Chapter 50 #2
Skye’s lips parted. She looked between Cara and Gabe and back again, quickly, as if the picture she saw might instantly change.
Then she slid down off the workbench, walked to the corner where she'd dropped her go-bag, set it on the table, and unzipped it, and began, for the first time in her adult life, to unpack.
Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. The family had chosen itself, out loud, on purpose, and the only sound in the room was a zipper and a woman finally putting her things down somewhere she meant to leave them.
Tom came home twelve days later, on his own two feet, because that was the only way he would agree to come home at all.
Just barely. Nomad flew him up from Louisiana with Reagan welded to his side and a wheelchair Tom had abandoned the moment they cleared the tarmac.
When the bell over the Sugar & Salt door rang and he eased himself through it, one hand on the frame and the other on Reagan's arm, Cara's first thought was that the swamp had taken a piece out of him it hadn't given back yet.
He'd lost twenty pounds he couldn't spare.
His skin was the gray of dishwater. He looked, in the kindest possible terms, like death warmed over and served on a slow plate.
Exactly perfect.
Piper was across the bakery before the bell stopped ringing — and then she did the hardest thing Cara had ever watched the kid do, which was stop. Two feet short of her father, arms already up, because she could see what Cara could see: a full-speed Piper would put him flat on the floor.
"Dad." Her voice cracked clean in half on the single syllable.
"Hey, Beautiful." Tom got one arm open. "Come here. Easy, though. I'm held together with about forty staples and a whole lot of thread."
She came in easy and wrapped herself around him careful as glass, her face buried in his shoulder. Tom set his chin down on the top of her head. The same gesture Skye had made, and held his daughter, and closed his eyes.
"You scared me," Piper said into his shirt.
"I know. I'm sorry, kiddo." His hand moved slow on her back. "I'm not going anywhere. I tried it the other way and it didn't take. Turns out I'm very hard to get rid of."
Gabe crossed the room and took Tom's weight off Reagan before anyone asked, got the man's arm up over his shoulders, and walked him to the good chair by the window the way you'd carry something you had very nearly had to bury.
Neither of them said a word. But Cara caught the look that passed between them, the man who'd built the plan and the man who'd bled for it, and it said all the things two men like that would go to their graves before saying out loud.
Across the room, Diane pressed the dish towel to her mouth and didn't quite manage to keep her eyes dry.
Wade, who had been pretending to reorganize the pastry case for exactly as long as the reunion had been going on, caught her at it.
Diane lifted her chin, daring him to say one word about it.
Wade didn't. He just held out the corner of his bandana, deadpan, and went back to arranging croissants he had no earthly idea how to arrange, and a look went between the two of them that Cara decided she would be asking about the minute she had room for one more impossible thing.
Agent climbed into Tom's lap the instant he was seated, with the air of a creature reclaiming stolen property, and Tom huffed a laugh that plainly hurt and didn't stop doing it anyway.
Cara stood in her warm kitchen and looked at all of it.
Wade, pretending he knew his way around a pastry case.
The cat who considered himself the bakery's rightful owner.
Tom, held together with thread, and the daughter who would not let go of his hand.
The yoga instructor upstairs who'd unpacked her bag.
The professor two thousand miles south who'd be calling Thursday.
This was the win. Not Cartwright. Not the network no one would ever get to read about. This room. These people, choosing, over and over, to be in it.
Nothing was resolved. Everything was different. And the family was all the way home.
Later, when the bakery had emptied down to its bones: Tom dozing in the good chair with Agent on his lap and Piper asleep against his shoulder, Reagan watching the both of them like she'd never seen anything she liked better, Wade walking Diane to her car the long way around, and Skye off to get the studio ready for tomorrow’s yoga classes, Cara stood at the dark window and let herself want something she had no business wanting.
A future.
The whole impossible shape of it. A morning, years from now, with Gabe across this same kitchen, gray and stubborn, hollering at the crossword.
A life that didn't end every single night with her counting the exits.
She let herself imagine saying yes to the thing he'd named in that hospital hallway.
A small wedding in a town that had turned into home.
Being, just once, a woman who got to stay.
Then she made herself remember why she couldn't.
The woman Gabe wanted didn't exist.
Her name was a kindness from a dead woman's nephew.
Somewhere out there was a warrant with her real face on it, and men who'd put a witness in the ground inside a locked cell and walked away clean, and the man she loved had carried a federal badge for years.
Turning her in, even now, would be a sworn duty, not a choice.
She couldn't hand Gabe a future. All she had to give him was Cara Sweet, and Cara Sweet was a lovely lie with flour on her hands. Unless Dom could find a way to help her change that.
The burner phone buzzed in the drawer at her hip. Dom.
She slid the drawer open and read.
Carly. Got your message. Sat on it a while, because I wanted something real to tell you first. Here's real: there's a young DA out here with a spine and a grudge, and she's been quietly pulling threads on your file.
It's not nothing. Might even be a road home someday.
But the men who buried Schlenkman are still breathing and still wired in.
So we go slow. Slower than you'll want. Stay Cara Sweet.
Stay small. Stay alive, and let me work it.
Could be a year. Could be a whole lot longer.
Don't put down roots you can't pull up fast. —D
Don't put down roots you can't pull up fast.
Cara looked back into the warm dark of the bakery.
The sleeping man and the sleeping girl. The cat.
The flour on every surface. The stairs that climbed to a woman finally unpacking a bag.
The whole tangled, rooted, reckless life she had gone and grown in the one place on earth she'd been told to grow nothing.
Too late, she thought. The roots were already down. They went clean to the center of her.
One of these mornings she was going to have to decide whether a woman who couldn't even give a man her real name had any business giving him the rest of her.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight she put the phone in her pocket, and looked at all of it, and let herself love it anyway.
This is reckless and I don't care anymore.