Dear Reader,
This week’s note comes from Home For Good. It is a story about a soldier’s return to his hometown and his reconciliation with the person he left behind. It also explores realizing that maybe love never really left. Perhaps, it was just waiting for the right moment to bloom again.
In this scene, Katie and Brock find themselves accidentally locked in a shed together. What begins as frustration turns into a quiet, uninterrupted, unplanned conversation that has the potential to fix more than a broken door.
Katie didn’t give up too often. But Brock was right. Yelling and pounding on the door only exhausted her. Defeated by the circumstance, she inhaled a deep breath.
Her scattered mind calmed and said something to the effect of, “Hmm, there seems to be enough oxygen in here for the both of us.”
She gave one final assessing gaze, found a spot in front of the line of buckets filled with barley, and sat down.
On any other day, the combination of the scent of seeds and soil would have soothed Katie. In this instance, it aggravated her. She’d need a shower when she got home.
Her eyes darted around the room. They had no food, no water, no bathroom. What if the others thought Brock and Katie had a meeting of the minds and went home?
She rose to her feet. “We have to get out of here. They’re not going to find us, and we’re going to die.”
“I’ve been in worse situations than this, Katie. I promise you we won’t die.”
“There isn’t a bathroom in here!” The funny thing about having to go to the bathroom. She didn’t need to use it until she was aware of the lack of one.
“We can empty one of Zane’s buckets and set it in the corner.”
Katie froze. He had been in this situation. “How can you handle this so well?”
Brock gestured with his hand to point to the equipment around them. “It is seed. I have yet to watch a horror movie where the characters run into a shed full of seed, and the villain uses it to bring on their demise.”
His reply forced Katie to reassess the situation. She perused the room again. There were buckets of seed, rolls of drip system piping, a clear toolbox full of the smaller pieces for the drip system. Katie grinned. “You’re pretty funny in stressful situations.”
Brock shrugged away her compliment. “I’ve learned to adapt.”
Katie turned her back toward the door and sat down again. When Brock bent down to sit beside her, she moved to make room for him.
Instead of sitting, he crouched and rested his elbows on his knees. They sat in silence.
Katie didn’t mind being stuck with Brock. She thought that he would have been a know it all. That he would tell her how to react. His relaxed disposition comforted her.
The sound of her breath flowing in and out of her lungs got to be too much for Katie. She had to talk. “Has the adjustment to moving home been easy or harder than you expected?”
Brock chuckled to himself. “This is luxury living compared to some of the places I’ve been. The farmers we worked with were remote. Some people had to walk miles to get water for their families.”
“So easier.”
He kept his gaze in the distance. “It has had its difficulties. Mostly dealing with people’s perceptions of me. They formed opinions before I came home.”
Occasionally, Katie overheard snippets of conversations where Brock was the topic of discussion. They were all glowing assessments of his character. If he hadn’t crushed her heart, she’d have joined the Brock is great fan club. “People love you.”
“It doesn’t matter to me one way or another if people love me.” He turned to address Katie. His eyes cut through her. “It does bother me when people talk on my behalf, and others believe it.”
“Who would have done that?” As soon as the question left her lips, Katie had the answer. He was talking about her.
He had to have been.
She cried, moped, and grieved when their relationship ended.
But what normal twenty-year-old woman wouldn’t?
It wasn’t like she formed an alliance of women to tarnish his reputation.
She dove into her studies and earned her master’s degree while working with her parents to save the family farm.
“Garth told me what happened.” A streak of pain flitted across his eyes. It was gone as quickly as it appeared.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She hoped that she wasn’t party to whatever it was that struck him. Something in Brock’s eyes said she did.
Brock blinked. The corners of his lip turned up. “Remember when we were in eighth grade, and Mrs. Walden found a sticky note in her chair?”
Katie searched her mind for the memory. Nothing came to her. Then again, their class committed many unfair shenanigans against the teacher who made it her mission to teach twelve and thirteen-year-old kids manners. She quit at the end of the year and moved to Billings.
At the time, the kids bragged about how their poor behavior chased her away.
Katie saw Mrs. Walden with the Paradise Hills Mustangs three years later at a speech and debate competition. The Mustangs made the Badgers look like small children who tried to wear their parents’ clothes. But the clothes were too big, and they came across as foolish.
After that, Katie recalled her eighth-grade year with remorse. The class chased away a person who was only trying to help them. “I don’t think I was there that day.”
“Someone wrote ‘help me’ on a small piece of paper. They had a piece of tape on it so it would stick when she sat down. This was before post-it notes.”
The light of recognition struck Katie. At first, Mrs. Walden didn’t say a word. She peered over the top of her glasses, and her eyes became scanners, passing from person to person.
Katie gasped in fear when they landed on her. She borrowed the tape and didn’t want the teacher to think she had done it.
Of course, the reaction was enough for Mrs. Walden to conclude. “Come with me,” Mrs. Walden crooked her finger at Katie. The blood rushed to Katie’s head, and her lungs ceased moving.
Mrs. Walden didn’t say a word. She crossed the room to the door with the paper adhered to her finger. The silent walk to the principal’s office was the longest two minutes of Katie’s life.
When she returned to class, everyone was quiet and on task. They all knew Katie hadn’t done it. None of them wanted to take the blame. Katie, who never got in trouble, received a stern talk and a warning of worse consequences from the principal. It would have been worse for the person who did it.
“At the time, I thought you were ballsy for taking one for the team,” Brock said, “After being in your shoes, I feel bad.”
His answer not only confused Katie but also frustrated her. She never found out who put the note in the teacher’s chair, nor did she know what Brock was talking about.
“Dallas put the note in the chair,” Brock kept his eyes on her. “I dared him.”
“Why are you telling me now? It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I want to explain why we did it. If we’d been busted, the coach would have made the whole team run and do pushups for the entire practice. And, he would have pulled both of us from the game that week.”
In hindsight, Katie recalled that Brock and Dallas were nicer to her after that. She supposed it was because they felt bad for her taking the fall. She never associated them with being the pranksters. Shortly after that, Brock took her to homecoming. The rest was history.
“That’s water under the bridge.” There was no point in Katie being upset with Brock now. She surveyed the room. It wasn’t like getting angry with him would fix the broken lock and free them from the storage room.
“Garth knew,” Brock said. “I didn’t realize it, but that was when we started arguing. He made it his personal mission to fix every one of my character flaws.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and sat. “It might have worked if he wasn’t doing things that were just as bad as me. You know the whole pot and kettle thing.”
“Brothers and sisters fight all the time.” Katie shrugged. “Or, so I’ve been told. Besides, you and Garth patched up things at the reunion.”
“Which gets me back to what he told me.”
“I’m not in the mood to play games. Just tell me or move on to the next topic.”
“After I broke up with you, he was the one to console you.”
Katie jerked and held her hands up as though she were pushing away a person. “Look, nothing like that happened between us. We just hung out and talked.”
Here she was, getting in trouble for something someone else did.
Again.
Katie promised herself that when she got out of the room, she’d avoid the Buchanan men. They were nothing but heartache and trouble. Brock was the heartache, and his brother was the trouble.
“He told me that he made it sound like I was involved with someone.”
Katie remembered the conversation. Garth set his hand on both of Katie’s shoulders, and with the most sympathetic expression, he told her what she needed to hear. “Brock is in love with someone who knows more about the world than you.”
It shattered Katie’s heart to pieces. The small-town values and roots she prided in herself repelled the man she loved. Garth’s explanation added meaning to what Brock had said, “I’m going places, and if I want to make something of myself, I need to go without you.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Katie pretended to stretch to create some distance between them. It was time to resurrect the wall she’d built. “The past is where it belongs.”
“Not when it clouds the future,” Brock said. “I broke up with you because I didn’t want the Dear John letters my friends got. When we got home from Iraq, the guys in my unit had wives and girlfriends to greet them. I got off the plane and headed straight to where my car had been stored. Their wives proved my fears wrong. By then, it was too late. I came home, and my mother said you were seeing Dale. I got my comeuppance. Garth had won the argument. I was the jerk that needed to grow up.” The hurt bled through. “I didn’t leave you because of another woman. I left you because I loved you.”
Since Brock had returned, Katie fought to keep him at arm’s length. It would be hypocrisy for her to fault him for doing the same. “Wow. That is a lot to take in.”
“You believe me.” Brock pressed his head against the wall and murmured, “She believes me.”
Sometimes, when we’re stuck, whether in a quiet moment, a hard season, or a locked seed shed, it’s lif’s way of slowing us down—just enough to see what’s still possible. It offers space to speak the truth, heal what’s been broken, and maybe, finally begin again.
For Brock and Katie, getting stuck gave them something they didn’t know they still needed—a chance to be heard.
If there’s something on your heart—a conversation, a hope, a dream—you’ve been putting off, maybe this is your moment to try again.
💛 I close this week’s note wishing you courage, connection, and just the right words at the right time.
With love,
Merri