Chapter 31 #2
I wanted to ask her about the closet. About her things, gone, the rod swept bare, the question I’d carried up the stairs and into this conversation like a stone in my shoe.
Where are your clothes, Am? Why did you move all of it out?
What is happening to us? I’d meant to ask those questions.
But she was already standing there holding her own elbows like the floor might tilt, already spooked by nothing more than a request to share a bed, and I knew that if I pushed on the closet now, I’d lose whatever fragile inch of her I still had.
So, I swallowed it. I set it down with all the other things I wasn’t saying.
“One night,” I said again, gentler. “Please. We haven’t stayed together in so long.” You’re still my wife, aren’t you?
The front door opened before she could answer. I heard three sets of footsteps—the kids—and the house filled, briefly, with the exact sound I’d flown across the world for, and then, just as fast, broke my heart with how it landed.
“Kai?” Bella’s voice, hopeful, pitched to carry. “Where’s Kai?”
“Kai’s in LA,” Amelie called back, and something in me flinched at how easily my sister now searched a house for another man’s name first. “Can you come say hi to me instead? I have a surprise for you.”
I presumed I was the surprise.
They came around the corner in a tumble. They were with the nanny, and my heart did something painful and glad at the sight of them. They’d grown in just the few weeks I had been gone. They always grew up when you weren’t looking.
“Guess who’s home?” Amelie said in a voice that suggested she was trying to get the kids excited to see me, fully aware they’d be disappointed it wasn’t Kai.
I dropped to a knee with my arms open. “Hey. Hey, look at you three. Come here, I missed you guys.”
“Stefan?” Bella looked confused. Jamie and August exchanged a look. Even the nanny seemed surprised to see me, and I was the one who hired her.
They eventually came. They hugged me. They were polite about it.
August, ever the diplomat, gave me a real squeeze and asked how my flight was, like a small adult at a funeral.
Jamie submitted to it for exactly as long as decency required.
And Bella, who used to climb me like a baby monkey and fall asleep on my shoulder mid-sentence, gave me a quick hug and stepped back.
“You smell like the plane,” she informed me.
“That’s because I was on a plane.”
She looked at Amelie. “When’s Kai coming back?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just been told. As if asking again might bring him home early.
“He’ll be back tomorrow,” Amelie said softly, and I kept my smile in place by force. I told myself it was late. Kids were cranky around bedtime.
“How’s school?” I asked them, working hard to keep my voice easy. “Tell me everything. Are the dorms okay?” I looked at the twins. “Did you guys try out for the soccer team?”
August nodded. “Kai helped us with the tryout. We made the team.”
Oh. “That’s great. How’s it going?”
“Good.” He looked, briefly, across the room. Not at me. At the game station by the television. The one they had moved from my side of the house.
“Jamie. How about you? Did you make any friends?”
“Yes,” Jamie said in the tone of a boy who had gotten into a great deal of trouble and had no intention of telling me about any of it.
It went like that. Every question I lobbed came back to me clipped and courteous and closed, fielded by three kids who’d answered the same questions for someone else already, and answered them at length, and had nothing left over for the latecomer.
I’d sat up with all three of them through fevers and nightmares after our parents died, and the whole weight of them landed on me at once.
I knew the precise sound of each of their real voices, and I was getting none of them.
The kids were being polite to me. I’d have dealt with their tears and tantrums. Polite was reserved for a guest. When had I become the outsider in my own life?
“Do you guys want something to eat?” I asked, even though it was late.
“We ate at school,” Jamie reported. “Before Mrs. Bea picked us up.”
“Okay, you three, it’s late.” Amelie clapped her hands once, gently herding. “Bedtime.”
“I’m on it, Mrs. Cavendish,” Mrs. Bea said from the hallway.
I froze.
I had never heard anyone call Amelie that, but that was what she was, what I had made her—Mrs. Cavendish.
I didn’t know what to say. Even Mrs. Bea was different now. It seemed Kai had whipped her into shape to heed Amelie’s directions, not the other way around.
“Make sure they brush their teeth and floss,” Amelie instructed. “I’ll be there in a second to tuck them in.”
I saw my opening and took it, because I was a man who had run out of better ideas. “I can read you guys a bedtime story if you’re up for it.”
Jamie made a face that seemed to say, Ew.
Even August seemed to have grown out of bedtime stories, and my affable brother didn’t take me up on the offer.
Instead, the twins had been eyeing the Nintendo since walking through the doors.
In the time I had been gone, they had grown out of their childhood—and those routines—and stepped into preadolescence.
Fuck.
How much had I missed?
“What about you, Bella?” I turned to my little sister for an olive branch. “You love story time. I’ll do the voices. Do you guys want to sleep on my side of the house tonight?”
The refusal was instant and unanimous, and worse, entirely without malice.
“All my stuff’s here,” Bella said reasonably, gesturing down the warm hall toward rooms I hadn’t known existed until tonight.
Beds, pajamas, the candy stash, the sorted-by-color everything.
A whole life, assembled and put away on the other side of a door I’d spent all this time politely declining to open.
“My bedroom’s here,” Jamie added, in the tone of someone explaining something obvious to a slow adult.
“Right,” I said.