Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Jack
Ididn't see her until she was standing right in front of me.
Even then it took a second. My brain served up a woman in a coat with a bag over her shoulder and I was already looking back at the floor when something made me look up again. Just like how you look up at a word you've read wrong, needing to go back.
Maddie.
She looked the same. That was the first thing, and the worst thing, because I'd spent twelve years assuming time would have done something to make this easier and it turned out time had done nothing of the sort.
Same eyes, same mouth, same way of standing like she was about to make a decision. She'd cut her hair. That was the only difference I could find, and I was aware that I was looking for differences the way you looked for an exit.
"I heard about Cassie," she said. "I'm so sorry, Jack."
The sound of my name in her voice did something I wasn't prepared for. God, I'd forgotten that. How she said it.
Baltimore. That was where she was supposed to be. Not here, not Cedar Falls. Not this hospital, and definitely not standing three feet away with a badge on her coat like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"You're here," I said.
Not the smartest thing I'd ever said, but it was what came out.
"Landed here," she said. "Few years back."
She sat down next to me—not across but next to—then put her bag on the floor and looked straight ahead.
"How's Lily?"
I kept my eyes on the far wall. It was easier that way. Maddie was close enough that I could smell her—something clean and clinical, with something else underneath it I didn't let myself identify. My brain was already running on fumes and this was not helping.
"All things considered, she's… well, I don't know." I shrugged. "She let me hold her rabbit."
Maddie nodded. "She'll be—" She didn't finish it. We both knew okay wasn't the right word for any of this.
There was a moment of silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
"I'm so sorry, Jack," she said again. Her voice was quieter this time, like the first time had been the formal version and this was the real one. "Cassie was—" Another stop, then she looked at her hands. "She was one of the good ones."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say to that. It was just true.
We sat there for a while. The lobby moved around us, pulsing with a life of its own: a family through the main doors, a man at the desk asking something, the security guard handing off to the next shift.
Normal life, carrying on. After the last twenty-four hours, I'd forgotten that was something that happened.
Maddie didn't try to fill the silence, which I remembered about her.
She had always known when not to talk. It used to drive me mad when we were young and I'd wanted her to say something, anything, and she'd just sit there with that resolute stillness of hers.
Now I was thirty-six years old and I understood it was a gift, that stillness, and I was grateful for it in a way I couldn't have articulated without embarrassing myself.
I was aware of her in the way you are aware of something you’re trying not to look at directly.
The particular warmth of someone sitting close.
The contained way she held herself, like she'd learned over the years to take up exactly the space she needed and no more.
Once, a long time ago, I'd known the exact weight of her head against my shoulder.
I took an effort not to think of that for more than a second.
"How long have you been here?" I said. "Cedar Falls."
"Coming up on three years. Baltimore first, then this."
"Cassie never mentioned it." Maybe because I’d never asked.
Something moved between us, briefly, at the mention of Cassie’s name.
"We weren't in touch much," Maddie said. "We'd grab coffee when we could, and kept meaning to make it regular." She looked at her hands. "We didn't get there."
I nodded. The specific guilt of that particular sentence… yeah, I knew it intimately.
She asked about me and I told her.
Montana, Wyoming, a year in the Yukon I gave one sentence to.
She listened the way she always had—fully, without filling the gaps—and I was aware as I spoke that I was describing twelve years of my life in about forty words.
Not sure what that said about me, but I didn't particularly want to examine it.
"Still moving then," she said, when I'd finished.
"Still moving."
She hadn't meant it as a verdict. I knew that. But I felt it land anyway, and I had nothing to put back against it that wasn't an excuse dressed up as something else.
The lobby hummed around us. Someone's child was crying somewhere near the entrance. I understood the impulse.
I was so damn tired. The exhaustion sat in my bones, pooling there ever since a phone rang in a dry shack in North Dakota, and it hadn't stopped since.
And now this… this awareness that Maddie was still here, still sitting in this chair she hadn't needed to sit in, and I didn't know what to do with that either.
She reached for her bag after a while, and I listened to the small sounds of leaving—the zip, the shift of weight, the quiet preparation.
"I should get going," she said.
"Yeah."
She stood. Looked at me once more with that careful expression, the one I remembered, the one that meant she was checking something she wasn't going to say out loud. Then: "If there's anything I can do. While you're sorting things out." She said it offhandedly, like something you say at a door.
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded and turned. I let her get three steps before it caught up with me.
"Maddie."
She stopped.
"Actually," I started, "there is something."