Chapter 18 #2
I closed the door just enough. When I eased into the water, heat took my breath in a clean way and gave it back warmer.
I tipped my head under and let my hair tug-free in the current.
The sounds of the house shifted through water’s filter—footsteps, a cupboard, the faint clink of a mug—domestic noises made dreamy.
In the bath, the courthouse came back in clearer relief.
The sticky hinge. The way the judge’s signature slanted downhill like it had somewhere else to be.
I remembered how proud I’d been at eighteen and how that pride thrummed now under the bruised part of me, insisting on itself.
Hazel Bradford. The stamp of it still on my tongue.
A choice I’d made and remade and remade.
I thought about Aunt Michelle, stirring a pot, calling into the living room: “You’re Hazel Bradford. Practice saying it.” I’d rolled it around my mouth until it fit right and then I’d labeled everything with it—mailbox, email, a little brass plate on the door of my first office.
He had found me, anyway.
I stayed in the tub for what felt like a long while.
When the water cooled from perfect to pleasant, I pulled the plug and watched it whirl away.
There was something satisfying about the circle of it, the way it chose a direction and committed.
I wrapped myself in the blue towel and padded into the bedroom, hair dripping onto my shoulders, skin pinked by heat.
Gideon was exactly where he said he’d be, arm crooked on his knee, head tipped toward the door like a man listening for a frequency only he could hear.
“I didn’t drown,” I reported.
“Good,” he said gravely. “I was prepared to perform a dramatic, shirtless rescue.”
I snorted. “We’re fresh out of damsels.”
“Noted,” he said, and stood, eyes scanning me like he was taking a measurement only he knew what to do with.
Not lustful—though I could see the pulse point on his neck argue for a moment—but assessing for hurt.
“Tea’s incoming,” he added. “And Maude’s insisting you take the big bowl of casserole to bed. ”
“I won’t take no for an answer,” Maude called from farther down the hall. “Also there’s whipped cream if you want me to gild the lily.”
“Please,” I called back, grateful, and she laughed.
Gideon handed me a soft T-shirt he must have thieved from his drawer and stepped back while I tugged it on. He shook out the blankets like he was unrolling a map and then, when I slid between cool sheets, set a tray on my lap with a mug, a honey pot, and a wedge of something bubbling.
“Do you want to talk more?” he asked. “Or do you want quiet?”
“Talk,” I said, surprising myself. “You should know … everything. Or close. If it isn’t too much for you.”
“It’s not.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, thigh pressed against my shin.
“I told you about Michelle,” I said. “Her husband—Joseph—he was better with weekends than mornings. He drove me to school on the first day of sophomore year because my hands shook too hard to steer and he said, ‘hands are for shaking or steering, not both’ and we laughed so we wouldn’t cry.
He moved to Arizona after she died. We talk on holidays.
I don’t have siblings. No cousins, either.
I have friends, but they’re spread thin with kids and life. It’s … mostly me.”
“Not anymore,” Gideon said.
My throat did a traitor thing. “I keep things orderly because it helps,” I confessed. “Batteries in the laundry room. Flashlight in the nightstand. It makes the world behave enough to let me sleep some nights.”
“I like a plan,” he said, not reaching to fix anything, just making space for the way I lined the shelves of my mind.
“I thought … if I could be meticulous enough, careful enough, I could make a geometry the world would respect.” I looked down at the tea and watched the steam unwind itself into the air like a tame snake.
“And then he stepped into the dining room downstairs and said my name and it didn’t matter what I labeled or locked. ”
“It matters,” he said quietly. “Order doesn’t make a man like that stop. But it makes you who you are.”
I believed him. Maybe not fully yet. But the belief had a foothold.
“I hate that I’m the only target,” I whispered. “It makes me feel … highlighted. Like an outline waiting for a dart.”
“He won’t hurt you,” he said. “And if he tries, I’ll make him regret the impulse.”
“Do you think he’s on parole?” I asked. “Isn’t there supposed to be … someone? A person to tell him where he can’t go?”
Gideon’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, like a weather front moving in. “I’m checking on that,” he said. “I’ll know more by morning.”
I stared at him. “How did this happen?”
“I think the world is cruel,” he said, echoing me with less poetry and more facts, “and sometimes it’s organized about it.”
The back of my neck prickled. I sipped the tea, sweet and sharply comforting. “Do I need to go to a hotel?” I asked. “Should I run for a while? Change locations?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t run. He’ll learn.”
“And if he doesn’t learn?”
“Then I teach him.”
The way he said it eased a muscle I hadn’t unclenched since twelve.
We ate off the tray like kids at a slumber party, Maude materializing to drop off whipped cream and to fuss, then disappearing. At some point, the constant tremor in my hands stopped for the night. The world didn’t right itself, but it got close enough to stand on without wobbling.
When the dishes were gone, Gideon set his phone face-down on the nightstand and looked at me like I was a map he wasn’t done learning.
“Sleep here,” he said. Not a question. A promise. “You don’t have to be alone tonight.”
I hesitated, then whispered, “Will you—just hold me?”
He didn’t even blink. “There’s no place else I’d be.”
When he lay down beside me, his body curved around mine like it had always known the shape. The world outside could have fallen away, and I wouldn’t have noticed. His arm slipped around my waist, hand settling over my heart.