Chapter 4 #3
Bonnie noticed that Gray was watching her tidy her desk while he bagged the empty milkshake cups and answered Noah’s questions. He saw everything around him, filed it away, and said nothing about most of it. It occurred to her to wonder when and where he’d learned to do that.
“Are we still on for Tuesday?” he asked, taking the paper bag of trash from her.
“Eight-thirty,” she confirmed.
“See you then. Have fun with your puzzle, Cassidy, and good luck thinking up a genetics question I can’t answer, Noah.”
He merely nodded to her, flashing her one of those sexy smiles of his that completely undid her. Her face heated up in response. Of course it did. She always blushed when he smiled at her.
Noah watched the door close. “I like him,” he announced and went back to his notebook.
Cassidy said nothing. But she was smiling secretively at whatever she was writing.
She might have a serious problem on her hands. Because she liked him, too.
On Monday the kids asked, with studied casualness, if they could come to her office after school instead of going to the diner.
Bonnie said yes because she wasn't born yesterday and it was easier to observe Gray’s interactions with her children from close range than to wonder about it from a distance.
Noah came through her office door at a dead run after school, backpack half off one shoulder, spiral notebook clutched against his chest. Poor Gray.
Behind him, at a brisk walk, came Cassidy. She pointed accusingly at Noah. “I told him he’s supposed to walk into official buildings and not run.”
“Noted,” Bonnie said with a tiny smile.
Privately, she was pleased that Noah didn’t let Cassidy boss him around. At least not all the time. It was good for Noah to be independent and good for Cassidy not to always get her way.
Noah dropped into the chair beside her desk and demanded, “Has Gray been here today?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
Noah's face lit up. “He might still come. It's only four o'clock.”
“He’ll come,” Cassidy said with serene certainty, settling at her table by the window and pulling out her homework.
“I have TWELVE questions,” Noah announced, opening the notebook.
“Do your homework, Noah,” Bonnie said. “If Gray stops by, then you can think about your questions.”
“But the questions ARE . . .”
“. . . not your homework. You're in second grade. Do the actual homework your teacher sent home.”
Noah pouted but pulled a rumpled worksheet out of his backpack. Cassidy finished her homework quickly and took out a new library book.
“He may not come in today,” she said, mostly to herself.
“There's still time,” Cassidy said calmly, turning a page. The certainty in her voice was either genuine or an extremely good performance. Bonnie’s money was on the latter. Cassidy was nearly as eager to talk with Gray again as Noah was.
The hallway door opened.
Noah leaped to his feet.
Grayson walked in carrying a manila envelope and wearing what Bonnie privately identified as his office clothes: pressed and starched shirt, dark jeans, the belt buckle she'd since learned was a prize for qualify for the World Rodeo Championships in saddle bronc riding a few years back. Gray murmured a greeting to Cassidy and glanced down at Noah’s notebook, a faint smile hovering on his lips.
“Guess what?” Noah said. “I have twelve questions.”
“Hello to you, too, Noah,” Gray said. He looked at Bonnie. “I have the inspection request forms the county requested. Do you have a minute to look them over?”
“Of course.” She took the envelope from him. “I'll process these while you fill out the facility certification form. It'll take you about fifteen minutes, and then this whole batch of forms can go over to the county clerk’s office.”
“Understood.”
“Give Mr. Lawton your chair, Noah, so he's got the edge of my desk to write on.”
Gray settled into the chair by her desk and went to work on the form she slid across to him.
“Gray,” Noah asked impatiently, “can fire burn upside down?”
Here we go. Bonnie split her attention between her computer screen and the man writing beside her.
“Fire burns in the direction of available oxygen and fuel,” Gray said, reading the form and writing simultaneously.
“However, gravity shapes the flame. Hot gases rise, so flames lean upward under normal conditions.
In zero gravity, fire burns as a sphere, because there's no convection pulling it in any direction.”
“WHOA.” Noah wrote that down too with the solemn focus of a child transcribing scripture. Bonnie stifled a smile and went back to reviewing the inspection report request.
“Can lightning start a fire?” Noah shot at Gray.
“Absolutely. Lightning superheats the air and anything it strikes to around fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. That's five times hotter than the surface of the sun.”
“FIVE TIMES?” Noah wrote faster. “Does everything catch fire from lightning?”
“It depends upon the material and the moisture content. Wet wood resists ignition from lightning better than dry wood, for example.”
“Did your dad teach you about fire?” Noah asked. “Or did you learn it from books?”
The atmosphere in the room did something odd. The light was the same. The sounds from the street below were the same. But the quality of the air shifted the way it did before a change in weather.
Gray set down his pen. Frowned. He picked the pen back up.
“I've learned a lot from books,” he finally said. His voice was even. Careful. “That's why it's important for you to become a good reader, Noah.”
“But did your dad---”
Gray cut in gently. “My dad wasn't around much.” His pen started moving across the form again.
Noah, bless his oblivious, relentless heart, was already on to his next question. The moment slid past him like water.
But Bonnie caught it. She kept her eyes on her computer screen and heard every word of the exchange. And she heard a few things that hadn’t been spoken aloud.
From the corner, Cassidy looked at Gray as if she was revising an important opinion about him. She jotted down something in the margin of her worksheet that was definitely not a math problem.
The mayor surprised Bonnie by stopping in at four-thirty. Gray was still at her desk, finishing up the latest form, and the kids were both reading. She’d finally taken pity on Gray and ordered Noah to leave Gray alone until he was done with the application she needed him to fill out.
Lucas walked through the outer office with the careful gait he always used these days and a slight hunch to his shoulders that was new. His skin was pasty white around the edges of his sunbed tan.
“Afternoon,” he said, without breaking stride.
“Your three o'clock for Monday left a message,” Bonnie said. “They want to reschedule.”
“Fine. You handle it.”
He went into his office. The door closed. He’d stopped slamming it closed this past week, which worried her more than the slamming had. Slamming was anger. A show of spirit. Feistiness. This defeated retreat into seclusion was so much worse.
She heard the familiar sequence: the creak of his desk chair, the metallic clicking of the locked safe’s combination lock, the sound of papers being shuffled.
She didn't usually speculate about what he was doing.
It was the mayor's personal safe, and he could keep whatever he wanted in it.
She was his secretary, and there were appropriate professional limits to what she was allowed to notice or question.
But she did find it strange that he always closed his door and forbade her to enter any time he had the safe open.
“All right,” Bonnie said briskly. “Noah, it's almost time to go home. Start packing up. Cassidy, you know what to do. Gray, when you're finished with the form . . .”
“All done.” He slid it across the desk.
“I'll get this filed first thing Monday morning.” She clipped it to the inspection packet. “The facility certification should come through within a week or so.”
“I appreciate all your help,” Gray said formally.
Noah abandoned packing in favor of following Gray to the door, firing off more questions having to do with the combustion temperatures of different building materials.
Gray rattled off the combustion temperatures with the distracted patience of a man who accepted that this was simply how departure worked now.
“Hey, Gray,” Cassidy called, from her table by the window.
He paused at the door and looked back at her. “Yes?”
“I finished my puzzle. And my teacher couldn’t solve it. I had to explain the answer to her.”
“That’s awesome! Congratulations! I’d love to give it try, sometime.”
Cassidy beamed, and Bonnie’s heart did a little flip flop of delight for her daughter.
Gray glanced in her direction, caught her gaze with his, and smiled briefly, intimately, at her before he left.
Disgust coursed through her. A person would think a woman her age could have a man smile at her without blushing like a teenager. But apparently not.
Bonnie watched him go and returned to shutting down her computer.
She was fine.
Everything was fine. They were on a first-name basis, he’d put his hand on her shoulder the last time she was at the fire station, and he'd just shot her a smile that would melt steel. She could handle this.
She could not handle this.
She found the notebook at eight-thirty that evening when she was picking up the kids' backpacks from the kitchen floor so she could sweep under them. It looked like Cassidy's homework notebook. Same cover, same color. She nearly put it back in the backpack without opening it.
But it had fallen open, and the entry at the top of the page, written in her daughter's neat, deliberate handwriting, said: Day 9. He knows when to stop talking. Most people don't know when to stop talking.
Did Cassidy have her first crush on a boy? Equal parts terror and elation roared through her. Bonnie looked at the notebook’s cover. It was labeled, in Cassidy's printing: OBSERVATIONS. PRIVATE.
She should close it. Put it back. But she’d been delaying having those conversations moms needed to start having with daughters around this age, and she really needed to know if it was time to bite the bullet and have The Talk.
She would just read one more entry.
Day 6: He fixed the broken hinge on the waiting room door. Nobody asked him to. He just noticed it was broken and fixed it. He put his screwdriver back in his coat pocket after. He carries tools in his coat.
Bonnie sat down heavily at the kitchen table. Gray had fixed her outer office door last week.
Day 4: He brought coffee for Mom. She said she didn't need it. She drank the whole cup.
Day 11: Mom did the thing she does when she doesn't want to look at someone. She looked at her computer screen for a really long time. Mom’s a fast reader. She doesn't actually need that long to read her computer.
Day 13: He didn't answer Noah's question about his dad. Said his dad wasn't around much. Mom looked at her computer extra hard after that. Note: find out more.
Bonnie closed the notebook. Set it precisely back on the table. Pressed her palms flat against the table as if the kitchen might tilt.
Her nine-year-old was building a logic puzzle of whether or not Gray liked her mother.
And Cassidy's not wrong about any of it.
That was the worst part. The observations were accurate. The inferences were spot-on. Cassidy had looked at the available data and reached the correct conclusion, and she was nine years old.
What made it even worse was she was sitting in her kitchen, a grown woman, and she’d been telling herself for two solid weeks that she was not thinking about Gray day and night.
She got up. Filled a glass of water at the sink. Stood looking out at the dark backyard.
Did Gray like her?
Did she like him?
She’d done this before. Trusted a man who gave her private smiles. Who looked at her as if she was a puzzle he personally needed to solve, who showed up steadily, who remembered little things about her.
Brent had been like that at first. Steady and certain and present. She’d trusted that steadiness, built a life on it, gave him children and her future and the softening of every defense she'd constructed before he came along.
And then he looked at someone else the same way he looked at her.
She set the untouched water glass in the sink and went to check on the kids.
She knew from bitter experience that the kind ones were the dangerous ones. They got all the way inside your walls before you thought to close the gate. The ones who knew exactly how to make you trust them because that was as natural to them as breathing.
Brent had been kind. He’d been thoughtful. He’d held her hand at her mother's funeral, answered her texts within minutes, remembered how she took her coffee, and never, in seven years, gave her any reason to doubt him.
Until he did.
She knew it wasn't fair to compare Gray to Brent. She also knew that one man's failures were not a verdict on every man who came after him.
She knew these things the same way she knew she should eat breakfast and get more sleep and call her father more often: intellectually, clearly . . . and without the slightest practical effect on her behavior.
She lay awake until well after midnight and still no answers came to her about what she was supposed to do now.