Page 23 of At First Dance
I don’t want to be a problem you have to solve. I’m going to give you your space back and take care of mine.
—Ivy
I read it twice. Three times. The coffee goes cold in my hand, and I don’t notice until the chill hits my skin.
She left the sweatshirt. Left the flowers in a Mason jar vase on the table, bright and defiant and already losing a petal. The bed’s made, hospital-corner neat, like a salute.
I stand there like a post somebody never got around to pounding into the ground. Then I do what I always do when the floor moves under me: I move.
Carl picks up on the second ring. “She swing by?” I ask, trying for even but tasting rust anyway.
“Car wasn’t ready, but said she’d find a way to handle it. Took an early cab into the city,” he says, oblivious to what that sentence does to me. “Bailey dropped her off. She said to tell you thanks. I told her you’re as stubborn as a mule and to text you anyway.”
“Did she?”
“Don’t reckon so,” he says gently.
I hang up and brace my hands on the worn counter like it’s the only thing that will hold me up.
“She won’t stay,” I’d said yesterday, all sharp edges and defense.
She heard me.
Of course, she did.
I look at the note again, at the careful way she avoided saying what she didn’t want me to hear: that I took something easy and made it hard, that I made myself safer by making her small. The kind of math I swore I didn’t do.
The sun pushes through the east window and lands on the folded sweatshirt like a spotlight. I pick it up, press my thumb to the collar where her perfume still clings, and feel something in me shift off its bolt.
I’m not going to chase her yet—not to punish or perform or prove some point to my dad. But I’m not going to let her think that sentence I threw like a shield is the truest thing I have.
I set the sweatshirt on the back of a chair she dragged close to the window because she liked to sit there and watch the field wake up. I rinse the Mason jar and change the water on the sunflowers because that’s what you do when you’re holding something that wilts without care.
Then I do the only thing I know how to do with my hands when my head is a fight: I go to work. And every task I pick up, every board I straighten, and every bucket I fill turns into a quiet plan for how I’m going to fix the thing I broke without asking for it to be easy.
She won’t stay, I’d said.
Not like that, no.
But if she comes back, it won’t be because I made the world smaller to keep myself from being hurt. It’ll be because I learned how to make room.
Chapter Four – Ivy
Bailey’s headlights sweep across the cottage wall like a tide I can’t hold back. It’s not even five—birds haven’t decided whose turn it is to sing—and the farm is holding its breath. I slip the note onto the arm of the couch, swallow around the lump that doesn’t want to be swallowed, and ease the door shut behind me.
Bailey’s idling by the oaks, hair in a messy bun, sweatshirt zipped to her chin. When I climb in, she studies my face and doesn’t ask a single question I’m not ready to answer.
“You sure?” she says instead, voice soft enough not to wake the trees.
“No,” I admit, buckling in. “But if I wait until I’m sure, I’ll never go.”
She nods like she understands the language of flight, then pulls onto the lane, keeping the truck lights low until we hit the road.
“Colson’s?” she asks.
“Yeah. I want to tell Carl in person.”
The town is still blue with almost morning when we roll into the gravel lot. The bay door is half up, light pooling on concrete, and Carl’s already there with a thermos and a grease rag tucked in his back pocket. Of course, he is.
