Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Madison
Lily turned around to say something about the dog and I felt Jack's hand leave mine.
Just like that. The warmth of it gone, the space between us ordinary again, two people standing under an awning watching the rain slow down. Lily hadn't seen anything. She was already turning back to the street, already moving on to the next thing, three thoughts ahead of us.
I kept my eyes on the rain.
My heart was going in a way I wasn't going to examine too closely.
I knew kids. I knew how they read rooms, how they filed things away, how they built narratives out of the smallest details and held onto them with both hands.
Lily had been building something for months—Gerald's opinions, the dinner invitations—and I didn't want to be the thing that confused her.
She'd lost enough. She didn't need the adults in her life making things complicated.
That was the sensible position. I'd been holding it for weeks.
And yet.
I thought about his hand. The deliberateness of it: not an accident, not a brush of fingers.
A choice. Like he'd been meaning to do it and had finally found the moment.
And my hand had moved on its own. It was a muscle memory I couldn't switch off, a tether that had snapped back into place the second I saw him sitting in that hospital lobby.
My brain was still making the case for distance, but my body had already stopped listening.
I was scared.
That was the thing I kept circling back to.
I was scared of what it would mean to let this be real.
Jack was a good man. I could see that clearly now, clearer than I'd seen anything in a long time. I trusted the man he’d become.
The one who built a life out of a few suitcases and a job at a garage.
The one who sat in a dark bedroom for three hours just to be an anchor for a kid.
The man who’d agonized over a grocery list because he was so damn earnest about getting it right. That man was real.
But then there was the rest of it. The truth I’d said out loud at four in the morning: I hadn’t forgotten.
He’d left Cedar Falls, but he’d also left himself—scattering twelve years of his life across oil rigs and empty highway states.
I’d watched enough people to know that a man doesn't just evaporate like that for no reason.
Whatever drove him to go hadn't gone away just because he was back in his sister's kitchen.
I was terrified he’d do it again. That one day I’d look up and the chair would be empty, and I’d be left standing in the wreckage of a second chance. It would be worse this time, because I’d know exactly what I was losing.
The rain had eased to a drizzle. Around us people were beginning to move again, retrieving things from under stalls, shaking out umbrellas. Lily announced that the market wasn't over and set off with great purpose toward the shortbread stall. We followed.
The air smelled of wet earth and crushed flowers, that clean scent of a market day after a storm.
Cedar Falls was doing that thing it sometimes did, where it felt like a place people actually chose to live in rather than just a place they’d ended up.
We walked. Lily found another shortbread and negotiated for it with a level of firmness that made the baker look twice.
She paid with her remaining pocket money and two cents borrowed from Jack, then declared she’d pay him back by Monday.
After a while Jack said, quietly: "Where did you go?"
I looked at him.
"Just now. You went somewhere."
I watched Lily for a moment, a few steps ahead, examining her purchase with great satisfaction.
"I'm okay," I said.
He was watching me with that expression he used for things he wasn’t going to push, but wasn’t going to let go of, either.
I exhaled, the damp air hitting my lungs like a reality check. "Thinking," I said.
"About?"
I stopped. Then I turned and looked him straight in the eye, the question I’d been carrying for weeks finally pushing past my ribs. "What are we doing, Jack? Truly."
He didn't answer right away. We walked past a stall where a woman was shaking the rain off a stack of wool blankets, the rhythmic snap-snap of the fabric the only sound between us.
"I don't know yet," he said. His voice was low, stripped of the usual grit. "I know I haven't earned the right to—I know there are things I haven't said. Things that need to be out in the open." He kept his eyes on the pavement. "But I don't want to stop. Whatever this is."
He paused, the silence stretching between us.
"I don't want to pretend the last few weeks haven't been—" He stopped, shaking his head as if the words he needed didn't exist in the language he spoke. "I just don't want to stop."
I looked at the street. At Lily a few paces ahead, the spring light catching the dark of her hair as it broke through the clouds. The town was reforming itself after the storm, ordinary and busy.
Jack wasn't asking me for anything. He was just placing the true thing on the table. It was the same quiet, devastating earnestness he brought to school lunch lists and dark bedrooms at 3:00 AM.
"There are things that need to be said," I agreed, my voice finally finding its footing.
"Yeah," he said. "There are."
"Not today," I said.
"No," he agreed. "Not today."
We walked on. Lily stopped to look at something in a window. Jack and I stopped behind her, side by side in the wet afternoon light, close enough that our shoulders were almost touching.
Not quite, but almost.
Lily pressed her face to the glass and made a sound of profound approval at whatever was inside, and Jack looked at me over her head and something passed between us that I didn't have a name for yet.
I thought: there's going to be a conversation. A real one, the kind we've been avoiding since we first met in that hospital lobby. And it's going to be hard, and I don't know what comes out the other side of it.
But I was tired of pretending I didn't want to find out.