Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
Jack
The bruise looked worse in the bathroom mirror than it had felt at the time.
I pressed a cold cloth to the bone, winced, and thought about what I'd told Maddie.
Caught a corner. Wasn't paying attention.
Both technically true, in the loosest possible interpretation of events.
I had not been paying attention. I had been paying attention to the wrong thing entirely, which was the man in the waiting area who had started on my father and moved, with the confidence of someone who'd been saying things like this for forty years without consequence, to Cassie.
I'd kept it together on the father part.
Just about. Frank Henley wasn't a man worth defending and I'd had a lifetime of practice at not engaging with people who thought otherwise.
I'd kept my voice level and my hands on the car I was working on and I'd said, quietly, that he might want to wait outside.
Then he'd started on Cassie.
Not anything specific. Just the casual cruelty of a small town memory—always knew that family was trouble, shame about the girl, though you had to wonder.
It was the kind of thing said without venom, which somehow made it worse.
Like she was just a footnote. Like her whole life, Lily, the house on Clement Street, all of it, was just something that had happened in the background of this man's Tuesday.
I'd set the wrench down.
I'd said, very carefully, that he needed to leave.
He hadn't.
Bellows had appeared in the doorway—some instinct, some radar the man had developed over forty years of running a garage—and taken in the situation in about two seconds. Time to go, he'd said, flat as he could, and the man had puffed up when he noticed he had an audience.
I'd stepped between them. I placed myself there, between Bellows and the problem, because Bellows had a bad back and a worse heart and wasn't going to take a punch on my account.
The man had taken a swing anyway.
It hadn't been much of one. More of a shove with intent, but it caught me on the jaw. I'd stepped back, held my hands up, and said we're done here in the same voice I used when a job was finished and it was time to move on. The man had left, muttering. Bellows had looked at me for a long moment.
Good, he'd said. Just that.
I pressed the cloth harder against my jaw.
The thing was, I didn't regret any of it.
The restraint, the stepping in for Bellows, the walking away.
That was the man I was trying to be and I'd been it, more or less, and I was glad about that.
What I regretted was the look on Maddie's face when she'd seen the bruise—the way something had flickered in her eyes before she'd smoothed it over. Something careful and old.
She'd believed the corner story, mostly. Except I'd seen the mostly part of it, and I didn't like it.
I should tell her, I knew that. We'd done the work in her apartment, the real conversation, the one that cost both of us something, and I'd told her I was done with the twelve years of nothing.
I meant it. Keeping things from her, even the small things with innocent explanations, was the wrong direction.
It was a step back toward the version of myself I was trying to leave behind.
I'd tell her Friday.
I stared at my reflection. The bruise, the jaw, the face I’d been looking at for thirty-six years—one that still occasionally startled me with how much it looked like his.
But I’d kept my hands down. I’d stood between Bellows and the noise, taken the hit, and walked away. In the history of the Henley men, that wasn’t nothing.
I turned off the light, leaving the version of me that looked like my father in the dark.
The bruise wasn't the only thing I was keeping from her. That was the other truth of it, sitting in the back of my mind while I went downstairs to start Lily's dinner. There were other pieces moving, other things not yet said, and I was going to need to find the right moment for all of it.
Friday, I thought.
I'd figure it out Friday.