Chapter 17
Tessa
I carried what Noah had said about Cole for the next several days.
The words turned over in me on the walk to the bakery in the morning, in the quiet stretches at the prep counter, in the half-hour after dinner while Noah did homework at the table, and I dried dishes I had already dried.
He looks at her when she's not looking. I had a son who was nine years old, and a son who was nine years old had clocked my fiancé harder than I'd been letting myself.
I was softer around Cole the way water is softer than ice.
I caught myself standing closer to him in the kitchen than I used to.
I caught myself not jumping when his hand brushed mine, reaching for the same drawer.
I caught myself looking at him a beat longer when he came in from his shift.
Whether he noticed, I didn't know. He hadn't said anything. He wouldn't.
On the Tuesday after the GAL visit, we were in the kitchen after dinner.
Noah was in his room with the model plane.
Cole was at the sink in a T-shirt with his sleeves pushed up to the elbows, washing the pasta pot that the dishwasher wouldn't fit.
I was beside him at the counter with the dish towel, drying.
He set the pot in the rack. He turned the tap off.
"Hey, Tessa?"
I looked up.
His voice had a careful note in it. The note men used when they were about to say a thing they hadn't been planning to say tonight, and were saying anyway because they had run out of ways not to.
"There's something I need to tell you."
My stomach went tight.
"Okay."
"There's this girl—"
No.
The sentence Cole was starting opened only one way in the language of fake engagements.
I've met someone. The arrangement is over.
And I had been softening for three days.
I had been letting myself want without naming the wanting.
I hadn't realized, until that one word, that I had something to lose.
"—who's been bothering me at Sean's."
I let out the breath I hadn't noticed pulling.
"Bothering you?"
"Yeah."
He hadn't looked back at me. He was still standing at the sink with his hands resting on the rim, looking at the spot where the dishwater was draining out. I turned to face him, the towel still in my hand.
"Tell me."
He told me. There was a woman who had come into Sean's the morning he'd taken Noah to the visitation—the trip to Sean's I'd made him a tray of pastries for.
Mid-twenties. Dark-haired. A heavy coat.
She'd asked him for help with a leak under her sink.
The pretext had been thin enough that he'd clocked it on the spot.
She'd stood too close to him in the aisle.
She'd touched his forearm on the way out.
"That was the first time."
"There've been others?"
"Two more. Different places. A couple of days after Sean's, she showed up at the firehouse—said she lived in the neighborhood and wanted to drop off cookies for the crew."
"Cookies?"
"Yeah."
"What was the third?"
"Last Wednesday. Davis and I were out shopping for the house, picking up groceries for the week's meals. She was in the dairy aisle. Made a thing about not believing how small the town was."
He paused and looked at me directly for the first time since the conversation had started.
"Do you think he'd hire somebody to—"
He hesitated. Looked for the word. The word he found was small in his mouth.
"—to try to seduce me."
The laugh came up out of me before I could stop it.
He waited.
"I'm sorry. I am—I'm not laughing at the question. I'm laughing at the word in your mouth."
"It was the word that fit."
"I know it was."
"Tessa."
I made myself stop smiling. "I wouldn't put it past him. He'd think it was clever. He'd think we deserved it."
He nodded. He didn't smile back. He went back to looking at the sink, thinking about something. After a beat, he looked over at me again.
"Would you come with me?"
"Where?"
"Sean's. Tomorrow."
I almost smiled again, for a different reason this time.
The man was a mountain. He'd carried Noah out of a burning building over one shoulder.
He'd stood in our living room with a court official three days ago and answered every question with the steady plainness of someone who had decided who he was a long time ago.
And here he was at the kitchen sink, asking me—quietly, almost embarrassed—to come with him to the hardware store, because a girl in a heavy coat had thrown his sense of where the floor was.
But it was more than that.
He had told me. About every one of the times she had shown up.
He hadn't had to tell me. No one else would have known.
He had told me anyway, the way you tell the person you're with—putting it on the record, making sure nothing could become a thing later, making sure I'd never wonder.
As if we were actually in a relationship.
As if he didn't want me to think, even for a second, that he had wanted any of it.
It almost made my chest hurt.
"Yeah," I said. "I'll come."
"Tessa, if it's a problem—"
"It's not a problem. I'll come."
He nodded. Once. The corner of his mouth eased, fractionally.
"Thank you."
Sean's Truck n' Salvage store was on the south end of Havensworth, a corrugated-metal warehouse with a gravel lot and a hand-painted sign Sean's wife had done about twenty years back. Cole pulled into the lot on Wednesday morning and parked on the side, the way he always did.
The bell over the door jingled when we walked in.
Sean was at the counter with a clipboard. He looked up. His face went into that warm shape men in this town got when somebody's fiancée walked in with somebody they liked.
"Tessa. Glad to see you again."
"You too, Sean."
"What can I get you both?"
Cole stepped up to the counter. "Paint. Exterior. And finishing nails. Two-and-a-half-inch."
"Swatches are over by the end wall. Help yourself. I'll grab the nails."
I drifted toward the swatch wall while Cole stayed at the counter with Sean.
The wall was the size of an oversized window—rows and rows of paint chips arranged by color family, cards I could pull off a metal hook.
I stood in front of it and felt, for the first time in I couldn't put a number to, the particular lightness of being asked for an opinion on something low-stakes. Color. Just color.
I started with the greens. Sage. Olive. A pale pearl green, the color of new lettuce. A clear, sharp green that stopped me when I saw it.
I knew the green before I knew I knew it.
It was the green of my own eyes. The ones I'd been hiding behind colored contacts for nine months.
The ones I'd told Cole, on a Wednesday at the bakery before Thanksgiving, that I hated—because the cover required it, because I needed a reason to be wearing the contacts.
The ones Cole had looked at across the bakery counter and said, in a voice lower than he'd meant to use, I don't see why you hate them.
The line had stayed in his voice in my head for two days afterward. I was hearing it again now, with the swatch in my hand.
"Those look like great colors."
I jumped a little. Cole was beside me at the wall. He was looking at the swatch in my hand, not at my face.
"I like the green."
"It's a good green."
I put it back on the hook. I made myself.
"I was going to do the exterior tonight and come back for the inside," Cole said. "Still deciding what color to paint the kitchen."
"What about a yellow?"
He looked at me.
"A kitchen wants a yellow," I said. "Soft. Buttery. The kind of color that makes people want to eat in there."
I pulled three yellow swatches off the wall and held them out. He took them. He flipped through them slowly, the way he flipped through anything he was actually thinking about.
"These two," he said.
"That's the one I would've picked."
He pulled one of the two off and put the other back. He kept looking at the swatch in his hand.
While he was looking at it, my mind went somewhere it had been going for days.
He's building me a room, Noah had said, to a woman with a clipboard, in a careful voice. In the new house. On Ashford Street. The room is going to be on the second floor. He let me pick which one.
I'd been planning to ask Cole about it. I hadn't yet figured out how. We'd walked through the house together once, weeks back. He'd told me he was going to fix it up. He hadn't told me he was building a room for my son.
Cole didn't say things he didn't mean. If he'd said it to Noah, he meant it. Which meant that some weeks ago, on a quiet afternoon I'd never know about, Cole Weston had decided which room in his house was going to belong to my nine-year-old son. And he had told my son. And he hadn't told me.
How long had he been planning—
"Tessa."
I looked up.
Cole was looking at the front door.
"That's her."
I followed his eyes.
A woman had just come into the shop. Mid-twenties. Dark hair pulled back. A heavy coat she hadn't unbuttoned, even though the day was warm enough that she should have. She had a phone in her hand, the way the woman at the bakery had held her phone the day she'd recognized me.
She caught sight of us across the shop.
I made my decision in the time it took her to take her second step toward us.
I tapped Cole's shoulder.
He turned to me.
I went up on my toes, put my arms around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth.
For a fraction of a second, he stiffened the way he had stiffened on the lawn that night at the fire—the same small stilling. Then his arm came around my waist. His other hand settled at the small of my back. And he kissed me back.
He kissed me back like he'd decided to.