Where It Settles (chapter)

The trail curved with the land, hugging the ridge like it had always known its shape. The trees stood in quiet assembly, their branches whispering overhead as the dusk pulled long across the lake below. A heron cut slow through the air. The sky was bruised lavender and rust.
It looked like a sky that had been through something. And was still holding.

Caleb and Jonah walked in silence. Not the strained kind, but something steadier—like an old hymn neither of them needed to finish singing. Leaves crunched beneath their boots. Gravel shifted under the weight of what hadn’t been said.

They came to a bench near the overlook. The lake stretched out below, still and soft. Mist clung low to the surface, catching what little light remained.

Caleb sat first, arms resting across his thighs, jaw set. Jonah followed a beat later, close but not too close, letting the quiet settle again.

“You think it ever gets easier?” Caleb asked finally, voice low.

Jonah glanced over. “What part?”

“All of it.” He rubbed his palms together like trying to start something that wouldn’t catch. Like trying to coax warmth from something gone cold. “Loss. Guilt. That damn space between what you meant to do and what you didn’t.”

Jonah nodded slowly. “Langston used to say guilt’s like smoke—gets in your clothes, your lungs. But grief… grief just sits with you. Doesn’t ask to be fixed. Doesn’t need to be.”

Caleb didn’t answer right away. The breeze stirred his hair.

“The boy I told you about…” he said finally. “I saw something good in him. Fragile, maybe. But it was there. He let me see it, just once. And then it was gone.”
He exhaled slowly. “When he went under, part of me felt like I had, too.”

The silence held.

Then Jonah reached out and laid a hand on Caleb’s forearm—gentle, steady. No words. No fixing.

Caleb’s hand twitched, just slightly, like it might rise to cover Jonah’s. But it didn’t.
He didn’t lean in. But he didn’t shut down either. It was something.

He leaned back against the bench, not pulling away, just needing the space to breathe.

Jonah let his hand fall away, resting it in his lap again.
It didn’t feel like rejection. Just timing.

They watched the water for a while, quiet and unmoving.

Caleb rubbed the back of his neck, gaze still forward.

“Some things you carry,” he said finally. “Some things carry you.”

Jonah was quiet a moment, then asked, “You think God stays in those things?”

Caleb didn’t answer right away. His jaw worked once, then stilled. The breeze touched the side of his face like it was waiting too.

“If He didn’t,” Caleb said, “I’d be gone already.”

Jonah didn’t smile. Just nodded once—slow, like he understood more than he could say.

They didn’t move for a long time.

(Chapter from Not the First in the Caleb and Jonah series. Contact me if you’d like to read the full story!)