Chapter 19
Asher
The phone rings a third time, and I picture it buzzing somewhere across town, sliding around on a nightstand while my sister decides whether I'm worth waking up for.
An hour ago I watched Audrey pull out of the parking lot, taillights swinging toward the highway toward Millbrook, toward the kids waiting at their grandmother's.
She kissed me at the car door with the sky still gray.
Drive safe. Text me when you get there, I told her.
She got in the car and rolled down the window: Nine-thirty?
I nodded. Hopefully it looked confident.
Nine-thirty. The clock on my stove says it's barely past six.
The phone clicks.
"If you are calling me," Felicity says, voice thick and furred with sleep, "to ask me to bring dessert to family dinner again because you forgot, the answer is no. I did it twice. I don't care what plans you have with whatever redhead or blondie, Mash."
"It's not about dessert."
"—because the last time, Mom asked me when I was going to start baking, and I had to sit through the whole lecture—"
"Flick."
Something in my voice stops her. I hear sheets shift, the rustle of her sitting up.
"Okay," she says, slower now. "What?"
I carry the phone to the window. The lake is flat down there, gray going to silver as the sun pulls itself up over the far shore.
"I need advice. But you have to swear you won't ask questions."
There's a long pause. I can hear her thinking.
"That's a really weird thing to make me swear before seven in the morning."
"Lissy."
"Fine. I swear. God." A yawn cracks the middle of the word. "Now what am I swearing for?"
"I've been seeing someone."
The silence on the other end changes. It goes very still and very alert.
"Define seeing."
"That's a question."
"It's a clarification, you legal-family freak. And?"
"And she has kids." I press my forehead to the cool ?glass. "Two of them. And she wants me to meet them today. Properly.”
The pause this time is longer. Her voice goes careful in a way that tells me she's already running the math—the weekends I've vanished, Knox going out on the town without me, the fan club I quit months ago without an explanation.
"You've never met these kids before?"
"Objection. That's a question."
She grumbles for a second. "Two kids," she says.
"Yeah."
I can hear her landing somewhere close to the truth.
She doesn't say it.
"And it matters to you, whether they like you."
I don't answer fast enough.
"Oh my God." I can hear her smiling. I hate it. "Mash has feelings."
"I'm hanging up."
"No, you're not. You called me at dawn, asshole. You're going to take your medicine." She exhales, and when she comes back, the teasing's gone out of it. "What do you think is going to happen?"
"I don't know. I've never done this before, Flick. I don't wanna screw up these poor kids—say something stupid. Make them feel like I'm forcing myself into their lives. Maybe they're not ready for someone else to—"
"Okay. Stop.” She takes a deep breath. “Here's the thing. You're spiraling. I can hear you spiraling. You're probably standing at your window, banging your head against the glass—"
"I'm not doing that."
"—against the glass, thinking you're this almighty superhuman that's gonna decide the fate of these kids.
Mash. Slow down. You're meeting two kids, not the pope.
" Her voice goes softer. "Just... be yourself.
Let them see how you light up a room. You know how to do that.
That's literally your thing. So do that—for the children. "
I let out something that's half a laugh.
"Light up a room. For the children."
“Yes.”
I don’t know what that means.
She continues anyway.
"You're going to be great, and I'm going back to sleep.
" She pauses, and I feel her at the edge of it, the question she swore not to ask sitting right there.
But she steps back from it, keeping her word.
"And when you want to tell me who she is, you will.
Or you won't. Either way." She thinks. "Bring the kids something.
Don't show up empty-handed like a savage.
And don't forget dessert for family dinner. "
"What do I even—"
But she's already gone.
The drive out is an hour I spend trying not to wonder whether Felicity figured it out. Whether she's going to run her mouth over a cliff and let something slip to Knox. Or worse, Declan. Shoot—to Nate, who will then tell Nora, which is the last thing I need.
The fields slide by, starting to green, the first stubborn blades pushing through.
Somewhere around the halfway mark, I pull into a gas station and stand in front of a spinning rack by the register for longer than a grown man should.
I walk out with coloring books and a pack of gel pens that smell like fruit.
I sit in the parking lot afterward, holding the plastic bag and feeling like the world's biggest idiot.
Then I'm on her street.
I park away from the house, the way I always do. Pull the cap low. Slide the sunglasses on out of pure habit. Walk up with the bag swinging from one hand and my heart doing something stupid in my chest.
I knock.
The door swings open on the kid from the barbecue, brown hair sticking straight up on one side, a milk mustache he hasn't been told about, looking up at me like he's been expecting somebody and I'll do fine.
"I remember you," he says.
"I remember you too." I take off the sunglasses.
He squints. "Do you remember my name?"
"Do you remember mine?"
He studies me for a second, like the answer might be written somewhere on my face.
"No," he admits.
"It's okay, Eli."
His whole face lit up—delighted I've got his, embarrassed I caught him not having mine, both at once.
"It's Asher," I tell him.
"Cool." He's already turning back into the house. "Can you help me grab the juice in the fridge?"
"Sure." I pause at the threshold. "Hey, Eli?"
He spins around, waiting for me.
"Do you always answer the door?"
"I'm the one who always hears it," he answers proudly, walking back up the entryway.
I crouch down until I'm eye-level with him. "You're the man of the house, bud." I see his little chest swell up. "You've gotta keep the ladies here safe, okay?"
"So... I shouldn't open the door?"
"Probably not. Unless your mom tells you it's okay. Sound good?"
He thinks for a moment.
"Yeah."
I stand back up. Make a mental note to install a door camera for her. Maybe an extra lock a seven-year-old can't reach.
"Can you help me with the juice now?"
"Let's go, little dude."
I follow him in. The place smells like coffee and toast and something sweeter underneath it—sugar and vanilla—the bones of whatever she bakes.
The girl’s at the kitchen table. She goes still when she sees me, pencil paused over the paper, the way a deer goes still when a branch cracks somewhere close.
"Hey, Sophie. Remember Asher?" Eli throws it over his shoulder, hauling the fridge open with both hands.
She nods. "Hi," she says, in a voice barely there.
"Hi, Sophie."
Eli's got his whole head in the fridge now.
"It's in the back," he reports, muffled.
I reach over him and find the juice boxes wedged behind a carton of eggs.
I hand one down. He crams it into a backpack already holding a banana and granola bar, zipping it with the grim focus of a man packing for a summit attempt.
"Is your mom awake?"
"Yeah. I'll go get her." And he's gone, sneakers thundering up the stairs, leaving me standing in a kitchen with a gas-station bag in one fist and a nine-year-old who's already dismissed me and gone back to her drawing.
The vents hum. Above me, a door opens and closes.
Sophie doesn't look up. Her pencil moves in small, careful strokes, the tip of her tongue caught at the corner of her mouth.
I pull out the chair across from her. Slowly. Like she's the deer, and I'm working very hard not to be the branch.
She's drawing a horse. Long body, off-balance the way a kid's proportions go, but the eye is good. She's spent a lot of time on the eye.
"Can I try?"
She looks up and considers me for a second. Then she slides a clean sheet of paper across the table, picking a green pencil out of the cup, and holds it toward me—and stops, taking it back, trading it for blue, like the green was too good to hand over to someone she hasn't decided about.
I take the blue.
I don't know what kids watch now. I've been off the cartoon grid since roughly the dawn of time.
But there's a cartoon dog I've seen a hundred times without meaning to—on cereal boxes, commercials, the side of a bus once—and I've got every line of her filed somewhere in the back of my skull from a lifetime of not paying attention.
So I draw her.
The trick is not overthinking it. I stop trying and just let my hand chase the picture that's already in there.
First, the round tilt of the head, one ear flopped down, the other perked like she's listening for something.
Then the big, exaggerated eyes. The soft curve of the muzzle.
I can feel Sophie watching now, so I keep going.
I sketch in a patch of grass under her paws, position her next to a playground at a park.
The pencil moves fast. I don't stop until it's done.
When I look up, Sophie's put her pencil down. She's leaning halfway across the table, studying the page like it's a card trick she's trying to catch in the act.
"How'd you do that?" she asks.
"I have a really good memory."
She frowns. Not unhappy, just turning it over. "You didn’t practice that?"
"No. Everybody's brain works differently though. It's just how mine runs."
She thinks about that. Then, with a decisiveness that reminds me so much of her mother it nearly knocks me out of the chair, she spins her own drawing around and pushes it across the table at me.
"This is Pepper," she says. "She's a horse, but she wants to have wings."
I take it seriously, looking at it the way I'd study film of my last at-bat in the dugout.
"Like a pegasus."
"Yeah."
"Can she give herself wings?"
Sophie smiles almost to herself. "Yeah."
"How does she do that?"
"Her eye changes color."
"That's why you spent so long on the eye."
She goes still again. Different this time. Caught. Pleased and fighting it.
"Yeah," she says, quietly.
I feel Audrey before I see her.
It's nothing I could point to. A shift in the air, the weight of someone landing in the doorway. But my body knows it's her, the way it always knows now. I look up toward the kitchen door.
She's standing there, dressed, hair still dark and damp at the ends.
She takes in the table, the two drawings, Sophie tipped toward me, me tipped toward Sophie.
The introduction—the proper one she was hoping for—dies on her face.
I watch it go. The tilt of her head when she's confused, the words coming apart before they're out, something moving behind her eyes that I can't fully name.
Relief, maybe. And under the relief, smaller and stranger, the look of a woman who walked in to do a job and found it already done without her.
"You two have—" she starts.
She doesn't finish it. She doesn't have to.
I give her a small smile from the table. Those doe eyes soften, and I have to look back at the table before it shows on my face.
Sophie turns to see what I was looking at.
"Mom," she asks, "are you in charge of snacks today?"
"Snacks?"
"For Eli's game."
Right on cue, Eli comes back down the stairs at a volume that suggests the house is on fire. Cleats in hand, bag cinched tight.
"Let's go, everybody!"
A flash of guilt passes Audrey's face. "Right.
Yes. The—" Her eyes cut to the clock on the stove, and I watch her realize she forgot.
Forgot clean, all the way. Her whole morning got eaten alive by a parking lot at dawn, a long drive home, the anticipation of me walking through that front door—and somewhere in all of it, a seven-year-old's soccer game fell straight out of her head.
"Ten-thirty," she says. "Okay. We can—yeah. We'll go. Shoes on."
She turns back toward me, the apology already on her lips.
Eli chirps up. "Can Asher come?" he asks.
The kitchen goes quiet in that particular, watchful way.
Audrey looks at me, and for a second it feels like the whole thing hinges there—not the game, not the morning. Something bigger.
"I'd love to," I say.
Thirty minutes later I'm sitting on the sideline of a chewed-up grass field in the next town over, folded into a crowd of parents in camp chairs and water bottles, blending into every bit of it.
Sunglasses and cap back on. Audrey sits a careful arm's length away in her own hat and sunglasses, the two of us a matched set of people very deliberately not touching in public.
A woman across the sideline gives me a second look. The hat and sunglasses help. So does the fact that every parent here is busy watching their own kid. I lean away from Audrey.
Out on the field, it's pure chaos, twenty-two tiny kids swarming a single ball like they're chasing the Easter bunny.
No positions. No plan. One migrating clump of cleats lurching back and forth across the grass.
Eli's somewhere in the heart of it, red shirt, far more enthusiasm than skill, and when the ball squirts loose near his feet he chases it down and boots it in a direction at least adjacent to the correct goal.
"GO, ELI!" I yell, before I can second-guess it.
A few heads turn. Eli’s head snaps toward the sideline, finding me, and his face splits into a grin so wide he nearly trips over the ball he's technically still dribbling.
Beside me, Audrey makes a sound. Not quite a laugh. Close to one. I can feel the heat of her arm even with the space she's keeping.
"You're committed," she murmurs.
"I'm a professional athlete,” I mutter. “I take youth sports very seriously."
"Do you even watch soccer?"
"I'm learning in real time."
She smiles.
The clump migrates left. I clap when the other parents clap. Yell when it feels right. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I glance over—
Sophie's at my elbow. She moved her blanket to the grass beside me.
I never noticed her drift over. And she's not watching the game.
Her head's tipped back, looking up at me from under the brim of her small hat, studying me the exact way she studied the drawing.
Like I'm something she hasn't ruled on yet.
Like she's measuring me against whatever she's quietly building in that head of hers.
She doesn't say anything.
After a moment she turns back to the field.
But she stays there, planted at my side, for the rest of the half. And every single time I cheer, I feel her glance flick up—checking, weighing, trying it against whatever picture she's building—then drop back to the grass.
I cheer louder.
I have no idea what she's deciding.
But I want her to decide yes more than I've wanted anything in a long, long time.