Pauses.
I call after him because the silence is too heavy and the driveway is too dark and I need him to know that even in the middle of a fight, I see him. The man underneath the guilt. The man who is so much more than the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“When did you get so mature?”
He looks over his shoulder. The ghost of a grin. The first break in the storm.
“It comes with age,” he says. “You’ll get there.”
The truck starts. The headlights sweep across the gravel, across the oak tree, across the tire swing that sways once in the draft of his departure. I watch the taillights shrink down the long driveway until they disappear around the bend, and then I’m standing alone in the amber circle of a porchlight he installed,in front of a house he rebuilt, wearing the quiet certainty that he meant what he said.
He’ll be right back.
And it almost seems like literally because less than a minute after his brake lights disappear from view, a set of headlights comes up the way. Except it’s not Saylor’s truck.
It takes a moment for my brain to register Janet Lundy’s vehicle. “Oh God,” I mutter to myself. “Of course right now.”
