Luka huffs a laugh and goes quiet. Another gust of wind rolls over the field and all the branches lift and dance. It’ll be harder not to think of Evie this time, but it’ll pass. Maybe in a month or two I won’t see her in every damn corner of this place. I just need—I need to remember how to be on my own, I think. Me and the cats.
And that damn duck I said I wasn’t going to adopt.
“I almost told her.” Luka considers the ground with a frown, relenting after a lengthy pause and sitting in the dirt across from me. He rummages around in his sweatshirt pocket and emerges with his fist clenched around a roll of cookies. He opens it with his teeth and offers me one. “Way back,” he explains. “At the start. I almost told her how I felt.”
I begrudgingly take a cookie. Another when I realize they’re chocolate hazelnut and Luka intends to launch into his best encouraging speech despite my protest. “Could have saved yourself about seven years, I bet.”
“Could have,” Luka agrees. “She was getting out of a cab in the city. I was waiting for her on the curb and she sort of—she got stuck, I think. Getting out of the car. Her bag or something was twisted around the seat belt. She tried to step out of the cab and her bag yanked her right back in. She laughed so hard she snorted.” He smiles at the memory, his eyes a little bit glassy. “She was so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. My heart felt like it was right here.” He taps his throat and then between his eyes. Pops out a cookie and shoves it in his mouth.
“Why didn’t you? Say anything?” I’m annoyed with myself for asking.
He shrugs. “Because we had a good thing going and I didn’t want to rock the boat with a difficult conversation.” His brown eyes narrow on me and he bites into a cookie so hard it snaps in two. “Does that sound familiar?” he asks around a mouthful.
It does. I’m not going to argue with him about the particulars. I’ve actively avoided having a conversation with Evelyn. Absolutely. Sure, some of it has been fear. But a big part—the biggest part—has been—
“I don’t want to tie her here,” I confess with a deep, heaving sigh. “I don’t want her to feel obligated.” To my feelings. To me.
“You think she would?” A little line appears between Luka’s brows.
Maybe. I sigh and rub the palm of my hand across my forehead. “What the hell is the point of being honest with her if she’s just going to leave anyway?” That’s the heart of it. It all comes down to me fumbling my way around a tiny bed and breakfast in the late summer heat, looking for scraps of her affection. Why the hell would I crack myself open just for her to look at everything inside and decide it’s not enough? So I can feel this same twist in my gut every time she leaves without a word? Continue to lose pieces of myself until I’m a collection of ragged edges? No, thank you. “She already left. She’s left three times now.”
“Phones exist, you know. You could call her.”
I take another long drink from my coffee mug. If Stella is watching us on the cameras right now, she’s probably wondering why the hell her boyfriend and her lead farmer are having a picnic in a field full of holes.
At 4:18 in the morning.
“I tried calling her,” I explain. While sitting on the edge of my bed with a wilting blue flower in the palm of my hand. I dialed her number three times and listened to a generic voicemail message. I typed out seven different text messages before I settled on a simple Where did you go? I wanted to send another. Why did you go? “She didn’t answer.”
“That’s it? You’re gonna give up? Relationship over?” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
I’m a realistic man. I know where I belong, and where I don’t. I set my expectations and act accordingly. Going around with fanciful ideas in my head about things I can’t have has never served me well.
This thing with Evie—it isn’t any different.
My empty house is proof of that.
“Listen, man,” I blow out a breath and some of the coffee from my mug spills over the edge and drips over my knuckles. I ignore it. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do and I—I know I said I didn’t need the pep talk, but it was—” I tilt my head back and forth. “It was fine.”
Luka sputters out a laugh and I push to standing, an ache in my back and in the center of my chest. I rub my palm there and hand Luka my empty mug, grab the handle of my shovel and squint out at the fields. I have over a hundred trees left to plant, and it looks like rain. The anticipation of it hangs heavy in the sky, clouds thick over a blanket of stars. It occurs to me that it’s rained every time Evelyn has left, and it almost makes me laugh.
Even the sky is sad to see her go. Weather to match my mood.
Luka stands with a grumble and drops both mugs into the wheelbarrow with a clang. His sleeve of cookies, too. He grabs the extra shovel I brought and stares at me with both eyebrows raised, a determined clench to his jaw. “I have one more thing to say to you.”
“Alright.” I glance longingly at the too-deep hole and wonder if I’ll fit inside.
Luka squares his shoulders. “I don’t think you should give up. Not yet. I don’t know where she is, but I’ve seen the two of you together. I’ve seen the way she looks at you. And Beckett … When have you ever given up on anything? You built tiny tents over saplings to protect them from the rain last winter. You monitored soil saturation levels in the middle of a hurricane. You showed up for Stella when she first had the idea for this place.” His voice cracks at the edges. “You walked away from a secure job with good pay to help her get on her feet here, with no guarantee. You adopted a duck—”
“—I didn’t adopt the duck—”
“—you adopted a duck you found in the barn. Four cats, too. You smuggle in cookies because you’re afraid of hurting Layla’s feelings. And I know you were the one who drove two states up the coast to get her the fancy butter she wanted when all the local suppliers were giving her the cold shoulder. You aren’t a guy who gives up, and you aren’t a guy who doesn’t care. So please stop pretending you’re either of those things.”
I stare at Luka. He stares at me. I clear my throat. “That was, uh. That was more than one thing.”
“It was,” he says, winded and worked up. His cheeks are red, his mouth set in a firm line. He shifts on his feet and points at the marked spots in the field with the blade of the shovel. He stabs at the air with it once. “I’m going to go dig some holes now.”
“That’s fine.”
I think he expected me to fight him on it. I’m still a little shell shocked from his speech. Those piano strings in my chest vibrate under the strain, all of my notes out of tune.
“You remember what you said to me when I showed up at your house? After that fight with Stella?”
Right before they got together, Luka appeared on my doorstep, his sweatshirt on inside out and a look on his face like someone stole all of his cookies and his last slice of pizza, too. He sat on my couch wrapped in three blankets and stared blankly into my fireplace for close to five hours. I just need a second, he had said. Just a few minutes.