Chapter 17
Cassidy was waiting for Gray on the fire station steps when he pulled in Monday afternoon.
She was sitting cross-legged with her backpack beside her and a book open on her knees, but she wasn’t reading.
She was watching the road. When his truck turned into the parking lot, she closed the book and stood up with the deliberate composure of a person who had rehearsed what she was about to say.
Gray parked and got out. “Hey, Cass. Where’s your mom?”
“Work. I told her I was going to the library after school.”
“Is this the library?”
“No.” She looked at him with Bonnie’s hazel eyes, steady and unblinking. “I need to talk with you.”
He unlocked the station door and held it open for her. She walked in ahead of him, her sneakers squeaking on the concrete bay floor, and went straight to the day room. She sat in one of the recliners and waited for him to sit beside her.
Like her mother she didn’t waste time on niceties. That apple had not fallen far from the tree.
“My mom’s been different the past few weeks,” Cassidy said. “She cries when she thinks I can’t hear. She sits at the kitchen table in the dark after we go to bed. She’s not sleeping.”
Gray nodded, giving Cassidy the same thing he gave everyone who brought him a problem. His full, undivided attention.
“She pretends she’s fine,” Cassidy continued. “She’s pretty good at pretending. But I’m better at noticing.”
This was true. Cassidy, at nine years old, had an observational capacity that most adults would envy. She missed nothing.
“Something happened,” Cassidy said. “And I think it has to do with you.”
The words were delivered without malice, not as an accusation but a simple statement of fact. He could respect that. It was a data point. She’d observed a change in her mother’s behavior and identified the most likely variable.
Gray considered his response carefully. Cassidy was nine.
She was also Bonnie’s daughter, which meant she could spot a lie from a mile away and would hold the liar in permanent contempt.
But he also couldn’t tell her the truth.
At least not the full truth. He had to find the narrow path between those two things without losing her trust.
“Your mom has been dealing with some difficult things,” he said. “Things that don’t have anything to do with you or Noah. Adult things.”
Cassidy’s expectant expression didn’t ease. She was waiting for more of an explanation than that.
That’s what he was afraid of. But frankly, he expected no less of her. She wasn’t Bonnie’s daughter for nothing.
“Some of the things she’s dealing with do involve me,” he said. “Not in a bad way. I’m trying to help her with the other things she’s working through. But they’re tough problems to solve. And hard things take a toll even on people as strong as your mom.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“No. She’s not in trouble.”
“Are you in trouble?”
He almost smiled. “No.”
Cassidy studied him for a long time. She had Bonnie’s directness, but where Bonnie’s directness was warm, Cassidy’s was more clinical. She was running her own analysis, and Gray recognized the process because it was identical to his own.
“You like my mom,” she said.
“I do.”
“A lot?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to stay?”
The question hit him in a place that had no armor. It was the driveway question. Was this the day his father’s truck wouldn’t be there when he looked outside or not? The same question he’d been asking his whole life.
And it had just been turned inside out and aimed back at him. By a nine-year-old girl who needed to know if the man paying attention to her mother was going to disappear the way men in her life had a habit of disappearing.
He leaned forward and looked her in the eyes. He said quietly, firmly, “I’m not going anywhere, Cassidy.”
She held his gaze for five full seconds. Then she nodded once, opened her backpack, and pulled out her observation notebook. She wrote something in it, closed it, and tucked it away.
He didn’t ask what she’d written. He didn’t need to.
“May I have a donut?” she asked.
“There’s a box of assorted kinds on the counter over there. Take whichever one you want.”
She got up, walked into the kitchenette, and came back with a glazed donut. She ate it sitting in the recliner with her book open on her knees, reading as if the conversation had never happened. The verdict had been rendered. Court was adjourned.
She was like Bonnie in another way. Neither of them held grudges. If they had a problem with you, they addressed it directly, worked it out with you, and then let it go. It was clean. Honest. And it put him at ease as few other qualities in other people could.
Gray sat beside her and tried to study to his coursework.
But the words blurred. He kept thinking about a five-year-old boy who used to listen for footsteps in a dark hallway, cataloguing the sounds of presence and absence without fully understanding what he was tracking.
And his thoughts kept straying to a little girl with a serious face and a notebook, who tracked the same thing he had as a kid .
. . but with considerably more precision.
Are you going to stay?
He was. God help him, he was.
Bonnie collected Cassidy from the station forty minutes later, having received a text from her daughter that said merely, At the fire station.
Don’t worry. Eating a donut. Bonnie had not been aware that her daughter knew where the station was relative to the library, which was three blocks away and on the wrong side of town, but she was learning to stop being surprised by Cassidy’s resourcefulness.
When she got to the fire station, Gray was as cheerful and uncommunicative as Cassidy’s text had been. She looked back and forth between the two of them, and neither one gave any indication that anything was the slightest bit unusual.
She thanked Gray for looking out for Cassidy and feeding her a donut, and she loaded her daughter into the car.
“What were you doing here?” Bonnie asked as they pulled out of the station.
“Talking to Gray.”
“About what?”
“Stuff.”
Bonnie glanced at her daughter in the rearview mirror.
Cassidy was reading, her face serene, offering nothing.
But Bonnie recognized the expression. Whatever had sent Cassidy to talk with Gray was handled.
She’d gotten whatever information she sought from Gray and no further was discussion was necessary.
It was weird, as a single parent, discovering that your child had spoken to another adult in confidence.
It was also weird to realize that her baby girl was growing up. Cassidy was becoming more self-sufficient and independent every day. Before she knew it, Cassidy would graduate high school, head out in pursuit of her own dreams, and likely leave Cobbler Cove.
As a parent, it was her job to help Cassidy along whatever path she chose to take in life.
And the first step in that journey was allowing her daughter to speak to Gray privately and not to pry.
Bonnie trusted Gray not to give her daughter bad advice.
And, if Cassidy had brought a problem to him that genuinely required Bonnie’s knowledge and involvement as her parent, he would have said something back at the station.
Huh. She trusted Gray with her children. There weren’t too many people in the world she could say about. Her parents. The WoWS. And now him.
At home, Noah was at the kitchen table with his question notebook open, printing carefully with a pencil that needed sharpening. He’d been at Jenna’s for the afternoon, and Bobby Foster had apparently introduced him to the concept of quicksand, which had generated an entire page of new questions.
“Mom, can a cow get stuck in quicksand?”
“I don’t know for sure, Sweetheart, but I expect it could.”
“What about a really big calf? Like the polar bear calves?”
“You’d have to ask Gray. I know that quicksand has some ability to support weight, but I have no idea how heavy an object would have to be to sink in it. I would think the object’s shape might affect if it sinks and how fast it sinks, too.”
That provoked an extended session of scribbling in the notebook.
“I wrote down all my questions.” He held up the notebook. “Also, why do people keep secrets?”
Bonnie, who was filling a pot of water at the sink, was shocked into stillness and almost filled the pot to overflowing. As she poured some of the water out into the sink., she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Bobby said his mom keeps a secret recipe for pie and won’t share it with anyone. Why would you keep a recipe secret? What if you die and then nobody can make the pie?”
Bonnie exhaled. Pie. He was talking about pie. “Some people keep secrets because they’re protecting something important to them.”
“But pie is important to everybody.”
She smiled. “That’s an excellent point.”
Noah turned the page. “Also, can you tell if someone is lying? Like, is there a way to know for sure?”
Bonnie set the pot on the stove and turned on the burner. She watched the blue flame catch and spread beneath the metal. “Sometimes,” she said carefully. “Sometimes you can tell.”
“How?”
“You pay attention to what people do, not just what they say. If the two things don’t match, that’s usually a clue.”
Noah wrote this down with great seriousness.
Bonnie watched him write and felt an ache in her chest. She was keeping secrets from the very child she’d just told how to watch for liars.
But Noah was far too young to tell that his father had been murdered.
And frankly, she would rather wait a few more years before she sprang news like that on Cassidy, either.
Speaking of Cassidy, she appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked at Bonnie with her clear, direct gaze and said, “I told Gray you’ve been sad.”