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Holt shifts. He’s no longer standing against the railing of my porch, but directly in front of me. He crouches low and my heart flip flops.

“I like you complicated, Faye. Messy and beautiful and lovely just as you are.”

“What’s happening, Holt?”

He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t get the chance to reply before Mabel bursts through the door. She’s wearing the cutest yellow sundress with a tulle skirt and white runners. In her hands, she holds my brush.

She takes it straight to Holt, like she once took it to Tate. “Can you brush my hair?”

Holt straightens. He clears his throat and I watch as his big hand wraps hesitantly around my brush. When he sits in the chair Mom occupied not long ago, Mabel drops to her knees between his legs, facing toward the front lawn.

Gently, Holt begins to battle the invisible being that nests each night in her hair.

Mabel closes her little eyes and her little lips smile.

My heart fractures. Oh, Tate.

28

STILL LOVES YOU

JUNE 2023 – PRESENT DAY

“Hey, bud, you want to run in and grab the grub for me?” Holt fishes bills from his wallet, handing them to Owen in the back seat.

“Sure,” Owen says quietly. Then he’s sliding from the truck and walking across the parking lot into the pizza place.

I twist in my seat to see that Mabel is fast asleep. The box of Holt’s truck is jam packed with plants and soil—more than I ever would have bought with Tate. But everything I even remotely looked at went into the cart. I tried to protest, but Holt just carried on. I not only have flowers for my pots, but shrubs.

Mabel stirs, sighs big, and slumps back into sleep. When Holt suggested we take his truck, I’d thought I’d have to transfer the car seat. I’d been surprised and warmed to realize that he’d already bought one. And when I say it’s the bougiest of the bougie, I’m not exaggerating. I don’t think I’ve even seen this one in the stores. So, he definitely ordered it online.

I wonder how many reviews he read. I can already see it, Holt hunched over his phone reading safety reviews on car seats.

“She seems like a good little sleeper to me.” Holt’s deep rumble consumes the space.

“The car always gets her.”

He chuckles, and his eyes drag over me again like they have at least a hundred times today. When I dropped my cardigan earlier, the way his eyes heated, I felt it like a lick of flame on my flesh.

He swallows. “You look really good in that dress, Faye.”

There’s a moment where I forget it was Tate’s favorite. Then I remember. “Thanks.”

Owen appears holding four massive boxes of pizza. I feel my eyes snap wide. “How much do you think we can eat?”

“I can eat a lot,” Holt tells me. “But I wasn’t sure if Doug and Candy would come by again, so I got extra.”

“What did you order?”

“One ham and pineapple. One pepperoni with extra olives. One with everything. And one meat lovers.” My heart clenches. The man listens and takes notes, obviously.

Owen opens the door and sets the pizza on the middle seat before climbing in after. Mabel doesn’t stir through the ruckus or the drive home and I already know it’s going to be a long night.

I wipe at the sweat on my brow as I drop down onto my booty to pull my gloves from my hands. The day turned out hot, and only got hotter as we worked. Holt is a beast and has clearly made this his workout for the day. He dug all the holes for the shrubs, after I debated and changed my mind a thousand times about where they were going. In a few years, the space under the porch railing is going to be blooming with snowball viburnums, hydrangeas, and lilacs.

Gardening has always been a happy place for me, but today it was bittersweet. This has always been something Tate took care to do with me. Every year, he’d teasingly groan about the greenhouse torture, but I knew he loved the time he spent with me there. The man loved me.

I thought it would hurt more doing all this without him.