Page 207 of That Rush

The words land like stones, each one a fact I can’t dispute. “I was making room for her,” I say, the excuse sounding thin even to me.

Adrienne opens the paper bag and hands Axel a breakfast sandwich. “If I brought you a contract selling the south acreage and told you Dad had already decided it was best for the family, would you sign it?”

“Of course not.”

“Even if Dad had good reasons?”

“He doesn’t get to sell land I own without asking me.”

Her eyebrows lift, and the silence that follows is the real argument.

“So our relationship is a land deal now?”

“I’m comparing consent. You’d demand the terms, the timeline, and a chance to negotiate. You’d be furious that anyone assumed your agreement because they loved you and believed the plan was good.”

“She could’ve told me what she wanted.”

“Maybe she was still deciding,” Axel says.

“We’ve had months.”

“To fall in love with you,” he replies. “That doesn’t mean she spent those months deciding which furniture to move.”

Adrienne starts to hand me the second sandwich, then puts it back in the bag. “Paige may have been wrong about some of it. The question you asked might not be the one she answered.”

They leave it there. Axel starts loosening the old hinge bolts while Adrienne sorts the pages Dad sent across the tailgate. Neither of them offers a solution, which means I have nothing to argue against.

I pick up the wrench and crouch beside the gate.

Paige told me she wanted more of the life we already had. I heard a limit and demanded a promise that matched the future I had already pictured.

The key. The closet. Thanksgiving. The room at the ranch. I treated each one like proof that I was building something for us.

I never asked Paige to design the future with me.

That afternoon, the office door opens on the first pull.

I repaired the swollen frame two weeks ago. New pine flooring runs beneath my boots, the outlets work, and the afternoon light comes through glass I cleaned because Paige deserved the mountain view without years of ranch dust across it.

I carry the drill to the far wall and set the bit against the first screw.

Either I finish this room or I take the shelves down. Leaving it suspended between both choices is a perfect mirror of my life.

The framework stretches almost to the ceiling. I secured three shelves beneath the window, including the lower one I measured for Josie. I planned another wall for fiction, a desk for Paige, a chair wide enough for her to curl into, and enough children’s books to keep Josie beside her whenever Paige wanted company.

I put her name on the library while I planned how my family would use it.

The drill is set to reverse. My finger rests on the trigger, but I don’t pull it.

I can still see Paige standing in the dust, sunlight in her hair as she spread her arms and filled this room with her words: shelves, a reading chair, a desk beneath the window. She loved the light, the view, the quiet. She loved the door she could close.

All I saw was the twenty yards between this building and my house. She imagined a place to be herself; I saw a place to keep her. My hand drops from the drill.

When I started the repairs, I told myself I was listening. Paige wanted solitude, so I built it close enough that she could step away without ever leaving my reach. She wanted a door, so I gave her one while assuming I knew which side she would call home. She said she would choose Fridays, and I turned that choice into every Friday that followed.

The same thinking shaped the key, the drawer, the empty hangers, Thanksgiving, and riding lessons she never asked for.

Each decision felt like love because structure is how I take care of people. I fix the broken thing, make the plan, and prepare for whatever comes next. If Paige had a place in my house, my family, and every month on the calendar, I could stop wondering whether she would choose me later.