Chapter 13
The History
ZOE
Ihold on to Jonah and the illusion of control.
Here we are, in the parking lot of justice or whatever, and Jonah Holt is melting into me like a six-foot-two ice sculpture in the sun.
I should let go.
I don’t let go.
His chin is somewhere near my temple, and his hands fist the back of my sweater like he thinks I might float away, and the entirely unprofessional, deeply inconvenient truth is that he feels good.
Solid. Warm. Like every bad analogy about a man’s chest, except real, and pressed against me, and currently breathing in a way that is doing absolutely nothing for my “no falling for him” rule.
Get it together, Lane.
“Okay,” I murmur into his lapel. “We’re okay.”
He doesn’t answer. He just keeps holding on.
I let him. Because today, a woman in pearls just told a judge that he was unfit to raise his own son, and made him sound like a thug. He earned this thirty seconds. I’m just the lucky rag doll he picked to absorb the impact.
After what’s probably a full minute and definitely too long, he eases back.
His eyes are red around the edges in a way I’m choosing not to remark on, because Jonah Holt does not do crying and I do not do witnessing him not-cry.
We have an unspoken agreement about it. We’ve had it for about four seconds.
“Come on,” I say, businesslike, because someone has to be. “Car. More private. Less courthouse.”
He nods.
We walk back to the SUV in silence, my heels clicking on the pavement, his hand brushing mine once and not on purpose. I climb up into the passenger seat and crank the heat, and the vents blow cold for a long, mean second before they warm.
Jonah stares straight through the windshield. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t start the SUV.
“You okay to drive?” I ask.
“Fine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He cuts a look at me. “What.”
“Nothing.”
“Zoe.”
“You’re not ‘fine.’ You’re about three seconds from putting your fist through the dashboard, and I wouldn’t blame you.”
He exhales through his nose. The kind that has thirty pounds of feeling shoved into it.
“Look.” I turn so I’m facing him in the seat, knee tucked up under me. “You can’t do the tough-guy thing.”
“What tough-guy thing?”
“The lock-it-in-a-box-and-hope-it-goes-away thing.” I point at his chest. “Doing that is for hockey players and emotionally constipated dads. You don’t get to be that guy anymore because there’s a small person living in your house who’s going to inherit every single coping mechanism you model for him whether you want him to or not.
So if you want him to talk to you, ever, about anything—starting with whether he wants the brown lunchbox or the blue one and ending with whether he ever stops being mad at you for being alive—you have to actually be a person with him.
Out loud. Including the parts where you’re not fine. ”
He stares at me.
His jaw works. His hand finds the steering wheel. The leather creaks. “Yeah. I’m upset.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, I’m fucking upset, Zoe.” His voice gets bigger, like it’s gearing up to boil.
“I’m doing everything wrong. I bought him a killer backpack.
The kind of backpack a kid would—and he hated it.
He didn’t want me to walk him into the school because he’s embarrassed of me.
He’s embarrassed of me, Zoe, on day one, and I haven’t even had a chance to mess up yet.
That’s just—that’s the baseline. And now Gwen, who—” He stops.
Breathes. Starts again. “Gwen. Who was a fucking shit mother to Rosie. Who made Rosie’s life a living hell.
Who Rosie ran away from. That woman is sitting in a chair telling a judge that I’m unfit, and the judge is taking notes, and I’m—I don’t know what to do. ”
He hits the wheel with the side of his fist. Just once. Restrained, even now.
The SUV is dead quiet except for the air.
I’ve never seen him like this. Not when Sydney started dating his best friend, not when he left the Blizzards, and not even since all this started.
His shoulders—those NHL-issue, sweater-filling shoulders—slump forward like the air’s been let out of him.
He looks breakable. He looks tired. He looks, God help me, like a guy who needs someone to tell him he’s not the disaster he thinks he is.
And the thing about compartmentalizing, is that eventually you run out of compartments. And right now, Jonah Holt has just exhausted the last one.
I unbuckle my seatbelt, swing my legs over the center console—nearly knee myself in the jaw—and end up with one knee planted on either side of his lap.
Straddling him in a courthouse parking lot as the world outside goes about its indifferent business.
My skirt rides up, tights stretching, coat bunched behind me, and I have the wild urge to laugh.
But I don’t. Because he’s just sitting there, fists slack now, blue eyes huge and startled and lost.
“Jonah.” I say.
His breath hitches. A muscle jumps in his jaw. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t push me off, doesn’t even seem to know what to do with his hands, which just hover in the air.
I reach up and cup his cheek, fingertips grazing the stubble at his jawline. He’s so hot—literally, like he’s running a fever.
“Hey,” I say. Soft. “Listen to me.”
He doesn’t look at me.
“Hey.”
He looks at me.
“He liked movie night.”
Jonah blinks.
“You told me. The Avengers. He ate three pieces of pizza and made appreciative noises at fight scenes. That happened. With you.” I stroke his jaw.
“He doesn’t want stuff, Jonah. He doesn’t want a Star Wars backpack and a Death Star Lego set.
Although he’s coming around to that, but still.
He wants you to keep showing up when it’s not cute and it’s not convenient and he’s not making it easy.
Him pushing you away right now? That’s him testing whether you’ll stick.
Because everyone in his life so far either left or died, and he’s nine years old and he’s bracing.
So he shoves, and he watches to see if you stay. ”
Jonah is staring at me. Not at his hands. Not at the dashboard. At me.
It is the look of a man who’s been handed a magic wand, and I’d really, really like him to stop looking at me like that, because my heart is doing something traitorous in my chest, a little stuttery flutter, and I don’t have time for that today, or any day.
“You really think that?” he asks. Quiet.
“I know that.”
He nods. Once. He swallows. He looks away first, and I get to breathe again.
“Okay,” I say, brisk, because I need my mouth to keep moving so I don’t kiss him. I also need to climb off him for that same reason, so I do. Once I’m back in my seat, I say, “Now. We need to talk about Gwen.”
“Yeah.”
“You need a lawyer.”
“I have a lawyer.”
“You have a contract lawyer. You need a family lawyer. Yesterday. Today, actually. By lunchtime. The kind that eats grandmothers in pearls for breakfast.”
He almost smiles.
“I’ll call Ms. Hernandez,” he says. “She had someone for me.”
“Good.”
“Gwen’s going to bring up everything,” he says after a second. “All my skeletons. Not just the bar fight suspension, but all the puck bunnies. She’s going to bring it all up and dress me up as a thug and the judge is going to—”
“The judge is going to look at the kid in your house who made mac and cheese yesterday and who sleeps in a room you had decorated and is currently sitting in a Dickens public school with his old beat-up backpack because you let him keep it. And Ms. Hernandez is going to file her report. And you are going to keep doing the work. That’s it. ”
He nods.
We sit in the silence for a breath, needing it. Finally, I say, “Will you tell me about her?”
“Gwen?”
“Rosie.”
His face changes. Not closes—opens. Just a little. Like a door cracking. The light coming through the windshield catches in his hair, picks out a few strands of red I hadn’t noticed before—the brown, highlighting his rich auburn hair perfectly, and I file that under the things I’m ignoring.
“Rosie was…” He sighs. “She was the smartest person in any room she walked into. And she always knew it, but she’d never say it.
She’d just sort of—let everyone else figure it out around her.
She was funny. She had this dry sense of humor.
She’d say something completely bonkers in the middle of class and only I’d catch it, and we’d just lose it, the two of us, in the back of the lecture hall. Drove our professors nuts.”
His hands move when he talks. They didn’t before, but they’re moving now.
“It was great until it wasn’t,” he says.
“I keep… I keep trying to figure out the line, where it stopped being great, and I can’t find it.
No exact moment where I go, oh, that’s it.
It was just—gradual. Like she was getting smaller and smaller in the room, and I didn’t—I was twenty-one, Zoe, I was a kid. I didn’t see it.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I remember her saying, ‘My demons are catching up.’ I thought she meant exams. I was a bonehead. She meant her mother. She meant everything. And when I got drafted, when the Blizzards called and it all started getting big and loud and cameras appeared in our apartment hallway—she couldn’t.
She just couldn’t. She hated all of it. The attention, the lifestyle, the—we’d come home, and she’d just go straight to bed. ”
I whisper, “She was terrified.”
“Yeah. So she just left. I came home from a road trip, and the apartment was empty. Note on the counter. ‘I can’t do this. Don’t look for me.’”
“Jesus, Jonah.”
“I called, emailed, texted her, on and off, for about six months. Then I stopped because I finally took the hint. She wanted away from me. But she also wanted to be away from her mom and away from the whole thing.” His hand opens and closes on the wheel.
“And maybe that would’ve been fine, except she was pregnant.
And she didn’t tell me. And that—that I can’t—”
He breaks off.
“That’s the part,” he says.
“That’s unforgivable,” I finish.
He nods. “I don’t know where to put it. The anger about that. Because she’s gone. So I can’t. I can’t yell at her. I can’t ask her why. I can’t—there’s nowhere for it to go.”
“No. There isn’t.”
He’s quiet. The heater whirs. Somewhere outside, a car door slams.
I look at him—the way the muscle in his jaw is finally not jumping for the first time since we walked out of the judge’s chambers—and I think, for a clear, terrifying second: Oh, no.
This is bad.
This is exactly the bad thing I told him would not happen, and I made him shake on it in the parking lot of Room Bloom eight days ago.
This—this thing where I’m in an SUV admiring the line of a man’s profile while he tells me about the worst thing that ever happened to him—is the textbook definition of falling for somebody.
Early this morning, I sent an email and officially took a position in Seattle producing a morning block for three million viewers a quarter, and I’m sitting here cataloging the auburn in Jonah Holt’s hair.
My sister can replace me; I called her last night too. She works at a daycare and is amazing with kids. She doesn’t have a Seattle problem. She also doesn’t have a Jonah problem.
I should tell him about Seattle. But I have almost a month before I start.
I can’t tell him now.
Cool cool cool.
“Hey,” he says, and his voice is so quiet I almost miss it. “I’m so glad you’re here, Zoe. I need you.”
I close my eyes.
I can’t tell him. Not today.
Tomorrow. I’ll tell him tomorrow. After the lawyer. After the dust. After I’ve figured out how to phrase a sentence that starts “so good news, bad news.”
“Okay,” I say, and I open my eyes, and I sit up straighter, and I clap my hands together because emotional whiplash is my new cardio. “New plan for today.”
“New plan?”
“Let’s go work out.”
He stares at me.
“What?”
“You need to work out.” I tick it off on my fingers.
“You have a body that runs on adrenaline. You just sat in a room and absorbed Gwen Anders’s verbal assaults without punching anything, which I respect.
But that has to go somewhere, Jonah, or you’re going to crawl out of your skin by the time Eli gets out of school.
So, it’s gym time. Lift things. Hit something padded. Burn it off.”
“You’re working out with me.”
“Sure. Why not.” I shrug.
“Okay, then.” He stares at the dashboard again. “You hate working out.”
“I have a complicated relationship with working out.”
“You once told me cardio was a tool of the patriarchy.”
“That was at a wedding, and I was three margaritas in.” I shake my head. “Actually, sober, I stand by that.”
The corner of his mouth lifts.
“You have a home gym,” I say. “Very little commitment. I can flutter in and out.”
“We’re really doing this now.” He throws the SUV in reverse. He looks at me one more time, like he’s trying to figure out what’s happening, and I look right back at him with all the authority I can muster, which is not a lot.
“Drive, Holt.”
He drives.
I look out the window at the clouds rolling in front of the sunny sky, and the courthouse shrinking in the side mirror. I don’t think about the way he said he needs me.
Tomorrow.
I’ll tell him about Seattle tomorrow.