“Don’t.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Running away before you can be told to leave.”
“I have no idea what you’re?—”
Hank held up a hand, stopping him. “You can yell at me later. Right now I’m going to say what I came here to say, and then I’m going to leave so you can do whatever fool thing you’re going to do anyway.”
“Lovely.”
“Tessa didn’t ask you to fix her life.”
He looked up sharply at his brother.
“She didn’t ask you to compete with her mother’s checkbook. She didn’t ask you to outbid a music school. She didn’t ask you to be anything other than what you’ve already been to her, which, as far as I can tell, is the first man in a long time who to show up for her and stay.”
“Hank—”
“I’m not done. Lexi’s been gone for years and you’re still letting her run your life. You need to decide who writes the rules for you. I’m just suggesting that your ex-wife shouldn’t still be calling the shots.”
Lexi wasn’t calling the shots anymore. He was the one deciding not to wreck Tessa and Makayla’s lives. Sure, he might’ve made that decision based on his experience with Lexi, but this was all him.
He opened his mouth to say so, but Hank stood up and cut him off with, “Don’t answer me. I’m going to go because you’ve got that look in your eye that tells me you’re about to be very stubborn.”
“It’s my best look.”
“It’s your worst look, bro.”
Hank paused at the door. “Tessa’s going to need you, whatever she decides. Don’t make her decide alone because you’re scared.” And with that, his brother walked out.
The workshop was cold when he opened the door.
He’d been coming out here a few nights a week ever since Arlo gave him a key to the shop. He came out after work, after dinner, sometimes staying till past midnight.
The rocking chair was on a pair of sawhorses in the middle of the room. He’d built the seat first—wide oak slats, scooped and sanded smooth, joined the way Arlo had taught him. The arms, also scooped and sanded to fit the forearm just right were finished, as was the gently curved back. He’d made every part of it with an eye to maximum comfort, sized up from Fern’s rocker to fit a slender woman Tessa’s height.
He’d shaped the rockers from a single length of maple Arlo had pulled out of a stack in the back of the shop and said, this piece has been waiting to be part of a good chair.
He finished joining the rockers, set it on the floor, and gave it a push. It rocked perfectly. No wobble. No hitch in its motion. All he had left to do was sand the whole thing to silken smoothness and rub in several coats of oil by hand.
It was a chair a woman could sit in for decades.
And he knew as sure as he knew it was a good chair that he couldn’t finish it.
He couldn’t gift it to Tessa and then watch her leave it behind. Leave him behind. Nor could he give it to her if she stayed. When he ultimately failed to provide for her and she lost the porch this chair was made for, she would grow to resent the chair as a symbol of all he’d cost her.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The skylights let in the silvery, washed-clean light of the valley after a spring storm. A patch of it fell across the rocker like the heavens were telling him to keep going. He ignored the message.
He cleaned and put away Mick’s tools, turned off the work lights, and locked the door. Arlo was on his porch in his rocking chair, watching him without comment.
Dillon raised a hand. Arlo raised one back.
He intentionally didn’t look at Tessa’s porch where a small, empty rocker sat alone, and where there was going to be—for the foreseeable future—exactly the same number of chairs as there had been when this whole thing started.
He drove home in the golden evening light and did not pick up the phone when she called. Again.
