Calum had to get away. He had to get away from the phone, had to outrun the voice still ringing in his ears. He had to escape the reality suffocating him.
The trailer stood tall, proud, before him, and he grabbed up a sledgehammer Charles had left behind. Glass exploded inward with the first swing, and Calum moved on to the next. Each impact drove another spike through his chest, but he didn’t stop. Not until every last window was shattered. It fits, he thought. It looked exactly like he imagined his mind, his heart, did with the pain.
“That was a fool thing to do.”
Calum shrugged and let the sledgehammer thunk to the ground. Charles tucked his hands in his pockets and stared at his nephew without speaking. Calum’s lungs burned as he inhaled, exhaled, rapidly and shakily. The world spun around him; he buried his hands in his hair and squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them, Charles was closer, holding out his pack of cigarettes.
Calum took one.
The two stood together in silence, smoking and ignoring the tears slithering their way down Calum’s cheeks. His hands shook, and he clenched them into fists. Anything to stop the trembling, anything to hide the weakness.
“She’s gone,” he whispered, the husk of his voice breaking the quiet.
Charles’s hand landed on Calum’s shoulder; his grip was tight, and Calum desperately searched for comfort in it. Unfortunately, he could feel nothing except the void expanding beneath his ribs.
Rett gave up on them, and Calum was left broken for it.
seventeen
Rett
“Then please, can you just sign the papers so we can be divorced?”
THE GARAGE FALLS SILENT. Even the large fans circulating hot air seem quieter. Rett swallows against the tightening in her throat. Calum’s dark eyes flick from face to face around them, then he straightens and sets aside his wrench. Without looking at her, he wipes his hands on a rag from the top drawer of his toolbox. She ignores the eerie quiet that’s broken only by him shouting that he’s taking a break.
With that, he strides through and then out of the building. She follows silently. He leads her to the side of the building and leans against the rusting sheet of metal behind him. Rett takes in all the differences the years have brought. There aren’t many.
His eyes are still the same rich brown, and his black hair flops over his brows as it always had before. His thin lips are as chapped as ever. She remembers all the times she pinned him down and forced lip balm onto him. He complained about the taste of cherry then kissed her, anyway.
Their relationship had been so carefree.
“Didn’t expect this today,” he finally says, digging in the pocket of his jumpsuit for the familiar box. Though his voice is flippant, his body stays taut. He’s rattled, and they both know it.
“And I never expected you to not sign the papers.” Blowing out a breath, Rett wipes a hand over her face then hesitates. “Why didn’t you?”
“’Cause I wasn’t ready to let you go.”
Rett’s hands start to tremble, so she tucks them into her pockets again. Nothing, however, can stop the heat flooding her cheeks or the tips of her ears. Nothing quells the swoop in her gut. Calum chuckles as he lights a cigarette—he knows he’s gotten to her.
Rett aches to travel in time. Go back to eighteen and never marry him. If she’d known then that this would be her life, that she would be standing before him at twenty-five with another man’s ring on her finger, begging him for a divorce… She never would have made such a mistake.
“You’ve had six years to get over it,” she says while moving out of the path of the steady stream of smoke.
“Yeah, well, I tried. Guess it just never took.”
Rett stomps a foot, gritting her teeth against the vibrations racing up her leg from the impact. She doesn’t care that it makes her look like a petulant child. She wasn’t the one acting like one. “Why are you being so dang difficult?”
“Why did you give up so easily?” he asks suddenly. His voice has grown serious, nearly pleading, but he doesn’t meet her eye.“We could’ve had something great, Rett, wedid, but you… You gave up.”
“Why do this, Calum? This postmortem ain’t gonna help. Look. I’m getting married. Just sign the papers so I can go home. You got four days.”
“Youarehome,” he calls as she walks away, and she does her best to ignore him.
She doesn’t turn around.
She will never call Oak Creek ‘home’ again.
Unfortunately, the whole town knows about the conversation in the auto shop by dinnertime. Miss Maudie tuts and shakes her head when Rett passes by, and Miss Agatha invites her in for a cup of tea and a good cry. Rett goes for the tea, but the crying never happens. Why would it? She’d come to terms long ago with the fact her marriage was over before it ever really began. After all, how much of a chance had it really had? She left for college two months after they exchanged vows in a small courtroom in front of a Justice of the Peace.
