She was coming home.
I knew what I was going to say when she did.
I went inside to make room in the refrigerator for eggs.
TWELVE
Daniela
Most women in my position just would've been excited.
Excited for the table read, for meeting all these people…being introduced to the A-lister playing opposite me.
The romantic leads. The glitz and glamor.
And the whole time, I was just thinking about Sawyer Holt.
Every word at the table read, he was on my mind…every confession, him.
Every love scene on the page, his hands.
I was losing my mind.
The table read had been in a converted warehouse space in East Austin, all exposed brick and good lighting and the nervous energy of twenty people who'd never been in a room together pretending they had. Ellis at the head of the table in her boots, cigarette tucked behind one ear, watching everyone with those flat assessing eyes. The DP on her left. Mark right behind me, vibrating at a frequency only I could detect.
The cast was extraordinary. I knew that objectively. The A-lister playing opposite me—Anderson Reeves, two Oscar nominations, the kind of face that belonged on a billboard and knew it—had shaken my hand and smiled and said he'd been looking forward to this, and I'd smiled back and meant it andthen spent the next four hours thinking about a man in a trailer three hours from here who made my eggs the way I liked them without ever being asked.
I was in serious trouble.
The Far Meridian was a good script. A great one, actually—the kind Ellis made, where the love story was load-bearing rather than decorative and every scene had two things happening at once. My character, Rose, was a woman coming back to a place she'd left and finding out she'd left something behind she hadn't meant to. I'd read it three times before the table read and cried twice and told Mark it was the best thing that had landed on my desk and meant every word.
I just hadn't expected it to hit quite this close.
Some things don't wait for you to be ready, Rose said, on page forty-seven.They just become true while you're not looking.
After, there had been dinner—long table, good wine, people more important and more famous than me talking about things way above my pay grade. Daniel had been charming and easy and genuinely funny, which I hadn't expected and appreciated. The director of photography, a woman named Rue who'd shot Ellis's last two films, had leaned across the table and told me she'd watched Devil's River twice after Ellis sent her my reel and I'd felt the compliment tingle at the back of my neck.
This was everything I'd wanted. I knew that. I could feel it—the rightness of the room, the script, the people, all of it snapping into place the way good things did when the timing was finally right.
And I'd still gone back to my hotel room alone and lain there staring at the ceiling thinking about Sawyer's voice.
I left at five-thirty in the morning, the second I could reasonably go.
Couldn't sleep anyway. I'd been awake since four, staring at the ceiling of a perfectly nice hotel room that had everything a person could want and none of the things I actually did, and at some point I'd stopped pretending and just got up and got dressed in the dark.
The drive out of Austin was empty and grey, the city still mostly asleep, the highway opening up fast once I cleared the last of the suburbs. Hill Country in the early morning was something else—the sky going from black to a deep bruised blue, the cedar and limestone just shapes in the dark, the road cutting through it like it had always been there and always would be. I had the heat up and both hands on the wheel and a gas station coffee that was terrible and I didn't care even slightly.
I made it in two and a half hours.
The gate to Holt Creek was pale in the headlights and then I was through it and on the ranch road, the familiar ruts, the cedar pressing in on both sides. The main house lights were on—Peggy, probably, or Gage, who kept rancher's hours whether he needed to or not. The paddock fence materialized out of the dark and then the trailer, the small light on inside, warm and particular, the same light I'd seen from across a field in December and felt something shift in my chest.
He was at the picnic table.
Two mugs. His hands around one of them, his breath making small clouds in the cold. He wasn't looking at his phone. He was just sitting there in the dark, waiting, the way he did everything—like he had all the time in the world and none of it was wasted.
I pulled up and cut the engine and sat there for a second.
Looked at Sawyer. Watched as Bishop moseyed across the paddock to lean against the fence, like he'd been waiting too.
