I haven't handed that part of myself to anyone since. Until a red dress walked into my brother's club and I forgot to be careful.
Bianca comes out to the workshop that evening with two beers and that look on her face. The talking look. I've watched a hundred women wind up to a talking look and I have never wanted to outrun one this bad.
"Hey," she says. "Can we talk about something."
"Working."
"You're sanding a thing that's already smooth." She sets a beer down by my hand. "Kieran. Look at me."
I look at her. And the wanting is so big in my chest it scares the air out of me.
"I've been thinking," she says, careful, picking her way through it. "About after. About maybe not making it a hard line. There's a commercial space down on Birch that's been empty two years, and I keep walking past it, and I keep seeing my name on the glass." A breath. "I'm trying to tell you I don't want to leave. I want to figure out if there's a version of this that doesn't end in six days."
There it is. Everything I've wanted laid out plain on a workbench, and all I can feel is the floor tilting.
Because here's what I know. People say they'll stay. They mean it when they say it, the way Vanessa meant the soft wordsat the start. Then the want fades or the city calls or they decide the quiet man on the mountain was a fun summer and not a life, and you're the one left holding a house you built for two. I gave the last woman the keys to the realest part of me and she rearranged the furniture to make me feel insane. I'm not handing those keys to a woman who's got a realtor on speed dial and boxes in her cabin.
Better to end it standing up than get left on my knees in six days.
"That's the fear talking," I say. "You're two weeks off a kitchen that gutted you. You don't want me. You want somewhere soft to land before you figure out your next move."
Her face changes. "That's not what this is and you know it."
"I know you're leaving. You've known it since the bar. Don't rewrite the deal now because the sex got good and the mountain's pretty in July."
"The sex." She sets her beer down too hard. "You think that's what this has been?"
"I think you told me you don't lie about what you want." I keep my voice flat, even, the same voice I use to talk a panicked hiker down a ledge, and I use it now to push the only good thing I've had in years off a cliff. "So want this. A month. You leave Sunday. That was always the shape of it."
"Look at me and say you don't feel this."
I don't say it. Can't. So I say the worse thing instead.
"What I feel doesn't change the math. You're gone Sunday either way. Let's not make it ugly."
The hurt that crosses her face is the kind I'll be seeing on the backs of my eyelids for a long time. She nods, slow, gathering herself.
"Wow." Her laugh has no humor in it. "You really are good. You almost had me believing a man could hold me like you do and not mean a single piece of it."
"Bianca."
"No. You don't get to say it soft now." She backs toward the door. "I told you the truth in this room. All of it. You asked me for that and I gave it to you, and the second I gave you the real thing you decided it was safer to call me a liar." Her voice cracks once and she nails it back down. "I'm not your ex. But you've already decided I am, so there's nothing for me to do here."
She walks out. Bear whines at the door. The tires go down the drive, and I stand in my workshop with a beer I won't drink and a board I'll never use, and I tell myself this is the smart play.
I was right. People leave. She had a realtor and a Denver and an exit before she ever had me. I just beat her to the door, which is the only kind of winning a man like me gets.
It feels like winning for about four minutes.
Then the quiet comes back, the quiet I built my whole life around, and for the first time it doesn't feel like peace. It feels like the inside of a box somebody nailed shut from the outside. The workshop still smells like her cooking from this morning. Her toothbrush is in my bathroom. There's a drawer that's hers and a side of the bed that's hers and a dog at the door waiting for a woman who's halfway down the mountain by now.
I made her into Vanessa so I wouldn't have to risk her being something else. Took the one woman who handed me the truth with both hands and called it a lie to my own face, because a lie I could survive and the truth might've cost me everything.
She's right. I beat her to the door.
I just didn't think it'd feel like locking myself in.
Bishop calls an hour later, because Declan saw the rental tear out of town and the Shaw brothers gossip worse than a quilting circle.
