Page 39 of Omega’s Fold

I put my mouth there.

He breathes out long and slow. I feel it leave him. Whatever he’d been carrying when he walked into the bathroom — the thirty hours before it, the year before it, whatever else — goes out on that breath. His hand on my chest goes heavier. His body against mine is, for the first time since I met him, not braced against anything.

I hold him.

“Don’t,” he says, into the quiet.

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Good.”

The sun finds its gap. A square of it comes in through the window and lands on the quilt, and I see properly for the first time what the quilt is — worked squares of different fabrics, one a faded plaid that I recognize from a shirt on the back of the chair, another a soft washed yellow that looks like it used to be a baby blanket, the stitching on one square crooked where someone’s learned on the job.

He feels me looking.

“My mother made it,” he says.

I make a listening noise, not wanting to interrupt. He’s actually talking to me. I don’t want to risk breaking the spell.

“She didn’t sew. She had a friend in town teach her one winter. This was the only one she finished. She used to say it was the only one she was ever going to finish and she was going to get her money’s worth out of it.”

“It’s a good quilt.”

“Mm.”

There’s a beat.

“She grew up here,” he says.

“In this house?”

“On this land. The house is newer. She was born in the one that used to stand where the barn is. She used to walk me out to the west pasture when I was a kid and tell me which cottonwoods were there when she was small. There’s one with a split in it from lightning and she used to hide in the split when she was six.”

I don’t say anything. I turn my head a little so my cheek is against the top of his hair.

“She took on a second mortgage,” he says. “When she got sick. I didn’t know. She didn’t want me to. She thought she’d pay it down once she was back on her feet. She didn’t get back on her feet.”

“Wyatt.”

“It’s okay. I’m — this isn’t — I’m telling you.”

“Tell me.”

He breathes. His hand on my chest goes still and settles.

“I’ve been running at the edge since I took it over,” he says. “Cattle. The boys. The payments. I can make the payments when things are normal. I was making them. Last winter was bad but I was making them.” He pauses. “Then the water.”

“The water.”

“Our aquifer runs under the ridge and south under the pasture. We have a right to draw on it. Everyone out here does. If Linden’s project goes in, the drawdown from the development radius is going to pull the water table low enough that our well goes intermittent in the dry months. I won’t be able to run cattle on the south pasture. I won’t be able to make the payments. And I’ll lose the place.”

I’ve gone very still.

The last thing I want to hear in this room is the word Linden. It’s not my fault who I work for. I don’t even think it’s my fault that Wyatt doesn’t know. What possible reason would I have to tell him? Not when I’m leaving in a week.

Right now, I don’t want to leave. I feel perfect just where I am and suddenly, keeping this secret feels like a betrayal.

I have the span of a breath to say so.