Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Jack
Bellows had closed the garage on Tuesday for a boiler inspection. The landlord had been deferring the work for months, and the heating had finally quit over the weekend, leaving the shop floor like an icebox.
"One day," Bellows had said, leaning against the doorframe with a sigh that sounded like retirement. "Maybe two. Don't go far, Jack."
I’d looked at the lift, the bay doors, and the way the morning light hit the tool bench. It was a good shop, but it was tired. It had the bones of a place that could do more than just get by, if someone was willing to put in the work to actually pull it back together.
But the doors were locked and the tools were put away, so I had a Tuesday with nowhere to be.
I made Lily's lunch—cream cheese and cucumber, oat bar, grapes—checked the planner, signed the thing that needed signing, and walked her to school.
She pointed at the cat and I nodded. At the gate she gave me the look she'd started giving me recently, the one that meant she was checking something without asking, and then she went in.
I went home and looked at the house.
The guardianship had been formalised three weeks ago.
A hearing, some paperwork, a judge who'd asked Lily two questions and then looked at me over his glasses and said something about the importance of stability that I'd taken seriously.
Phelps had shaken my hand afterward. Sandra had sent a card.
Lily had been told, and then nodded and asked if we could have pizza, so we'd had pizza.
It was done. She was mine and I was hers. Clear Creek was where we lived, and I had a job, a house, and a list that was mostly crossed off now. That still surprised me when I looked at it.
I did the laundry. I'd gotten better at this too—not competent exactly, but I was no longer a man who stared at a washing machine like it was going to do something unexpected.
Lily's things first, then mine, sorted by color the way she'd told me you were supposed to.
I'd been doing it wrong for the first three weeks, which had resulted in one of her white shirts coming out a faint pink that she'd examined gravely and declared she actually preferred.
I put a wash on and went through the house.
Straightened things, wiped down surfaces.
Made the beds. Found a sock behind the radiator in Lily's room that had apparently been there for some time.
I was getting better at all of it: the rhythms of a house, the things that needed doing without being told, the geography of a shared life.
It had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like… just what I did.
I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table.
The coloring book was gone. Lily had finished it a couple of weeks ago and I'd bought her a new one. At some point the old one had moved to the shelf without either of us making a decision about it. I hadn't thrown it away. I wasn't going to.
She’d started that one with Cassie. I’d spent a night flipping through it, looking at the pages where the colors bled together.
Lily’s frantic, scribbled edges meeting Cassie’s steady, careful strokes.
Some of the animals had been finished by Cassie in those last weeks, her handwriting naming the colors in the margins.
It was a map of a time I’d missed, and I wasn't ready to let it go.
I drank my coffee and stared at nothing. That lasted about ten minutes, and then Maddie was in my head.
The market. The rain.
Her hand.
I’d kept Saturday at a distance. It’s what you do when looking at something directly means you have to deal with it.
I’d focused on the routine instead: the garage, Lily, dinner, the bath, the bedtime.
I’d maintained the machinery of the life I’d built and kept everything else in the margins. I hadn't turned to face it once.
But now, with no work and no Lily and nothing to put between me and my own head, it was right there.
I’d reached for her, and she’d answered. Just her fingers curling around mine in the dark space between our coats. She hadn’t looked at me, but she’d held on. She’d stayed right there in the rain and let it be true.
I got up and rinsed my mug, the water loud in the empty sink.
What was I doing?
I’d had my chance. I’d had three years of it, and I’d stood in a bar on a Thursday night and traded it for nothing.
I'd spent twelve years telling myself it was for her own good.
That she was better off without a man who had his father's voice in his ear and his father's weakness in him.
. And maybe I'd believed it at the time.
Maybe I'd even been right in the limited, cowardly way of a man who makes the wrong choice and then constructs reasons for it. But she’d gone to Baltimore and become a surgeon and built a life, and none of it had required me to be gone.
My absence hadn't been her fuel; it was just a hole I’d left behind.
She'd done all of it in spite of me, not because of me.
And now she was here. I was here. Lily had somehow threaded us back together, and I was standing at the kitchen sink at half-past nine on a Tuesday morning with the phantom weight of her hand still resting in mine.
I didn't know if I had any right to want what I was wanting. I didn't know if a man like me got to have a second chance at a life he’d already walked away from.
Maybe I should pull back. Step away before the momentum carried us somewhere we couldn't come back from. Maddie had a life. She had a career and twelve years of being fine without me, and I had a track record—a long, documented history—of being exactly the kind of man who let her down.
I stood there and let that sink in.
Then I thought about Cassie.
I thought about that phone call. It had been twelve years ago, weeks before I’d stood in that bar and ended things.
Take the ring, Jack. It should be Maddie’s.
She’d said it like she already knew I was drifting.
Like she was trying to tie me to the ground before I floated away.
Cassie had known me my whole life; she’d never once—not even when I was at my absolute worst—stopped believing I was worth the trouble.
She was the one who’d kept Maddie’s number in that green address book all these years, just waiting for me to finally catch up to her.
Cassie wasn't here to tell me to stop being an idiot anymore. I had to do that for myself.
I dried my hands.
The fear was still there. It was always going to be there—the voice that sounded like my father, the low comfortable certainty that the math always came out the same way in the end.
I wasn't going to outrun it. I'd spent twelve years trying to outrun it and all I'd managed was a lot of distance and a lot of nothing.
But I was thirty-six years old and I was still standing. Lily was at school, the house was clean, and the list was mostly crossed off. And Maddie Clarke had held my hand in the rain and refused to let go.
Maybe that was enough to go on. Maybe it was the only thing that mattered.
I picked up my phone.
Can we talk? Properly. There's something I should have said a long time ago.
I stared at it. Put the phone down, then picked it up again.
Sent it.
I stood at the counter and waited. A minute. Two.
Now?
I looked at that word.
Are you at the hospital?
Day off. Working from home.
Three dots. Then an address on Cedar Falls, Birchwood Lane. There was a pause, and then:
Door's open.
I put my phone in my pocket and grabbed my jacket from the hook. I stood in the hallway for a moment, the house quiet around me. It was the strange stillness of a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be and only one thing left to do.
My heart was hammering the same frantic, uneven rhythm I’d felt the first time I walked Maddie home from a party more than twelve years ago.
The night I’d known I loved her and hadn’t found the words yet.
It was that specific feeling of being right on the edge of a cliff, the air turning thin, the whole world narrowing down to a single address on a single street.
I was thirty-six years old and I felt like a kid about to break something.
I locked the door behind me and went.