That's not what I want. Sophie, but since you came over here and you fixed my door and you made that particular joke, she stopped, breathed once. I think I've run out of comfortable ways to keep pretending. Caleb didn't speak.
He understood in a way that he couldn't have articulated, but felt very clearly that whatever Sophie was about to say had been sitting inside her for a long time. And that she was choosing right now to say it. And that he owed her the most honest silence he had to offer. I knew within about two weeks of meeting you, Sophie said.
I didn't mean for it to happen. I wasn't looking for it. After my last relationship ended, I was genuinely comfortable being alone, actually comfortable, not just telling myself I was. I had my house and my job and my routines and I wasn't sitting around waiting for someone.
She was quiet for a moment. And then you moved in next door and you straightened my fence without being asked and you showed up every time I needed help and you never once made me feel like I owed you anything for it. You just showed up. You were just decent, quietly, consistently decent.
Caleb was very still. That sounds like I should have kept the fence crooked, he said. Despite everything, Sophie made a sound that was half a laugh. "Probably," she said.
"Would have saved me a lot of sleepless Tuesday nights." She turned from the window and looked at him. "I'm not telling you this because I need you to feel a certain way. I'm not asking you for anything. I just I can't sit here and watch you joke about marrying me and pretend that the word didn't hit me somewhere real." She stopped.
"Because it did. And I'm tired of pretending it wouldn't." The room was very quiet. Caleb's toolbox was on the floor. The door he had just fixed was smooth and perfect on its new hinges.
And Sophie Bennett was standing at the window of her bedroom looking at him with the most honest expression he had ever seen on another human being's face. And every single thing he had told himself over the past 8 months that they were just neighbors, that it was just convenience, that he was just a man who was good at fixing things, and she was just a woman who needed things fixed, was dissolving like paper in rain. He thought about Rebecca. He thought about the 9 years of trying.
He thought about what it felt like to love someone who needed you to be different and the particular slow damage that did to a person over time. He thought about the morning coffee. The two sugars she remembered. The way she sat on the floor of her kitchen without needing to explain why.
He thought about Lily reaching up between them at the farmer's market and taking both their hands like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He opened his mouth and then, because he was afraid, because he was the kind of man who had learned to be careful with things that mattered, and sometimes that carefulness looked exactly like cowardice, he said the wrong thing. "Sophie, I don't want to make things weird between us." She nodded slowly. Something went out of her face.
Not hurt exactly, and not anger, but a kind of quiet acceptance that that almost worse than either of those things. "I know," she said. "You don't have to say anything. I shouldn't have No." He stopped himself, started again.
"I'm not I'm not trying to dismiss what you said. I just Caleb." Her voice was gentle but clear. "It's okay, really. I'm not going to fall apart.
I just needed to say it." But the way she said it, the careful practiced steadiness of it, told him that the only thing she had more experience with than feeling things deeply was hiding the cost of them from other people. He picked up his toolbox. He walked toward the door and he paused in the doorway, the fixed smooth perfectly balanced doorway, and turned back. "Two sugars," he said.
Sophie looked at him. "What? You knew I took two sugars in my coffee before I'd told you," he said. "The first time you handed me a cup, you just knew." She was quiet.
"I pay attention," she said finally. "I know you do." He held the door frame for a moment. "I've been paying attention, too." He left. He went home.
He put his toolbox in the garage and stood there in the dark for a long time with his hand on the truck and his mind doing the thing it did when he was standing in front of a problem that mattered, turning it over, looking at it from different angles, figuring out what was actually broken versus what was just worn. He didn't sleep well. He lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and had the argument with himself that he'd been avoiding for 8 months. The argument started as it always did with the practical side.
She lives next door, he thought. If this doesn't work, you don't just lose a relationship. You lose your morning coffee. You lose the person Lily goes to when she gets off the bus.
You lose the whole shape of your daily life that you didn't even realize you'd built around this woman until this exact moment. And the other side of the argument came back at him immediately in the voice he recognized as the part of himself he trusted least and needed most. You already lost it, Caleb, the moment you fixed that door and opened your mouth. You can't unsay it and neither can she.
The question now isn't whether things change. The question is whether you let them change towards something or away from something. He was quiet in his own head for a while. Then he thought about the nine years with Rebecca.