My Own People Betrayed Me at My Engagement Barbecue, So I Took the Hill Back novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Spare Room

Cade cleans the gravel from her foot and sets the terms, and at two in the morning she crosses the hall to his open door.

The Hartmann place sat a mile past the creek, a limestone farmhouse with a tin roof and one lamp burning in the kitchen.

Cade carried me from the truck to the door without asking.

I let him, because my foot was bleeding on his floorboards and I was too tired to be proud.

He sat me on the kitchen counter beside the sink and ran the tap.

"Left foot," he said. "Give it here."

I lifted it.

His palm cupped my heel, and the whole foot disappeared in his hand.

He washed it under the faucet, slowly, with his thumb pressing along the arch to find the cuts.

Cold water ran over my ankle and down the drain.

"Gravel in two places," he said. "I'll pull it. This will sting."

"I've been stung before," I said.

"Not by me."

He found tweezers in a drawer full of syringes and vet wrap.

He worked the grit out of my arch one piece at a time, with his head bent low over my foot.

I watched the gray in his hair at the temple.

He smelled of horse and soap and the inside of his truck.

I had spent July, August and September not looking at him across the barn lot.

I was looking at him now, in a bright kitchen, from four feet away.

"You're not going to ask what happened," I said.

"I was parked at the gate." He did not look up. "I heard most of it from the accordion player."

"Then you know I could throw them all out tomorrow."

"I know the ranch is yours." He swabbed the cuts with iodine. "Throw them out."

"Britta is twenty-five and five months pregnant, and my aunt is a widow who sings in the church choir."

My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"If I put them on the road, the whole county remembers it until I die."

"Hilde knows that. She said it on purpose, with a microphone."

Cade looked up at me.

His eyes were brown and very tired.

"So you walked out instead," he said.

"So I made her explain to everyone why the heiress left her own party. Let them wonder."

"That's a long game for a woman with one shoe."

"I have two shoes," I said. "They're in the road."

The corner of his mouth moved.

He taped a gauze pad over the arch and pressed his thumb flat along the edge to seal it.

His hand shook.

It was a small shake, only in the thumb, and he stopped it at once by closing his fist around my ankle.

I noticed it. I told myself it was the iodine.

"Terms," he said, and let go of my foot. "Since you're renting."

"Go on," I said.

"The spare room is the one with the iron bed, at the end of the hall."

"All right."

"My door stays open at night," he said. "I'm on call, and the phone carries better."

"All right," I said again.

"You pay no rent. I cook breakfast and you cook nothing."

"I can cook."

"I'm sure you can." He set the tweezers down. "Nothing in this house happens unless you start it."

"Not a hand, not a look. You say when, or you don't."

"And if I never say when?" I asked.

"Then I've got a roommate for six months and a good horse doctor's reputation."

I thought about the hands that had closed around my waist at the gate.

I thought about them for longer than was polite.

"Where is your father?" I asked.

The tap dripped once in the sink.

"Amos wasn't at the barbecue," I said. "He has never missed a Wiedenfeld party in his life."

"I couldn't tell you where Daddy is."

His voice stayed level.

"He hasn't called me in eighteen years. I see him at my mother's grave once a year, and we nod."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. I left. He never forgave a man for leaving."

He picked me up off the counter again, one arm under my knees.

He carried me down the hall to the iron bed in the spare room.

He put a quilt over me without looking at anything below my chin.

"Good night, Miss Wiedenfeld."

"Tilly," I said. "Everybody on the hill calls me Tilly."

"Good night, Tilly."

He left the door open.

I lay in the dark and listened to him move around the kitchen, washing up, turning off the lamp.

In April I had stood at my father's grave on the hill with four hundred people.

I had looked for this man across every row.

He had not come.

He had not called, or written, or sent flowers.

I had never said a word about it to anyone.

I lay there with my foot throbbing and the whole day sitting on my chest.

His bed creaked down the hall.

Then it was quiet, and the quiet went on for hours.

At two in the morning I put my feet on the floor.

The gauze pulled on my arch, and I did not care.

I walked down the hall in my mother's dress, past the empty kitchen, to the door he had left open.

He was lying on top of the covers in the moonlight with his boots off and one forearm over his eyes.

He was awake.

He had been awake the whole time.

"Cade," I said.

He lowered his arm.

"I'm starting it."

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