Chapter 20
Asher
The math problem has Sophie stumped, and I'm trying very hard not to fix it for her.
"Read me the first part again," I say.
She slides the worksheet half an inch toward me, like proximity is the issue. "A train leaves the station going fifty miles an hour."
"Okay. So what do we know?"
"That trains are slow and boring." She says it flat, eyes on the page, and I have to look back down at the table to keep from laughing. Definitely her mother's daughter. Same dry little delivery, like the joke is a tax she's paying so she doesn’t have to feel anything out loud.
I shake my head.
"Fifty is slow to you? Jesus. Remind me to ask you again when you're sixteen... Okay, what else do we know?"
She sighs the long-suffering sigh of a nine-year-old who’s correctly identified that I'm stalling because I'm not allowed to just give her the answer.
Audrey's rule. I can help her find it, but I can't hand it to her.
Audrey made me promise the second time I sat at the table, and I've kept it, which is more than I can say for most promises I've made in my life.
Across the kitchen, Audrey is bent over a mixing bowl with a spoon in her mouth, frowning at it as if it insulted her.
"Not enough cocoa," she says to the bowl.
She grabs a new spoon from the utensil drawer and reaches for a little jar.
The light from the window over the sink catches the dusting of flour on her forehead, a pale smear she doesn't know is there, and I add it to the growing list of things I can't stop noticing. The cocoa frown. The way she stands with one foot always tapping. The cake is for somebody at church—someone’s kid turning eight—and she’s making it the way she makes all of them.
For free. Like it doesn’t count as something spectacular just because it disappears.
"Who's it for again?" I ask.
"Marcy's granddaughter. From the choir." She tastes the new spoon, and something in her face eases. "There. That's it."
"You should think about charging."
She doesn't look up.
"For a kid's birthday cake?"
"For all of them. You've made, what, six since I started counting?"
"It's just a hobby." She's stirring again, slower now. "It's not like I run a cake business."
"You could. If you wanted to."
Her eyes lift then, just for a second.
"I wouldn't even know where to start."
"I could look into it."
Whatever's on my face, she decides not to argue with it. She doesn't say yes, and she doesn't say no. She just gives a small smile, going back to her bowl, and I let it drop.
Eli's on the floor by the back door, running a fire truck down some cardboard he turned into a track. Audrey and I wince a little each time the dang thing crashes into the baseboards.
I look at Sophie chewing the end of her pencil, and I think about the afternoon I asked her.
It was three weeks ago, give or take. Audrey had run upstairs to deal with something, and I'd caught the kids one at a time because it felt like the right thing to do.
Eli was first because he's easy. Well, mostly.
I accidentally threw away a scrap of paper on the floor that morning, thinking I was helping.
I didn’t know it was a homemade treasure map until Eli discovered it in the trash.
God, that was awful. He cried for a good three minutes until I pulled out another sheet of paper, same color, and he directed me the whole time in its recreation.
The scariest three minutes of my freaking life.
And Audrey just stood there, trying not to giggle while I sat at the table, letting a seven-year-old tell me my lines weren’t straight.
Later that day, I'd crouched down by the fire truck he was playing with and asked him, very seriously, if it would be all right with him if I took his mom on a date sometime.
He'd considered it for about two seconds.
"Ew. Gross." He'd run the truck up my forearm. "As long as I don't have to go."
"You don't have to go."
"Then okay." And that was the entire negotiation.
Sophie was more nerve-wracking.
I'd found her at the table we're at now, coloring, and I'd sat down across from her and waited until she looked up.
"Can I ask you something?" I'd said. "A real question."
She put the marker down. Capped it. Folded her hands like a tiny lawyer.
"Would you be okay if I took your mom on—"
"A date?" she'd said before I got there. Of course she got there first.
"Yeah. But only if you're okay with it."
She thought about it the way she does, where you can see her turning a thing over to check its underside.
"Do you like her?"
And I gave her the truth, because Sophie can smell anything else from across the room. "Yeah. I like her a lot, Soph."
She nodded once, as if she were confirming something she already knew. "I think she likes you too. She's happier when you're here."
Something went tight in my chest at that. I had to look away for a second.
"Are you okay if I take her out, though?" I asked. "Your mom's important. But you're important too, Sophie. So's your brother. This doesn't happen if you're not okay with it."
She studied me for a long moment. Long enough that I understood I was being measured against something, and that whatever it was, she wasn't going to tell me.
"Yeah," she said finally. "You can date her. If you keep making her happy."
I couldn't help the grin that came from that major win.
"Thanks, little fawn."
She looked down at her coloring, trying to hide her own little smile.
I drove home that night, unable to name the feeling for forty minutes. It wasn't the feeling I get from women or the kind I get from a good game. It was older than both—quieter—and it scared me a little, how much I wanted to be worth the answer she'd given me.
"Asher." Sophie's looking at me now, pencil paused. "You're staring at the table again."
"I'm thinking."
"About trains?"
"Deeply."
She rolls her eyes, and the eye-roll is so like her mother's that I have to drink some of the water Audrey set in front of me an hour ago just to have something to do with my face.
Audrey crosses to the microwave with a bowl of butter.
She opens the door, closes it, then punches in the time and frowns. She punches the buttons again. Watches the little numbers count down. The butter goes soft, turning into liquid, and then the timer hits zero and the thing just stops.
"The sound's broken," she says. She presses the same buttons a third time, faster, like the machine is a person she can rush into compliance. "It was beeping yesterday. The sound must be—"
"It's not broken," I say, not looking up from Sophie's worksheet. "I turned the sound off."
She stops pressing buttons.
"You turned the sound off?"
"Yeah. Yesterday. You always start sprinting when something’s in there, trying to catch it before it beeps.
" I draw a little diagram of a train and a station for Sophie, two boxes and a line, because she understands things better when she can see them, and the words on the worksheet aren't enough.
"Figured you could melt butter without giving yourself a heart attack if it just stopped quietly. "
I keep my eyes on the diagram. Box, line, box.
The kitchen goes still.
I look up.
She's standing at the counter with the bowl of melted butter in both hands, and she's looking at me like I've done something enormous. Like I crossed an ocean for her and didn’t even realize it.
There's no name for the look she gives me.
It's not the look from the bathroom or from the front seat of my car.
It's quieter than either, and it goes through me twice as hard. It does something to my chest I’m going to have to sit with later.
It was a microwave beep. I turned off a microwave beep.
I didn’t think twice about it.
"Train problem," I say to Sophie, looking back down. If I keep looking at Audrey, I'm going to get up and cross the room to her, and the kids are right here.
The grin gets away from me, anyway. I feel it pulling at the corner of my mouth, and I let it, head bent over a nine-year-old's homework, because nobody's looking at me and I don't have to perform the size of it for anyone.
I stay through dinner. Spaghetti—Eli's choice—and by the end of it, half the sauce is down the front of his shirt. Sophie cracks the train problem on her own and won’t let me celebrate it, which is her part of the deal.
Audrey’s chocolate cake comes out of the oven, smelling like something out of a better life than mine, and she lets me lick the spoon.
Eli is scandalized by the unfairness of it.
When I leave, the porch light is on and the kids are already in pajamas, arguing about a show.
I kiss Audrey's temple at the entryway. Soft. Quick. Her hair smells like sugar, cocoa, and something sweet that's uniquely her.
"Drive safe," she says.
"Always do."
I don't particularly, but I drive the hour back to Harlow slower than I have to. Somewhere around the lake I notice I'm doing it on purpose, stretching the time between her house and the rest of my life. I feel more like a man with something to protect than I've ever felt about anything.
My phone keeps lighting up, buzzing against the cupholder in the console. The group chat that’s been going off since the middle of dinner. It's been hard keeping this from them. My friends. My sister.
I want to tell them. I want to tell somebody.
I've spent over a decade making sure nobody got close enough to know me.
Now I've got the realest thing I've ever had.
And I can't tell anyone about her.