Caro fell asleep first. Rosemarie and Kasey took the bottle of wine outside to continue their conversation, and Rosemarie told her how she peeked at Trey’s texts on Caroline’s phone. She talked about Caro mentioning that he could stay mad for days over the littlest thing. Kasey talked about how it bugged her that she didn’t know more about Trey. The longest amount of time she’d spent with him was those fifteen minutes he was out on the dance floor with them at prom. She hadn’t laid eyes on him since she’d been back in town.
Kasey had no place questioning Caroline’s marriage or what Trey was like. Kasey had kept so much from everyone she had no choice but to believe that everyone had a right to their secrets. She hated when the girls got pushy with her, so she wasn’t going to get pushy with Caro.
At least, not yet.
Rosemarie said she was only allowing herself to worry about Caro quietly for now, and Kasey said that was what she’d do too. They finished the rest of the wine by candlelight, sitting on the side of the pool with their feet glowing in the water.
*
It was the middle of Taylor’s wedding week when Kasey finally worked up the nerve to go to the farmhouse. She hadn’t been there since the night she graduated from high school, the night of the big party they threw in Ada’s backyard. She called Devon from the car. She had the windows down and was wearing her dad’s old, threadbare Gremlins T-shirt with her cutoffs. She’d been leaning into her Goldie wardrobe all week—humid, Southern summer and nostalgia.
“I hate thinking you’re doing this alone. I know you’re getting tired of hearing it from me. Am I getting on your nerves?” Devon asked with the same plunge of tenderness in his voice he always had when he was being patient with her. She pictured the face she knew he was making—his amber eyes, his rosy bottom lip in a straight line. He was by far the prettiest man she’d ever dated, somehow both pretty and handsome. Leonine. She’d been attracted to him immediately, leaving no wondering on that front. After discovering that he was intensely smart and kind too and that their personalities coalesced, staying together had been so easy. Staying together forever and dreaming of buying a brownstone in Brooklyn one day and having kids and making French toast on Saturday mornings in a Nancy Meyers–esque kitchen made the most sense.
“No, no,” Kasey lied. “You’re being very sweet and it’s not like I want to do this alone, Dev. I have to do this alone.” She let him know （again） that she could ask any one of her girlfriends to come with her and they’d do it in an instant.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you too.” Her blood tingled cool when she made the last turn before the farmhouse driveway. She timed it so she would get there while the sun was up, get inside before it went down. She told Rosemarie, Ada, and Caro where she was going and left them chatting at the table at Plum Eats, where they’d eaten dinner together.
“I saw a Shih Tzu on my walk home this afternoon. Black and white. He was barking at the pigeons, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it,” Devon said with his gentle heh heh of a laugh that Kasey loved so much.
“After I left Caro’s this morning, I got to hang with Rosemarie’s dog, Basie, at her place with my second cup of coffee.”
“Kasey and Basie. Cute.”
“I know, right? I’ll send you a pic of her. She’s so adorable it almost makes me want to get a puppy. Almost,” Kasey said.
“Let’s get a puppy the day we get back from our honeymoon. Seriously.”
“Deal.” The wedding was a year away; getting a dog then sounded lovely.
Kasey stopped the car at the end of the driveway. She didn’t want to be on the phone when she drove the last quarter mile up to the house.
“I love you, Kase. FaceTime later and let me know how everything goes?” Devon said.
Yesterday morning they’d FaceTimed. She told him a lot of things, but nothing about Silas. Before she’d left the city, Devon had asked if there was an ex-boyfriend in Goldie he should be worried about. He’d said it tongue in cheek because Devon wasn’t a jealous man. He was confident and coolheaded and he’d proven he could handle her and her emotions, even the sloppiest ones.
So why wasn’t she telling him about Silas?
Was there anything to tell?
She could tell Devon she felt like she had the stomach flu when Silas said hey to her. That she felt like she had a high fever when he picked her up and hugged her. That the room tilted when they were at Duke’s later that night and Silas handed her a fizzy Bellini because when they were in high school, she’d told him when she was grown-up, she wanted to be the kind of woman who drank Bellinis with her girlfriends and wore expensive heels and lived in New York. That her mouth dried out when he said goodbye to her at the end of the night. How he’d said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Fritz? Promise you won’t disappear? I couldn’t handle it. I thought I was going to die last time. I’m serious. I thought I’d legit die of a broken heart when you left. I thought I did something wrong or that I hurt you somehow, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t eat for, like, a month.” He was confessing because he was drunk at that point and so was she. He’d told her some of those things in a few emails they sent back and forth fifteen years ago after she left. He said some of it on the phone the handful of times they’d talked. But then Kasey stopped writing; Kasey stopped answering the phone. She forced herself to stop thinking about Goldie and him too.
They both moved on.
“Yes. I will. I love you too,” she said to Devon, careful not to let her voice crack.
“Promise you’ll let me know immediately if you need me? I’ll hop on a plane so fast—”
“I promise, Devon. Thank you.”
Kasey had been working with a Realtor friend of Holly Plum’s for the past year to rent the farmhouse out from time to time. As her car’s tires rolled over the gravel of the driveway, she imagined a family renting it in July—grilling hamburgers and corn, filling an inflatable pool with cool water for their kids. She pictured little ones catching lightning bugs in mason jars and their parents drinking sweet tea on the porch. Maybe they’d bring their boat or a pair of Jet Skis, or big black rubber tubes for floating away on lazy days.
Her daddy had been smart enough to set the house catty-corner on the land so it caught the best light, and if she squinted, she could see the Castelow lake house and acreage sprawling through the trees on the other side of the water. Her mom could’ve made good money if she’d sold the farmhouse, and she could’ve worked less, but she said she’d never sell it. The house meant so much to them because it felt like the thump of her daddy’s heart was still knocking inside of it.
He’d made that house and he’d loved that house, so no, Kasey wasn’t going to sell it now that it was hers. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it. For as adult as she’d felt for practically her entire life, and for as long as she’d been living on her own and taking care of herself, being responsible for a whole-ass house felt a smidge too grown-up for her liking. She found herself more angry than sad as she pulled up and turned the car off, yanked the emergency brake.