Page 104 of Where You're Planted

“I’m gonna…” he muttered, gathering their breakfast trash to get the lingering food smell out of the room. He wandered down the corridor, looking for a trash can, and wound up all the way back out in the waiting room…where, with a mug of flowers in one hand and her phone in the other, stood Tansy.

31

Tansy

She had just sent a text, telling Jack she was at the hospital, when suddenly he was standing in front of her. “That was quick,” she murmured, shifting her weight, second-guessing showing up at the hospital without warning.

This morning, she’d woken up less angry and hurt about his grant application and more…tired. Resigned. Her library would close. That seemed inevitable. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her friends. She wasn’t really ready to have the conversation she’d promised Jack today either.

But then she’d dropped off Briar at school and went to work, half expecting Jack to be camped out by the library, eager to resolve everything, and he hadn’t been there. Ian told her Jack was at the hospital—only, he’d first said it as though Jack was the oneinthe hospital. Later, she might laugh at the comedy of miscommunication in the ensuing couple of minutes, but she wasn’t there yet. Her relief that Jack was okaywas immediately washed out by the news that Amy had had her baby early with some kind of complications that warranted Jack missing work to be with her. She hadn’t thought twice about it. She’d gotten Marianne to cover her morning story time and driven straight here.

Now, though, she felt uncertain. She’d said some harsh things to him yesterday. And then, when he’d been dealing with this crisis last night, she’d brushed him off. He hadn’t fought it.

“What are you doing here?” Jack said, his voice like sandpaper. He looked as rough as he sounded, with dark circles under his eyes and a heaviness to his face that madeherfeel tired by proxy. The sight of him pulled at her heart.

“Sorry. I should have called or—”

He crossed the last few feet between them and threw his arms around her. She hugged him back, feeling the tension in his muscles, the tangible need behind the embrace. He sighed into her hair like this was his first full breath in hours. Maybe it was.

“What are you doing here?” he asked again, although it felt rhetorical now, an expression of surprise and gratitude.

“How’s Amy? How are you?”

“I’m…fuck. Really glad to see you,” he said, finally pulling back enough to look at her. Only now did she realize he was holding a plastic bag of food trash. He left her to toss it into a garbage bin and then reached for her hips when he came back but dropped his hands at the last second. He gestured to the chairs, and they sat. She set the mug of flowers she’d stolen from one of his flower beds in the gardens on her way out beside her opposite thigh.

Seeming cautious, he set one hand on her knee. It didn’t come naturally to him to keep his hands to himself now, shecould tell, and the part of her that had opened to him, that had come back alive in her body with his, wanted to tell him it was okay to touch her, that she needed it herself. But she sobered, realizing this was a boundarysheshould be the one to maintain. She didn’t know what it meant that she was here, if anything was different than it had been yesterday, only that she knew how anxious he’d be about Amy, and she’d had to come.

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening last night?” she asked. “I would have talked to you.”

He shrugged. “Things between us were…are…”

“Yeah. But this is bigger than that.”

He licked his lips, maybe restraining a hopeful smile. “Well, Amy’s all right. The baby, too.”

“And you?”

“I’m…good,” he said, sounding surprised by it. “They asked me to be her godfather.”

Tansy saw the wonder in his eyes as he said this, the genuine pride. “Congratulations, Jack. They’re lucky to have you.”

He nodded absently, mulling something over. Then his eyes sharpened on her. “Look, I know this is the worst time to tell you this, but I only just worked it out for myself…”

“What?”

“When you tried to ask me about relationships, somethingmore…when I said I don’t do them or don’t want them…I thought that was true, but it’s not.”

She swallowed loudly. She didn’t know exactly what he was trying to say, but she did sense that she wasn’t ready to hear it. “You’re tired,” she said, managing a teasing tone. “You’re not making sense.”

“Tansy, I want it all,” he said firmly, confidently. “I wanted it the first time, too. But after my marriage fell apart, I became too fucking much of the worst parts of myself. I didn’teven want toconsiderwanting all this again—to be a real partner to someone, to have a family. And I know it’s not fair to tell you all this right now. But I need you to know, without a doubt, that Iwantit. With you and Briar. Whatever that could look like. Whatever you’re willing to—”

“Jack…”

“I know. It’s a lot. Don’t say anything, okay? I know me saying this doesn’t fix everything else. It probably makes it harder. But just don’t decide anything yet. Please.”

He’d told her once that the best thing for most of the plants in the gardens after the storm was to do nothing to them—not move them, not cut away their damage. Just wait those first weeks and let the shock wear off. That was what the last couple days felt like—a shock.

And maybe she was just so tired of immediately figuring out her next step, of not falling into helpless despair, because she wanted this to be the answer right now. To do nothing—nothing that couldn’t be undone, nothing she’d regret. It felt like the only move either of them could handle.

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