Maggie Moves On(115)

By the time they got back to the house, it was almost seven.

Cody took the groceries into the kitchen and started to unpack them with Dayana while Silas went in search of Maggie.

He found her—with Kevin and the kittens, of course—in her office, behind her laptop on the same paint-splattered worktable. She was wearing the noise-canceling headphones and peering intently at the screen.

Silas started to lean in, planning to snap her out of her trance with a kiss on her neck, when he read a few lines of the document she was looking at.

“Maggie, what the hell is this?”

She jumped and yanked the headphones off. “You scared the crap out of me,” she said, minimizing the document.

“Is that an offer from the Welcome Home Network?” he asked, his voice low and calmer than he felt.

Silas felt like he’d been sucker punched.

He’d just assumed that he’d win. That she would fall for him like he’d fallen for her. That they’d stay—preferably—or go together.

Yet here she was making plans for her future. Not theirs.

“They offered me my own show,” she said.

“When?”

“On Cody’s graduation day.”

Silas put his hands on his hips so he wouldn’t be tempted to strangle her. “You’ve been sitting on this offer for a month, and you didn’t think to mention it to me?”

“It was unexpected. I didn’t even know if it was something I’d be interested in,” she said. “It’s on the East Coast. At least two seasons.”

He looked at the whiteboard. Her timelines were to an end, and she’d filled the empty space with demographic stats on what looked like two towns.

He heard Keaton’s little feet making their way toward the kitchen.

“Where’s Sy?” Keaton sang.

His chest hurt. Physically hurt. She was weighing her options, and from the looks of the research, she wasn’t even considering what he thought was the best choice. Him.

Couldn’t she see they’d started to build something here? Something real. Something that felt right.

“So you’re deciding between another house or a show with a network?”

“Among other options,” she said vaguely.

He crossed his arms over the ache in his chest and stared her down.

“Just because I don’t want you making decisions for me doesn’t mean we’re not in a relationship,” she said, getting a bit of fire in her eyes.

“If the situations were reversed, I would have brought all of this to you. I would have asked you your opinion because you know what’s most important to me, Maggie?”

She remained silent.

“You. These aren’t just my decisions anymore. They’re our decisions.” It was coming out wrong. But he didn’t care. He needed to be part of the process, needed her to trust him to listen to her. But maybe that was asking for too much.

“I live the way I do for a reason. I don’t have to take other people’s feelings into consideration.”

“Are you even taking yours into it?” he demanded. She sounded pissed off and just a little bit scared, and he hated it.

“Silas, you’re the one who wanted me to have a little time and space to think. And I thought about a lot of things on that water. A lot of those things scared the hell out of me. So I’m doing what I do, weighing my options, doing my research.”

“Are you even going to stay long enough to find out how Campbell found the gold? What he did with it all? Do you even care? What about Cody? And Wallace? Your sister? Were you even going to ask me to go with you?” he snapped. The ache in his chest was getting worse, blooming bigger by the second.

“Sy,” she said, hurt in her voice, “you mean a lot to me—”

He held up a hand, cutting her off. “Save it.”

“Hey, Sy, what do I do with the chicken?” Cody called from the kitchen.

“Get the marinade out,” he called back. “I’ll be there in a second.” He turned back to Maggie, who looked like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. That made two of them. Couldn’t she see what they were building together? “Look, I’ll stay and help you cook dinner tonight because I’m selfish enough that I want to be in that memory of yours. But after dinner, I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back until the party.”

“Why?” She looked shocked.

Good. He didn’t want to be alone in that.

“Why?” he repeated on a humorless laugh. “Because I’ve been building us into something you don’t think we are. A relationship. A partnership. You’ll get the time and space to decide if what you really want is to continue going solo.”

Those molten brown eyes went wide on him. “What if I don’t want to stay?” she asked, her voice trembling just a bit.

“Then I’ll go with you, if you let me. But you need to decide if you’ve got room in your life for me. And, darlin’, I take up a lot of space.”

“You can’t give up everything to follow me. That’s how resentment grows. That’s how you start stalking exes on Instagram and having FOMO meltdowns over farmers market hashtags and engagements.” Her voice was hushed, but the panic rang through clearly.

“You are everything to me, Maggie. Do you hear me? The fact that you think I’d give you up over geography? What do you think we’ve been doing here?”