Chapter 4
Colt
Lily has taken over the kitchen table. Library books in overlapping stacks, her notebook open to a color-coded timeline, index cards pinned under her elbow with locations and dates she's pulled from the internet.
She's building a photo essay on Nightfall Cove for her spring break project, and she's treating it like a dissertation.
"I need primary sources," she says without looking up. "Mrs. Ramsey wants original photographs, not internet scans. The library has the archive collection from when the town incorporated. Miss Frost showed me the catalog."
Miss Frost. Three times in two minutes. Lily's been dropping the name into conversation all week with the subtlety of a brick through a window.
"So text her," I say.
"Dad. I'm twelve. You won't let me have a phone, remember? That whole speech about screen time and developing brains?" She looks up from her notebook. "Can you please text her? You have her number."
I do have her number. Ellie texted me four days ago about a notebook Lily apparently left at the library. The notebook turned up in Lily's backpack the next morning. Neither of us mentioned it.
I pick up my phone, type the message, and stare at it for ten seconds before hitting send. Lily's spring break project needs archive photos. She says you know the collection. Would you want to come help? We're at the house.
The reply comes in under a minute. Yes. What time?
Four? Do you remember where we live or do you need the address?
I remember, from dropping Lily off last month. I'll bring the reference binder.
I put the phone down before I can think too hard about that. Lily hasn't looked up, but she's grinning at her notebook.
"Don't start," I say.
"I'm not starting anything."
"Your face says otherwise."
She turns a page and the grin gets wider.
Ellie shows up at ten past four with a canvas tote of binders, a box of archive gloves, and a container of oatmeal cookies she says the neighbor made. I hold the door open wider than necessary so she can pass without brushing against me.
She stops in the hallway. Takes in the rain boots by the door, the keys on the hook, Holly's photograph of Lily on the wall. She doesn't say anything about it.
"Come on in. Kitchen's straight back."
"Miss Frost!" Lily appears with the energy of a kid who heard the car pull up and spent the last five minutes clearing a chair. "I organized everything by decade. Is that right?"
"That's exactly right." Ellie sets the tote down and pulls out the binder. "Start with the incorporation documents. Photographs are labeled on the back—date, photographer, location if they had it."
They sit next to each other. Lily asks questions with the intensity she brings to everything, and Ellie matches it, showing her how to use the archive gloves, how to cross-reference a photograph with a written record.
Lily leans into Ellie's shoulder to look at a print and Ellie tilts the binder toward her without thinking about it.
I stand at the stove chopping vegetables and watch them in the reflection of the window.
Maren's recipe cards sit in the holder by the burners.
Her handwriting, her notes in the margins.
More garlic. Lily won't eat this without cheese.
I cook from them because they're good recipes, and because the handwriting keeps her in the room.
The rest of the kitchen does the same thing in a different way—Lily's art covering the fridge, the reading chair by the window with a permanent dent from the nights I spend in it after she goes to bed.
This house is me and Lily. Every surface says so.
Ellie sits in the middle of all of it and fits. She just fits. Lily laughs at something she says about a caption on a 1942 harbor photograph, and she laughs back, and the two of them bent over the table with their heads together—
The scenting hits me. Both of them at once.
Lily's happiness, clean and uncomplicated, the way she smells when she's safe and engaged and with someone she trusts.
And Ellie's—warmer, deeper, a settled contentment I've never picked up from her at the library.
At the library there's always a nervous edge. Here there's none.
The combined scent fills the kitchen. I've lived in this house for twelve years and kept it running. I haven't had it feel like this since before Maren died.
I set the knife down and grip the edge of the countertop and breathe through it.
"Stay for dinner," I say. It comes out before I've decided to say it.
Ellie looks up from the binder. "Oh—no, I don't want to impose. You've already got everything going, I should—"
"Please?" Lily spins in her chair. "Please stay, Miss Frost. Dad always makes too much anyway and it's just us and he made the good chicken, the one with the lemon, and we never have anyone over for dinner, please—"
"Lily."
"I'm just saying we never have anyone over."
Ellie looks at me. I shrug. "She's not wrong."
"Okay." Ellie smiles, and it reaches her eyes in a way I haven't seen before. "I'd love to, thank you."
We eat at the table with the archive photographs pushed to one side.
Lily talks through most of it—her project and photographs, which decade she thinks had the best architecture.
Ellie listens and asks follow-up questions while she eats two helpings of the chicken without commenting on it, which is better than a compliment.
I sit across from them and eat my dinner and don't think about how right this feels because if I think about it I'll have to do something about it.
Lily finishes the project by seven. She yawns, enormous and fake, and stretches.
"I'm going to my room. I'm tired."
"It's seven o'clock."
"I'm tired from research." She kisses my cheek on the way past, glances at Ellie. "Thanks, Miss Frost. The incorporation photos are perfect."
"Anytime, Lily."
Her bedroom door clicks shut.
Ellie's gaze lands on the closed door, then on me.
"She's not very subtle, is she," I say.
"No." Ellie's mouth twitches. "She really isn't."
I pour coffee and hand her the blue mug, not Maren's, and lean against the sink with archive photographs spread between us on the table.
"Dinner was really good, thank you," Ellie says. "Where did you learn to cook?"
"Maren's recipe cards." I take a drink. "After she died, Lily was four and living on chicken nuggets. I gave it about three weeks before I decided that wasn't going to be our life, so I started working through the cards in order. Burned everything for the first three months. Lily ate it anyway."
"She was four."
"She had low standards. I had low skills. We met in the middle." I lean back against the sink. "I like it now. Cooking. Didn't expect to, but it turns out chopping veggies for forty minutes is the closest thing to meditation I've got."
Ellie smiles at that, a real one, not the polite version she wears at the checkout desk. "I'm terrible at it. I eat cereal most nights. Or toast, if I'm feeling ambitious."
"That's bleak, Miss Frost."
"Says the man who just admitted he burned three months' worth of meals."
"I improved. Have you?"
"I've upgraded to toast with butter." She lifts her mug. "This is as domestic as I get."
"What do you do after the library closes?"
"Walk the coast path if it's still light or read.
I'm in bed by nine most nights." She pauses.
"When I moved here, I wanted a town where nobody expected anything from me after six o'clock.
Portland was all dinner plans and couples' friends and holidays where I smiled until my face hurt.
Here I just... stop at six. Lock the door, walk home, eat my cereal. "
"I get that," I say, because I do.
She looks at me for a second longer than she needs to. "Yeah. I think you might."
We sit with that for a minute. I drink my coffee. She drinks hers. It's the most comfortable silence I've had with another adult in years.
Ellie breaks it. "You know, Lily tried to put me on a reading schedule last Saturday. She left a list of titles she thought I should get through before the end of spring break."
"She does that. She made Knox read Earthsea last summer. He called me at midnight to ask if the dragons were metaphorical."
Ellie laughs. "She argued with me about the ending of The Dispossessed. Said Shevek's return felt like avoidance."
"What did you say?"
"I asked her if going home with new knowledge could be revolutionary."
"And?"
"She told me she wanted the ending to cost him something." Ellie shakes her head. "She's twelve. She argues about thematic stakes like she's defending a dissertation. She is ridiculously intelligent for her age."
"She gets that from her mother."
I didn't plan to say it. Ellie goes still across the table.
"Maren loved books," I say. "She read the way Lily reads. Like the author owed her an explanation for every choice. She would have built a whole curriculum around it if she'd had the time."
Ellie holds my look for a moment. Most people rush to say something when you mention your dead wife.
"What's the worst book you've ever recommended to someone?" I say. "Professionally."
She covers her face with one hand. "Oh god. The Celestine Prophecy. A patron asked for a life-changing read and I panicked."
"You panicked."
"She was standing right there and I blanked on every book I've ever read. It was my first week. She came back and told me it changed her marriage."
"For better or worse?"
"She didn't specify and I was too afraid to ask."
The laugh catches me off guard. Mine, not hers.
She grins at the sound of it, then laughs too, and the laugh turns into a snort she tries to catch behind her hand.
It comes out anyway. Her neck goes pink, the blush climbing from her collar to her jaw, and I can smell the shift in her—embarrassment and amusement and, underneath, want.
She can't hide it and I can't ignore it, my grip tightens around the coffee mug.
I keep my hands where they are.
"So where did you study?" she says. Her neck stays pink. "Before the university position."
"Portland State. English lit."
Her mouth opens. "You're kidding. I was Portland State. Class of '05."
"I was class of '03."
"We were in the same department for two years and never crossed paths." She shakes her head, still smiling.
She laughs and I want to kiss her. She's sitting at my kitchen table with archive photographs between us, a blush on her neck and my daughter down the hall. I want to cross the space between us and put my mouth on hers.
But I don't move.
We look at the same photograph, the harbor in 1948, fishing boats in a row. Her hand rests on the edge of the print and mine rests next to it, and when her knuckles brush mine neither of us pulls away.
She's closer than I realized. The curl at the nape of her neck. My reading glasses sit low on my nose.
Two inches. My eyes drop to her mouth.
Lily's door opens.
"Dad? Can I have water?"
We both pull back at the same time.
"Yeah, sweetheart. Give me a second."
I fill a glass and walk it down the hall. Lily takes it. She glances past me toward the kitchen, then back with a smirk on her face.
"Goodnight, Dad."
"Goodnight, Lil."
When I come back, Ellie is standing with her tote over her shoulder, not meeting my eyes. Her fingers shake on the strap. I walk her to the front door.
The porch light catches the rain. Fine mist, spring weather, the kind that gets into everything.
She turns in the doorway to say something and the words don't come.
She's close enough that I can see the pulse in her throat, the way her lips part around whatever she meant to say.
Her eyes drop to my mouth and stay there.
I could close the distance. One step. My hand finds the doorframe instead.
She exhales, steps back, pulls her jacket tighter.
"Thank you," I say. "For helping her."
"Of course, I love Lily, she's such an amazing girl." She's halfway to her car when I say it.
"Ellie."
She stops. Turns. I'm in the doorway with the light behind me and my fists in my pockets because if I take them out I'll reach for her.
"That's not what I mean. When I say thank you." I hold her across the wet front walk. "It's not just for Lily."
She stands in the rain for a long second. Then she dips her chin and turns for her car.
The headlights sweep across the house. Then she's gone.
Ellie's photographs sit in a neat stack where she left them, and the chair across from mine is empty. Lily's light is off down the hall.
Her coffee mug sits by the sink, the blue one, forgotten. I pick it up and find coral lipstick on the rim.
I wash it, dry it, and open the cabinet.
Lily's mug on the left, the purple one she picked out at a craft fair when she was six.
Maren's in the middle, white ceramic, untouched for eight years because throwing it out felt like a second funeral and using it felt worse. I set the blue one on the right.
Three mugs in a row.
I close the cabinet and stand in my kitchen and let myself think about what life would look like with Ellie in it.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Thank you for dinner.
I type and delete two responses before I send one.
Anytime.
A minute passes.
Goodnight, Colt.
Not Mr. Rivers. Colt.
Goodnight, Ellie.