Page 67 of Chasing the Other Woman

“I don’t know when I will be.”

"Understood."

Someone behind us calls for more tarps around the corner. Life keeps moving in all its rude, practical ways.

Brooks doesn’t ask me to come home.

He doesn’t ask me to make this easier for him.

He just stands there with his hands at his sides, giving me the one thing I asked for too late and needed all along.

A choice.

And for the first time in two years, I wonder if he might actually understand what that means.

Sixteen

BROOKS

Sam’s question stays with me long after she walks away.

Not the part about fear, though God knows that one's sticking, too. Not the part about another pregnancy someday, which scares the hell out of me and makes me stupidly hopeful all at once.

It’s the bracelet.

Do you get angry again and remove another bracelet I've given you to punish me?

The words hit me too late.

At the time, there was just too much to sort through. Tony’s confession. Luci’s part in it. Sam’s face when I admitted I’d wanted to hurt her at the clinic. Her voice when she said I broke her heart. All of it came at once, too fast and too sharp for one man to sort through while standing still.

But now I’m sitting in my truck outside The Funnel Cloud with my hand wrapped around the steering wheel, and all I can think is that Sam believed I took off that bracelet to punish her.

I look toward the bar.

Through the front windows, I can see movement. Petra behind the bar. A lineman carrying a stack of folded tarps. A few locals sitting close together with paper plates and plastic cups. The town is still bruised from the storm, but it’s up and moving.

Sam is in there somewhere.

I don’t go back in.

I don’t text her. I don’t call. I don’t tell her where I’m going, because this isn’t something I’m doing to make her look at me.

The engine turns over with a rough rumble. My left arm protests when I shift into reverse, the healing injury pulling tight beneath my sleeve.

I drive.

The roads out of Muncie are still littered in places. Broken branches shoved to the shoulder. A stop sign bent almost flat. A strip of sheet metal caught in a barbed-wire fence, flashing dull silver when my headlights hit it. The sky over the Panhandle is clear tonight, all that violence gone somewhere else, leaving regular people to clean up after it.

I’ve made a career out of chasing storms. Naming them, tracking them, getting close enough for the footage, the science, and the rush.

The storm that did the worst damage to my life never had a name.

By the time I pull into our driveway, my back is stiff and my eyes burn from the drive. The house sits dark except for the motion light over the garage. It snaps on when I step out, bright and accusing.

Sam always hated that light. Said it made her feel like she was about to be told to put her hands up and the cops were going to come out of the bushes.

The memory almost makes me smile. Almost.