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Then he hangs up.
I sit in my car with the phone still against my ear, though there’s no one on the other end of it now.
Love you.
He said it the way you say it to someone you’ve said it to for years. Tacked onto the end, already turning back to whatever Dottie needed in the kitchen. He didn’t pause. He didn’t brace. He didn’t wait to see how it would land.
I lower the phone into my lap, slow, and let the words run through me. He didn’t say it to make me feel anything. He said it because it’s just true now. True enough to slip out.
I put the car in reverse. For the first time I can remember, I’m not leaving somewhere. I’m driving home.
Chapter 22
Luke
I hang up, and it takes me about four seconds to hear what I said.
I’m still standing in the middle of the kitchen, phone in my hand, staring down at the screen like it might play it back for me. The call ended. Her name’s just sitting there at the top, the duration frozen underneath.
I don’t move. Dottie’s saying something about the oven. I don’t hear a word of it.
Love you.
I said it the way you say drive safe. Tacked onto the end, half of me still telling Bo to keep his hands off the rolls. It came out on its own, the way true things do when you stop guarding the door.
I could call her back. Say it again on purpose, slower, so it counts. But she’s twenty minutes out with an ugly pie belted into her passenger seat, and calling to have a whole conversation about two words feels like a good way to talk myself out of the best thing I’ve done all month.
So I don’t call.
I wait.
Which, for me, is the hard part. I fix things. I don’t sit on them. Give me a busted water heater at two in the morning and I’m fine. Give me twenty minutes and a sentence I can’t un-say and I’m a wreck in my own kitchen.
“You’re standing funny,” Dottie says. She’s got the turkey resting under foil and both hands in a bowl of potatoes, and she has never once missed a thing in her life. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve got the face you had when you backed the truck into the mailbox.”
“I told her I loved her.”
The masher stops.
Bo, at the table gluing something that is either a turkey or a hand, looks up. “You told who?”
“Olivia.”
“On the phone?” Dottie sets the bowl down. “You told that girl you love her on the phone, in the middle of Thanksgiving, like you were reminding her to grab milk?”
“It came out.”
She looks at me for a long second, and then her whole face goes soft in a way that’s almost worse than the teasing. “Well. It’s about time one of you said it out loud.”
“You think she—”
“I think you should go outside,” Dottie says, “because her car just pulled up.”
I’m out the front door before I decide to be.
