I didn't know what I was doing here.
Except…
That was a lie. I knew exactly what I was doing. But naming it felt dangerous, like staring too hard at a shadow and watching it disappear. I kept my eyes on the path and didn't ask questions I wasn't ready to answer.
Standing there in the April sun, I realized these last few months had more weight to them than the previous twelve years put together. I’d spent a decade moving from one rig to the next, but now I was a man who’d miss a kid pointing out a cat on a wall if she ever stopped doing it. I’d gotten used to the noise of her. The scuff of her shoes, the cartoons, the sound of someone else just being in the house. It had changed things.
And Maddie.
Maddie laughing. Maddie at the kitchen table at four in the morning, her hands around a mug. Maddie in the supermarket, explaining school lunches like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I could have had this. Some version of it. Not this exactly—not Lily, not Clear Creek again, or even Cedar Falls—but the part with Maddie in it. That version of a life had been right there twelve years ago, and I’d stood outside a bar and traded it for nothing.
I'd been afraid. That was the simple version of it. Afraid I was my father's son after all, afraid she was going somewhere I couldn't follow, afraid of the distance between who I was and who she deserved. I took that fear and turned it into an excuse, then I walked into that bar and made sure the bridge was burned.
I’d been twenty-four and an idiot.
Now I was thirty-six, standing in a market on a Saturday, and I wasn't sure I was doing any better. I was still just thinking about it instead of?—
"It's going to rain," Lily said.
I looked up. She was right. The sky had turned a flat, bruised grey. The wind caught the trees at the edge of the park, and a second later, the first heavy drops hit the pavement.
Then it came down.
It wasn't a drizzle; it was a proper April downpour, sudden and loud. People scattered, stall holders throwing tarps over bread and candles. Lily made a sharp sound of indignation, and I grabbed her hand. We ran—the three of us—for the nearest cover, a bakery awning already crowded with people ducking out of the deluge.
We made it just as the world turned into a sheet of grey.
The awning was small. We were pressed in among maybe a dozen other people, all of us slightly damp, watching the rain turn the market into a different place. Lily was wedged between us, craning her neck to see through the downpour. She looked fascinated, like she was witnessing a controlled demolition. Across the path, a few stall holders were laughing as they struggled with their tarps, but a dog tied to a nearby bench was barking his head off at the sky.
"My shortbread," Lily said, peering into her paper bag.
"It's dry," I said.
She checked, gave the bag a protective squeeze, and went back to watching the flood.
I was steadying myself against the press of the crowd, but mostly I was just aware of Maddie. The awning was low, trapping the heat of everyone under it, and she was close enough that I could feel the warmth of her arm against my sleeve. She was watching the rain, one hand in her pocket, the other at her side, just a few inches from mine.
I looked at her profile. The grey light made her look younger. She had this stillness about her when she wasn't bracing for a crisis. She just looked like Maddie.
Lily said something about the dog.
I didn't hear a word of it.
I moved my hand.
Not far. Just enough. My fingers finding hers at my side, unhurried, like this was something I'd been meaning to do for along time and had finally found the moment for. I felt her go still. She just stood there, watching the rain, letting it happen.
I didn’t look at her.
She didn’t look at me.
Lily was still talking about the dog, her voice small against the sound of the storm.
Then Maddie’s fingers moved. They slid against mine and then curled around them, tight, in the quiet space between our coats.
We stood like that while the rain came down and the market dripped and the town went on around us, and I looked at the street ahead and felt something settle in my chest that had been loose for a very long time.