Not the First (chapter)

The garage was still.

Rain tapped the metal roof in soft syncopation, the kind that made you feel like the night itself had settled in to stay. Caleb didn’t bother with the overheads—just the single lamp over the workbench, its glow golden against the steel and concrete.

He sat alone, engine parts half-sorted on the table, a socket wrench resting beneath his hand like it had dozed off mid-sentence. He wasn’t fixing anything tonight. Just sitting with the pieces.

Jonah hadn’t said much that morning. Just passed him a small, folded scrap and nodded once. No explanation. No weight to it—at least not in his voice. But the way his eyes lingered—that said enough.

Now, with the quiet all around him, Caleb took the note from where he’d tucked it inside the worn pages of his Bible. The spine was cracked, the pages softened from years of oil-stained hands and Sunday dust. It looked like it had been carried through more than one man’s storm.

He unfolded the note slow.

Psalm 27:1
“The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?”

He read the next line slower.
You don’t have to name it.

Something in him exhaled.

Then:
You’re still my brother.

He wasn’t sure what that line broke—but it broke something gently.
He stared at the note a long time. Long enough for the rain to change tempo. Long enough for the silence to grow familiar.

He read the note again.
That lady at the Spoon had said you didn’t have to name it. Just show up where it lives.
He pressed the paper to his chest and held it there, steady as the rain.

He wasn’t the first to carry something unnamed.
That ache you don’t have a word for.
That bond you can’t quite explain.
But he carried it still.

Then he tucked the note back into the Bible’s spine, stood, and switched off the bench light.

He rolled the garage door shut. The rain kept on, soft and steady.

Behind him, the lamplight glowed against the walls—warm, human, and quietly whole.

And somewhere out there, Jonah was still showing up—

where it lived.

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