Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 10: What she kept telling herself
AMY
She told herself she was going to wait.
She told herself this on Monday and on Wednesday and on Friday when he came by her house for the first time instead of the other way around, and she handed him coffee and showed him Marcus’s completed evaporation project — the finished slide deck, six slides, printed and laminated because Marcus had saved his allowance for the laminating at the print shop — and watched him look at the slides with the particular focus he gave things he was genuinely interested in.
She told herself on Saturday when they took his mother’s truck to the Henderson farm for the hay pickup she’d volunteered to help with, and they worked for three hours in the August heat and drove back with the flatbed full and dust in their hair and he laughed at something she said about the second Henderson boy’s approach to baling, and it was the full laugh, the one she hadn’t heard in ten years.
She told herself.
But she had told herself for twelve years and she was twenty-eight years old and it was August in Oakwood, Texas, and Jake Mitchell had come home, and she was done waiting.
She just needed a minute to figure out how to say it.
She tried the direct version: *Jake, I have been in love with you since we were sixteen.*
She tried it in the kitchen, to Gerald the snail’s photograph on her refrigerator, which Marcus had given her at the end of the year and which she’d taped up because she liked looking at his determined snail face.
She tried it to Gerald and Gerald was non-judgmental about it.
She tried the softer version: *I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you.*
She tried the joke version: *So I have this problem.*
She tried none of them because every version sounded either too much or too small and neither was the thing she actually meant, which was: *I have been carrying this for twelve years and I am not carrying it alone anymore.*
She settled on the direct version.
She drove over on a Sunday afternoon, which was the time he was usually in the south field or doing something with the truck, and she found him on the porch with a glass of water and a book he wasn’t reading — she could tell he wasn’t reading because the book had been in the same position for twenty minutes, which she’d clocked from her kitchen window.
She sat in the chair across from him.
She said: *I need to tell you something.*
He put the book down. He looked at her with the full attention.
She said: *I’ve been putting this off because the timing seemed wrong, and then the timing was still wrong, and then I decided the timing was never going to be right if I kept deciding it wasn’t.*
He said: *Amy.*
She said: *Let me finish.* She looked at him. *I’ve been in love with you since we were sixteen.*
The porch was quiet.
She said: *I know you were my best friend. I know you left. I know you’ve been gone for ten years and you’ve just gotten home and you’re working through things that are hard and this is probably the last thing you want to hear.* She kept going because if she stopped she was going to lose her nerve. *But I’ve been doing the careful thing for twelve years and I’ve been the good friend and the neighbor and the person who brings the iced tea and the tomato seedlings, and all of that is true, I mean all of it — I want to be those things. But I’m also the person who has loved you since the tailgate of your father’s truck and I can’t keep not saying it.*
He was very still.
She said: *I’m not asking you to do anything. I just needed you to know.*
He said: *Amy.*
She said: *You don’t have to say anything right now.*
He said: *I—* He stopped. He put his hands on his knees. He was looking at the yard. *You don’t want this.*
She said: *I know what I want.*
He said: *I have nightmares that put me on the kitchen floor. I have panic attacks at the hardware store. I am — not—* He looked at her. His face had the quality she’d come to recognize in the last two months: not closed, but carefully managed in the way of a man who was managing a door that wanted to open. *I am not a person you should love.*
She said: *That’s not your decision.*
He said: *I could hurt you.*
She said: *How.*
He said: *The nightmares. If you were—* He stopped. *If there were someone in the room, in the middle of an episode, I could—*
She said: *Jake.* She said it quietly. *I volunteer at the VA. I know what the episodes look like. I know what the protocol is.* She paused. *I’m not asking you to be recovered. I’m not asking you to be anyone other than who you are right now.*
He said: *You deserve—*
She said: *I decide what I deserve.* She looked at him. *And I decide that what I deserve is to stop waiting for the right time and say the true thing.*
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
She thought: *he knows.*
She thought: *he has known for a while.*
She thought: *this is the door.*
She got up. She crossed the porch.
She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him.
It was not a testing kiss. It was not a tentative kiss. It was twelve years of knowing what she wanted and finally, finally, saying it without words.
He was still for exactly one second.
Then he kissed her back.
His hands came up and caught her face and he kissed her back with the specific quality of someone who had been holding something for a very long time and had just stopped holding it, and she could feel the twelve years in it, hers and his both, and she thought: *yes. There it is.*
He pulled back.
He looked at her.
He said: *Amy.*
She said: *Hi.*
He said: *I’ve been—* He stopped. He was breathing. *I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen.*
She said: *I know.*
He said: *You knew.*
She said: *I suspected.* She was still holding his face. *I wasn’t certain until the festival.*
He said: *The hand.*
She said: *The one extra second.*
He let out a breath. Something moved across his face — not grief, not quite, but the specific feeling of a door that had been closed for too long finally opening. Relief, maybe. And under the relief, the thing she’d been looking at in him for two months — the careful management — and she watched it lower, just slightly, just enough.
He said: *I’m not in a good place.*
She said: *I know.*
He said: *I’m getting there. But I’m not there.*
She said: *I know.* She let her hands come down from his face. *I’m not asking you to be there. I’m asking you to let me be here while you get there.*
He looked at her.
She said: *That’s the offer. That’s all it is.*
He said, very quietly: *That’s not a small offer.*
She said: *No.* She sat back in her chair. *It’s not.* She looked at her hands in her lap. *So what do you want to do.*
He was quiet for a long time.
He said: *I want to not ruin your life.*
She said: *Okay. What else.*
He said: *I want—* He looked at the yard. The light was going gold over the south field. *I want you here. I’ve wanted you here since I left.* He paused. *That’s a terrible thing to say.*
She said: *Why.*
He said: *Because I left. I left and I never told you.*
She said: *You were eighteen.* She looked at him. *I was eighteen. We were both eighteen.* She paused. *We’re not eighteen now.*
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
She said: *So what do we do.*
He reached across the space between the chairs and took her hand.
He said: *I’m going to need to go slow.*
She said: *I’ve been going slow for twelve years. I can manage slow.*
He looked at her hand in his.
He said: *This is terrifying.*
She said: *Yes.*
He said: *Good.* And it wasn’t quite a smile and it wasn’t quite a laugh and it was both of those things, and she thought: *there he is.* The seventeen-year-old on the tailgate looking at the stars. Still there. Still exactly there.
She thought: *I knew you were still there.*
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