“About the fact Zeke has loved you his whole life? Waited for you to be ready for that?”
“If that was true, we’d be on our way to a tree house together.”
“There’s a goat trying to eat your shirt.”
She twisted around to look. “That’s Violet. She likes shirt.”
“He’s scared, Rory.”
She gave Violet a shove and pried her shirt out of the goat’s mouth. “He’s not scared of anything.”
“The one thing he’s scared of is you.” Cal climbed the pen’s fence and sat astride it. “And Mom, but that doesn’t count. That’s self-preservation.”
“Why would he be scared of me?”
Cal held his hand out to her, inviting her up. “Because you’re the one person who can turn his world on a dime.”
She took his hand and sat beside him and they both watched the mini goat Therese, in the next pen, try to jump in with the bigger goats.
“That one has ambition and persistence,” Cal said. “Like someone else I know.” If there was a message in that, her brain was too shook to comprehend it. “Congratulations. You did good. We’re all proud of you.”
Oh, ambition and persistence. “Thank you.”
“Now will you quit thinking you have anything to make up for. It was as much my fault the way things went down between us as yours.”
Yes, it was time to forgive herself. Some things weren’t worth persisting with. “I’m in love with Zeke. I know that must seem odd to you.”
“Not at all. He’s a catch.”
It was too strange talking to her old lover about her new one. Bernadette screamed in sympathy. Cal told the cranky goat to take a chill pill.
He bumped her shoulder. “You and me, we were good together. Great together. Brilliant partners in crime. But we should have left it at that.”
He’d wanted to keep their relationship strictly professional. She’d pushed for more and he’d caved. It was odd to remember that she’d been the instigator of it all now.
“We were never meant to last,” he said. “I was just who you needed at the time. Knowing that didn’t make it easy to give you up.”
“Wow, that makes me sound like a giant user.” But Cal was right. After her father died, Cal was a big brother, misplaced, too-young father-figure, and then boss, partner, and finally lover. He was the stability she’d clung to, the excitement she craved without fear of failing.
“I needed you too, Rory. I wasn’t ready to take over Sherwoods from Dad. You made it all so much easier until I realized I was holding you back.”
“From what?”
“From working out who you really are in love with.”
So he’d known all along she was meant to be with Zeke. Sometimes it was easy to hate Cal for being right all the time. “Feels like that’s a bust.”
“He tried every distraction to get over you. He’s waited for you forever. He needs to know this isn’t a whim for you, a convenient fallback.”
He couldn’t possibly think that now. Gertrude sniffed at their feet. She scratched the goat’s head with her boot heel. Cal was wrong, finally.
“Your hair is a mess, your nails are broken, you don’t have a phone in one hand and a book in the other. You’re not even wearing clean clothing and you’re hanging out with goats. This isn’t your regular life. This is the ultimate date drug, designed to make you think and say and do things you don’t mean.”
“And you think I can’t tell the difference between a shirt-eating goat and figuring out Zeke is the love of my life because my hair is a mess?”
“I think he’s scared you can’t. They doped him on DMT. He’s not himself right now. And he’s trying to give you space to decide what you really want when you’re not forced to be together. He’s trying not to break his own heart.”
He was ridiculous, and she wanted to feed him to these goats. “What do I do?”