Chapter 6 Noah
I started listening for her car.
It was a small, stupid thing. The particular sound of her tires on the gravel, the way the engine cut off, the pause before the shop door opened.
By the second week I knew the rhythm of it the same way I knew the sound of Lily’s sneakers on the stairs in the morning.
Awareness had become a habit I couldn’t break.
Tessa arrived that Monday with two coffees and a paper bag that smelled of cinnamon. She set one cup on the corner of my workbench without asking and kept the other for herself.
“Peace offering,” she said. “For keeping you late last week.”
“You didn’t keep me.” I wiped my hands and took the cup. The coffee was black and strong, the way I drank it. She had paid attention. “Files turned out clean. Printer’s running them today.”
She smiled, small and real, and the shop felt less empty for it. I watched her set up at the folding table—the same careful arrangement of laptop, tablet, and notebook—and tried not to notice how the morning light caught in her hair.
Lily noticed everything.
That afternoon she sat on a stool near Tessa’s table with her sketchbook, swinging her legs and asking questions in the direct way only a seven-year-old could.
“Do you have a dog in the city?”
“No,” Tessa answered, eyes on her screen. “My building doesn’t allow them.”
“Do you like living in a tall building?”
“Sometimes. I can see a lot of lights at night.”
“Do you think my dad is handsome?”
My hand stilled on the plane. Tessa’s fingers paused over the keyboard. A faint pink rose in her cheeks, but her voice stayed light.
“I think your dad is very good at his work,” she said. “And he makes excellent birdhouses.”
Lily looked thoughtful. “That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Tessa agreed. “It isn’t.”
I bent over the board again and forced the blade to move in a steady line. The pull in my chest had nothing to do with the wood.
Later, after I had closed the shop and driven Lily home, the questions continued at the kitchen table over spaghetti.
“Is Miss Tessa going to stay after the festival?”
“She’s only here for the design work, bug.”
“But she likes us.” Lily pushed a meatball around her plate. “She laughs at your jokes even when they’re not funny.”
“My jokes are funny.”
“Sometimes.” She looked up at me with Erin’s seriousness in her gray-blue eyes. “I like when she’s here. The shop feels different.”
I reached across and smoothed the loose strand of hair that always escaped her braid. “Different isn’t always better.”
“This different is better,” she said simply.
After she was asleep, I stood in the doorway of the bedroom and looked at the photograph on the dresser.
Erin’s smile. The version of my life that had ended four years ago and still occupied the same space in the house, in the shop, in the quiet hours when Lily was not there to fill them.
Guilt rose the way it always did—slow and heavy and familiar.
Wanting something new felt like stepping on a grave.
Noticing the way Tessa’s presence changed the air felt like a betrayal I had not earned the right to make.
I turned away and went back downstairs.
The next evening Tessa stayed late again to finalize the last of the festival collateral.
The shop was quiet except for the low hum of the lights and the occasional shift of wood cooling in the night air.
She worked with her lower lip caught between her teeth, completely absorbed.
I finished the final sanding on a set of cabinet doors and found myself watching her more than the grain under my hands.
When she finally stretched and closed the laptop, I was standing closer than I meant to be.
“You always look at problems like that?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to solve them whether they want to be solved or not.”
She tilted her head, considering. “Pretty much. It’s either that or let them sit on my chest all night.”
The honesty in the answer pulled something tight under my ribs.
I set the sanding block down. The space between us felt charged in a way I had been trying to ignore for days.
Her eyes were warm and tired and open. I could smell the faint vanilla of her skin under the stronger scent of sawdust and coffee.
I almost reached for her.
My hand lifted halfway before the old weight settled back across my shoulders—the memory of a hospital room, the sound of Lily crying in the night, the careful walls I had built so nothing could break us again. I let the hand fall.
Tessa saw the movement. Something flickered in her expression—understanding, disappointment, acceptance—all at once. She looked down and began packing her things with quiet efficiency.
“I should go,” she said. “Early start tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
I walked her to the door. The night outside was clear and cold, stars sharp above the black line of the trees. She paused on the threshold, portfolio under her arm.
“Noah.”
I waited.
“You don’t have to keep the line so hard,” she said softly. “Not on my account.”
Then she left. I stood in the open doorway and listened to her car disappear down the gravel road until there was nothing left but the wind in the pines and the sound of my own breathing.
Inside, the shop felt larger and quieter than it had any right to. I turned off the lights one by one and locked the door.
Lily’s words from dinner followed me home.
This different is better.
I was no longer sure I had the strength to keep pretending it wasn’t.