Chapter 25
Kayla
Something had happened at the department.
Ben had been around a lot the last couple of days but quieter than usual—and for a man who’d turned economy of speech into an art form, that was saying something.
“Someone at the department died” was all he’d given me, standing in my kitchen two days ago with a glass of water he wasn’t drinking. Brief words delivered in his usual even tone, except the air around them was different. Heavier.
I didn’t push. We had our agreement. If it was work stuff he couldn’t discuss, I wouldn’t pester him with questions. But still, I wished there were something I could do to help lighten his load.
Jolly had noticed too. Every time Ben sat down, Jolly would cross the room and press his body against Ben’s leg.
Not the purposeful positioning of a working dog.
A check-in. Then he’d trot back to the fence gap to play with William, and ten minutes later, he’d circle back to Ben again. Running his own diagnostic.
This morning, the heaviness was still there, but lighter around the edges. Ben had come over early to ask if William and I could help him with something.
He’d bought a dining table.
A dining table. For the man who’d been eating off the kitchen counter since he moved in, whose house contained a coffeemaker, a dog bed, and what I suspected was a single towel.
I didn’t make a thing of it. Neither did he.
“Left side’s catching on the doorframe,” Ben said from behind his end.
“Which side is left? I’m walking backward.”
“Your left.”
I adjusted my grip on the table’s edge and lifted. The solid oak surface had looked manageable in the back of Ben’s truck. It was less manageable sideways through a doorframe that had apparently been designed for people who didn’t own furniture.
Ben had the heavy end. He was moving through the hallway with the controlled efficiency of a man who’d carried heavier things through narrower spaces, and I was shuffling backward in socked feet, trying not to take out a light switch with my elbow.
“Almost there. Two more feet.”
“You said that four feet ago.”
The corner cleared the frame, and we were through. Ben guided his end down first, then came around to help me lower mine. The legs hit the floor with a solid thud, and we stood there looking at it.
Round. No head of the table. Everyone equal.
The dining room looked different with something in it. The bare walls hadn’t changed, but the table anchored the space, gave it a center of gravity it hadn’t had. A reason for the room to exist.
Ben ran his hand across the surface. Oak, medium finish, simple lines. Nothing fancy. Built to be used.
“Fits,” he said.
“It does.”
He looked at the four chairs still boxed by the wall, then at me, and something warm moved through his expression. Not quite a smile. The thing that lived next door to a smile and was, in many ways, better.
Through the kitchen window, I could see William and Jolly in the backyard.
Whatever game they’d invented today involved William running in wide circles while Jolly herded him like a very enthusiastic sheepdog.
The yard was soft from the rain we’d had the last couple days, and both of them had been out there long enough that I was choosing not to think about the state of William’s clothes.
“I should unbox the chairs,” Ben said.
“I can help.”
“You’ve already helped. Go sit. I’ll bring you tea.”
“You don’t have tea.”
“I bought some.”
He’d bought some.
I was following him into the kitchen when my phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen.
An email. From an address I didn’t recognize, which meant I recognized it immediately.
I’ve been thinking about what’s best for you, and I know you’ve been thinking about it too. That’s me, Kayla. We both know it—
I closed the email. Opened the Evidence folder. Dragged the message in. Done.
Six months ago, my hands would have been shaking. Now it was fifteen seconds of my life. Open, file, move on.
I did want Craig Dutton completely out of my life.
Not in the desperate, panicked way I’d wanted it at the beginning.
In a tired way. A finished way. I was done giving this man space in my head, and the fact that he kept claiming it anyway, one email at a time, was less frightening than it was exhausting.
I thought about a restraining order again, but Craig hadn’t threatened violence, so there was no cause.
He was just relentless, and there wasn’t a court filing for that.
If he would just stop, I wouldn’t need one.
If he would just find some other woman to fixate on, I could close the Evidence folder for good and forget he existed.
I set my phone facedown on the table.
Ben came back with two mugs. Lemon ginger for me. Black coffee for him. He sat across from me, and for a moment, we were just two people at a table. The ordinariness of it was the point.
A crash came from the backyard.
Not a bad crash. The particular percussion of a back door thrown open with the full enthusiasm of a six-year-old boy and a dog who couldn’t get enough of each other.
They came through the kitchen in a blur.
William first, sneakers pounding the floor, Jolly right behind him, both of them moving at a speed that suggested they were being chased by something only they could see.
William was laughing so hard he was barely upright.
Jolly’s tail was a propeller, his mouth open in that wide, happy grin, his body a dark streak of uncontained joy.
They made it to the dining room before I fully registered the damage.
Mud. Everywhere.
William’s sneakers were caked with it. His jeans were brown from the knees down. His jacket had a streak across the front like he’d slid on his stomach. Jolly was worse—paws black, underbelly coated, a trail of prints across the kitchen floor that looked like a crime scene.
“Mom! Mr. Ben! We were playing army, and Jolly was the—”
William stopped.
The laughter cut off like someone had pulled a plug. His eyes dropped to the floor, to the muddy prints tracking from the kitchen through the dining room. Then to his shoes. His hands. The mud on his jacket.
Then he looked up at the adults.
The joy drained from his face so fast it was like watching a light go out. His body went rigid. His shoulders pulled in. One hand found the hem of his jacket and gripped it, twisting the fabric the way he always did when the world was going wrong.
Jolly was still moving, tail going, oblivious. He bumped against William’s leg, and William didn’t react. He was staring at the muddy floor with an expression that made my stomach drop.
A kitchen in another town. Craig’s voice filling the room, filling every space my son had left to hide in. The look on William’s face when the screaming started. How small he’d made himself.
“I’m sorry.” Barely a voice. His chin was down. His body had folded inward until he took up as little space as possible. “I got the floor dirty. I’m really sorry. I—”
His words stopped. His face crumpled. He looked down at himself, and I watched the realization hit him at the same moment I saw it.
His jeans were darker at the front. Wet in a way that had nothing to do with mud.
William stood in the middle of Ben’s dining room, next to Ben’s new table, on Ben’s muddy floor, and he was shaking so hard his teeth clicked together.
His eyes were huge and glassy, and the mortification on his face was so complete it went beyond embarrassment into something that looked like surrender.
Every instinct I had was firing at once—pick him up, hold him, tell him it was fine. But I was frozen because I could see that any attention I drew to what had just happened would make it worse. Would confirm that this was the catastrophe he believed it to be.
Ben moved.
He set his coffee down. Came around the table. Walked to William without hurrying, without any shift in his energy that might register as alarm or disgust or any of the things William was bracing for.
He lowered himself to eye level. Not in front of William. Beside him.
“Hey.” Low and easy. “You know what happened to me once?”
William didn’t look up. But he didn’t pull away.
“I was in the Army. My first real mission. We were moving through a building, and somebody started shooting. Loud. Close. Scariest moment of my life up to that point.”
Ben said it the way he said everything—plainly, like the facts were enough. “And right there in the middle of it, while I was supposed to be this tough Army guy, I pissed myself. Just happened. My body got scared before my brain caught up.”
William’s chin lifted a fraction.
“You know what my sergeant said afterward?”
A tiny shake of the head.
“He said welcome to the club. Said it happened to him his first time too. Said it happens to every soldier at some point, because that’s what bodies do when things get intense. It’s not something you control. It just happens.”
William’s breathing had slowed. His hands were still gripping his jacket, but the white-knuckled tension had eased.
“I was so embarrassed, I wanted to disappear,” Ben said. “But my sergeant treated it like it was nothing. Because it was nothing. So I’m telling you the same thing. It happens to men. No big deal. Never will be.”
William’s eyes finally came up to Ben’s face. Searching. The careful scan of a child looking for the lie, for the turn, for the moment the calm voice would become a loud one.
He didn’t find it.
“But I got the floor dirty,” William said. His voice broke on the last word.
“That’s what floors are for.” Ben said it like it was the most obvious fact in the world. “Floors get dirty. That’s why God invented mops. This floor has been too clean anyway.”
Something shifted in William’s face. Not a smile. Not yet. But the rigid terror was loosening, giving way to something cautious underneath.