12. Nina
— ? —
Nina
Morning coffee tastes different here.
In the Bellevue Avenue mansion, I drank from china cups that cost more than my first car, looking out at manicured gardens that someone else maintained. Here, I hold a chipped mug I bought at a yard sale, watching the harbor wake up through windows I cleaned myself.
It tastes like freedom.
It also tastes slightly like paint fumes, because I left the nursery door open again, but freedom is rarely perfect.
***
Adrian starts showing up without asking for anything.
The first time, he brings groceries - practical things, milk and eggs and the weird cheese I like that’s impossible to find, the one the shop on Bellevue special-orders. He sets the bags on my porch, knocks twice, and is halfway down the walk before I open the door.
“You forgot to say hi,” I call after him.
He stops. Turns. There’s a beat where neither of us knows what we’re doing.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“There’s cheese.”
“I can see that.”
“Okay.” He nods, shoves his hands in his pockets like a teenager who’s forgotten how his own arms work. “Okay. Good.”
He leaves. I stand in my doorway holding a bag of groceries and hating the small, traitorous thing in my chest that watched him walk away and wanted to call him back.
***
The second time, he’s sitting in his car when I get home from my OB appointment. He rolls down the window.
“How’s the baby?”
“Fine.” I stop at my mailbox, gathering envelopes, keeping my voice as flat as I can manage. “Growing.”
“Good.” He doesn’t move to get out. His hands stay at ten and two like the car might bolt without his permission. “I just wanted to... I don’t know. Be somewhere nearby in case you needed anything.”
“I don’t.”
“Okay.” He starts the car. “Call if that changes.”
He drives away. I stand there with my mail, feeling something I can’t quite name, and it takes me until I’m inside with the kettle on to admit that the something is disappointment.
You told him to keep his distance, I remind myself. You don’t get to be sad when he listens.
The kettle has no opinion on this. The kettle is smarter than I am.
***
The third time, he brings a hammer.
“Your porch step is loose,” he says when I open the door. “I noticed it last week.”
“So you came to fix it?”
“If you’ll let me.”
I step aside. He kneels on the weathered boards and gets to work, and I watch from the doorway with my arms crossed, waiting for the catch.
There isn’t one.
What there is: the flex of his forearms as he drives the nail home. The way his shirt pulls across his shoulders when he reaches. The familiar curve of his neck, bent in concentration, and the absolutely unwelcome memory of pressing my mouth to exactly that spot.
I grip the doorframe harder.
“The railing’s loose too,” he says without looking up. “Did you know?”
“It has character.”
“It has dry rot.”
“Character,” I repeat, because if I agree with him he’ll stay another twenty minutes, and if he stays another twenty minutes I’m going to keep standing here cataloging his forearms like a woman who has completely lost control of her own brain.
He glances up at me then. Something flickers across his face - awareness, maybe, or hope, or the ghost of a thousand mornings when looking at each other like this ended very differently.
“Nina.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out softer than I mean it to.
“I wasn’t going to-”
“I know.” I pull my cardigan tighter, armor made of wool and bad decisions. “Fix the railing too. Since you’re here.”
He fixes the step. Fixes the railing I pretended not to know about. Asks if there’s anything else, and I say no too quickly, because if he stays another minute I’m going to do something stupid like invite him inside.
He nods. Gathers his tools. At the bottom of the steps he pauses, one hand on the railing he just saved, testing it.
“It’ll hold now,” he says.
He is not talking about the railing. We both know he is not talking about the railing.
“We’ll see,” I say.
I stand there for a long time after his car disappears, hating the way my pulse is still running too fast.
No speeches. No pleas. No grand gestures.
Just a man trying to be useful to a woman who doesn’t need him - and a woman whose body hasn’t gotten the memo about boundaries.
***
Cole comes for dinner that week.
He looks better than he did in the café - still thin, still exhausted, but there’s color in his face now. Hope, maybe. Or just the relief of someone who doesn’t have to carry a secret alone anymore.
He walks straight past the table I’ve set and into the nursery doorway, where he stands studying my mural with the expression of a man appraising fine art.
“Your boats are drunk,” he says.
“They’re impressionistic.”
“They’re hammered, Nina. That one’s capsizing.”
“That one is tacking.”
“Into the lighthouse?”
“Sit down and eat your dinner before I rescind your godfather privileges.”
He grins and sits, and for a moment - the wry tilt of his head, the way he shakes out his napkin like he’s disarming it - he’s just Cole. Not Cole-who’s-dying. Not Cole-the-secret. Just my oldest friend, insulting my artwork at my own table, the way God intended.
“He’s trying,” Cole says, reaching for the bread basket.
“I know.”
“Are you going to let him?”
“I don’t know.” I push vegetables around my plate. “Part of me wants to. Part of me thinks that’s just the part that’s tired of being alone.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“What do you mean?”
Cole sets down his fork. “You can want to forgive him because you’re lonely AND because he deserves forgiveness. Both things can be true at the same time.”
“I don’t know if he deserves it.”
“He doesn’t,” Cole says simply. “Forgiveness isn’t about deserving. It’s about deciding whether holding onto the hurt is worth more than letting it go.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“Dying gives you perspective.” He grins - that familiar Cole grin - and I realize how much I’ve missed it. “Also, I’ve been watching a lot of daytime television. Deeply philosophical stuff.”
I throw a piece of bread at him. He catches it, laughing, and points it at me like a gavel.
“For the record,” he says, “he fixed my kitchen faucet on Tuesday.”
My fork stops halfway to my mouth. “He what?”
“Showed up with a wrench. Didn’t say much. Fixed the faucet, checked my smoke detectors like a very handsome fire marshal, and left.” Cole shrugs, but his eyes are watching me carefully over the bread. “Didn’t ask me to tell you. Which is why I’m telling you.”
I stare at my plate. The image assembles itself against my will - Adrian on his knees under Cole’s ancient sink, in the apartment of the man he’d accused me of loving, asking for nothing.
“Don’t,” I warn.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face said plenty.”
“My face,” Cole says serenely, buttering his bread, “is dying. Show it some respect.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Cancer card.” He takes an enormous bite. “It’s the only perk. Let me have it.”
For the first time in weeks, the cottage feels like home.
He hugs me at the door, longer than usual, and I feel how much of him is still missing under the jacket.
“Next scan’s in a few weeks,” he says into my hair, casual in the way he only gets about the things that terrify him. “Just so you have it on the calendar.”
I hold on one extra second and don’t let my face change until his taillights are gone.