Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Jack
I'd made the sauce twice.
The first time was fine. I tasted it, decided it was fine, and left it on the stove. Then, forty minutes later, I tipped it down the sink and started again without examining why. The second batch was better. Probably. I tasted it four times to be sure.
Lily was at the kitchen table doing homework. Or pretending to. She had a pencil in her hand, but she’d been watching me for the last ten minutes with the focused attention of a wildlife documentary.
"You're being weird," she said.
"I'm making dinner."
"You keep stirring it."
"That's how you make sauce."
She looked at the pot, then back at me. "You already stirred it."
"You can stir it more than once."
She seemed unconvinced. She put her pencil down and propped her chin in her hands. "Are you nervous?"
"No."
"You look nervous."
"I'm not nervous. Do your homework."
She picked the pencil back up, satisfied in a way that suggested she'd gotten what she came for. I turned back to the sauce and stirred it again, which I was aware was not helping my case.
It was just dinner. Maddie had done me a favor at the supermarket, Lily had invited her, I'd made too much pasta for weeks and now there was a third person coming and that was fine. It was just dinner.
I stirred the sauce.
"Gerald thinks you should change your shirt," Lily said, without looking up from her homework.
I looked down at my shirt. It was a grey t-shirt, clean and faded, the kind of thing I wore when I wasn't planning on seeing anyone but the TV. I went upstairs and changed into something with a collar.
She knocked at seven on the dot. It was so completely Maddie that I almost smiled before I reached the door. She was standing on the porch with a bottle of wine in one hand and a small paper bag in the other.
"For Lily," she said, holding the bag out as soon as I opened up. "I didn't want to show up empty-handed."
I looked inside. It was a copy of Matilda, the edition with the original Quentin Blake illustrations on the cover. I stared at the book for a second longer than I probably needed to. It was the kind of thoughtful gesture that bypassed the awkwardness of the front door.
"Come in," I said, stepping back.
Lily appeared from the kitchen in approximately three seconds. She’d clearly been hovering by the door, listening for the knock. She looked at Maddie, then the bag, then me, and finally said "hi" with the elaborate casualness of a child who had been engineering this moment for a week.
"Hi yourself," Maddie said.
She crouched down to Lily’s level and showed her the book. Lily took it with both hands, examining the cover with great seriousness. Something in the room seemed to settle then, the vibration of the house shifting into something warmer.
Dinner was easy in a way I hadn't expected. Lily was on form. She’d been getting better day by day, small signs of something loosening, but tonight she was a version of herself I hadn't seen yet.
She told Maddie about school with the breathless energy of a kid who had been saving up material for a specific audience.
Mrs. Alvarez had a fish tank. There was a boy called Noah who could burp the alphabet, an achievement Lily clearly envied. They were doing a project on weather, and Lily had decided she wanted to be a meteorologist, an ambition that had lasted forty-eight hours before she’d pivoted to being a vet.
"What changed your mind?" Maddie said.
Lily considered this. "You can't cuddle a cloud," she said.
Maddie looked at me over Lily's head, just briefly. There was something in her expression that wasn't quite a smile, but… it was closer to one than I’d seen in years. It was a look that said she’s incredible, and for a second, we were on the same side of a very old fence.
I looked back at my pasta, suddenly interested in a piece of penne.
After dinner, Lily pushed her plate away and looked at the kitchen clock with unconvincing theatricality. "Is it bedtime?" she asked. She acted as if she didn't know it was already twenty minutes past, even though I’d caught her checking the time every two minutes since we’d sat down.
"Past it," I said.
She slid off her chair. Then she looked at Maddie. "Will you read me a story?"
The table went quiet.
Maddie hadn't expected it. I could see the surprise register, a quick flicker before she looked at Lily and then briefly at me. I gave her the smallest nod I could manage, a silent it’s okay if you want to.
"Sure," Maddie said.
Lily took her hand and led her toward the stairs with the air of someone who had planned this from the very beginning. Which, of course, she had. Gerald watched from the counter as they went, his mismatched eyes fixed on the hallway.
I started on the dishes.
The water ran hot. I worked through the plates and the pot and the glasses. Somewhere in the middle of it, the question arrived—the way questions do when you’ve been keeping them at arm’s length and finally run out of road.
What exactly was I doing?
Maddie Clarke was upstairs reading my niece a bedtime story in my dead sister’s house.
I’d changed my shirt and made the sauce twice, and now I was standing at the sink trying to remember the last time any of this had felt like a good idea.
She had a life. She had that man from the funeral.
She’d come here once in the middle of the night for a sick kid and again because a five-year-old had backed her into a corner in a parking lot, and I’d let it happen because—
Because what?
Because Lily had asked and it was easier to say yes? Because it was just dinner? I’d spent twelve years moving from one city to the next specifically to avoid standing in a kitchen feeling like this. Apparently, twelve years wasn’t enough.
I dried my hands.
Upstairs, faintly, I could hear Maddie’s voice. It was low and even, carrying the particular cadence of someone reading aloud. Then, silence.
I stood at the sink and waited for her to come back down.
* * *
She appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, moving quietly on the stairs. "Out," she said. "She didn't even make it to the second page."
"She does that." I handed her the last plate without thinking about it.
She took it just as naturally. She found the dish towel on the oven handle and dried the plate while I reached for the next one. We stood at the sink in the kind of silence that didn't need filling, the water still running warm over my hands. I was very aware of how close she was standing.
"How is she doing?" Maddie asked. "Really."
I thought about it. "Better than I expected. Worse than I want." I turned the tap off. "She has good days and then something will catch her and she'll go quiet for a while. A smell, a song. Something that was Cassie's." I paused. "She doesn't cry much. That worries me sometimes."
Maddie nodded. "It's not unusual. She's processing it in pieces." She set the plate on the rack with a soft click. "You're doing the right things, Jack."
Silence for a moment. Then she looked at the plate rather than at me.
"And how are you doing?"
"Fine," I said. "Got the job. Thirty-day review is on Monday. Housing is sorted, guardianship paperwork is moving." I reached for the dish towel, keeping my hands busy. "Getting there."
She didn't say anything for a moment.
"That's not what I meant," she said.
I was quiet for a second. "I'm okay."
She said nothing. Just stood there, and somehow the silence had a shape to it—the specific shape of someone who knew exactly what I wasn't saying and was prepared to wait for the rest.
I set the dish towel down and put both hands flat on the counter. The granite was cold under my palms.
"I never thought I'd be back here," I said.
"Clear Creek. I thought—" I stopped and shrugged.
"I don't know what I thought. That it was done.
That chapter was closed." I looked down at my hands.
"And now this. All of it." I took a breath.
"I don't know how I'm doing, Maddie. Honestly. I don't know."
I stopped. Looked up at the ceiling—at the room above us, the small shape under the blankets, the rabbit with the mismatched eye.
"But I know what I have to do," I said.
She was looking at me when I turned. Not the careful look, not the professional one. Just her, just looking, and the kitchen was very quiet around us.
"Is there anything I can do?" she said. "To help. If it's money—"
I smiled at that. I couldn't help it. "We're good. I wasn't much of a spender these past twelve years. I saved enough, and now with the job..." I shrugged. "But thanks, Maddie. Truly."
She nodded. Something had shifted in her face—the guard down an inch, maybe less. She looked at the counter, then back at me.
"What about you?" I asked. "You doing okay?"
I kept my voice easy. Just catching up. We were just two people who used to know each other, standing in a kitchen at the end of the night. "Things good? Work and—" I paused. "Tom, right?"
Something flickered across her face, brief and unreadable. "Yeah," she said. "Tom."
"Good guy?" It came out more like a question than I’d intended. My voice betrayed an interest I had no business having.
Maddie went still for a second. I had no right to ask that. She knew it, I knew it, and the quiet kitchen seemed to emphasize the overstep.
"Yeah," she said finally. "He’s a good guy."
"Good," I said.
Silence for a moment. I wasn't sure what I’d been looking for in the asking. Nothing, probably. Just filling the space the way you fill a room when you haven’t seen someone in twelve years and you're suddenly standing at a sink together at ten o’clock on a Friday night.
"Work’s good," she said. "Busy. Which is how I like it."
"Yeah. I remember."
"Cedar Falls suits me." She turned her gaze to the window, watching the reflection of the kitchen against the dark garden outside. "It took me a while to figure out why. But it does."
I didn't ask why. I almost did—the question was right there, heavy on my tongue—but I caught myself. Whatever answer I was fishing for wasn't one I’d earned yet.
"She would have loved this," Maddie said.
I looked at her.
"Cassie." She gestured vaguely toward the empty table, to the spot where Lily had been holding court. "This whole thing. Lily conning you into dinner, the book, all of it." She paused, a ghost of a laugh catching in her throat. "She'd have been insufferable about it."
I looked at the empty table, too. "Yeah. She would have."
"She always thought she knew best," Maddie said. She didn't sound bitter. It was just the truth, fond and sad in the way of things that were both at once.
"She usually did," I said.
Maddie smiled at that. It was small and real, and it stayed for a moment before fading into something more contemplative. She stared at the spot where Lily had sat for a long time. I didn't rush her. The kitchen just held the silence for us.
"I should have called more," she said finally. "The last few years. I kept meaning to."
"Me too," I said.
She looked at me then. It was a long, level gaze that didn’t ask for anything and didn’t offer any easy outs. We both knew we’d loved the same person, and we both knew we’d done it badly in our own ways. There was no way to fix that, and for once, neither of us tried to.
She picked up her coat from the back of the chair.
"Thank you for dinner," she said. "It was—it was really nice, Jack."
"Yeah," I said. "It was."
I followed her toward the door. We stood in the hallway for a moment with the porch light glowing outside. Lily was asleep upstairs, and Cassie was everywhere in the walls of the house.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Night, Maddie."
She walked to her car. She reached the door, hand on the handle, and stopped. Just for a second, her back was to me, her silhouette sharp against the streetlight.
Then she turned.
"For what it's worth," she said. "I'm glad you're back."
She got in the car before I could say anything. I stood in the doorway and watched the taillights disappear around the corner. Then I went back inside and turned the light off. I sat at the kitchen table in the dark for a while, not thinking about anything in particular.
Which meant thinking about everything.