Wide Open – Epilogue – Warm Enough

I’m sitting on the front porch with a coffee that’s going cold because it’s already warm enough out here that cold coffee is just coffee, and Logan’s truck is in the driveway, and the ring on my finger catches the morning light in a way that still surprises me three weeks in.

I didn’t plan this.

I want to be clear about that because I am not a woman who does things she didn’t plan and then acts surprised about them – I am a woman who plans everything, who moves freight across four states on a spreadsheet, who scheduled her divorce proceedings around a quarterly review because the timing made logistical sense. I plan. I execute. I move on.

What I did not plan was a Tuesday night in a bar watching the game with friends and a man across the room who couldn’t stop looking.

I noticed him noticing.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.

He was tall and dark-haired and had the kind of shoulders that make a woman do a brief, private inventory of her current life choices, and he was drinking something that turned out to be zero-alcohol beer, which I didn’t know yet, and he was watching me the way men watch women when they’ve decided something and are just waiting for the right moment to act on the decision.

I’d seen that look before.

I’d also been burned before, which is a different story and a different man and a ring I gave back on a Tuesday that was considerably less pleasant than this one.

His name was Logan.

He was back in town after years away. Inherited his grandparents’ house. Was opening a car detailing studio on the west end. Had apparently grown up here the same as me, which meant we’d been in the same rooms at the same times for years without it ever going anywhere, and then he left and came back and walked into a bar on a Tuesday night and looked at me like the years between then and now were simply the preamble to the actual story.

I said yes when he offered to drive me home.

I said yes to more things after that.

This is the story of how a woman who had stopped believing in good things ending well found out she was wrong – not gently, not without a fight, and not without a certain amount of Maddie, which I will get to in due course.

Pour yourself something.

It’s a Texas-sized story.