Chapter 7
Audrey
The text comes in while I'm scraping crusted batter off a cake pan.
Declan: Hope the week was good to you.
I dry my hands on the dish towel before I pick up the phone. He does this. Checks up on me with the smallest words, easy ones, nothing that asks anything of me except that I exist on the other end and be honest.
Me: It was good. Quiet. How was yours?
The three dots appear right away. They always do. He's not playing that game where you wait twenty minutes so the other person doesn't think you were sitting there waiting. He just answers.
Quiet too. Bunch of us got together at the gym this morning. Knox started a betting pool for who can lift the most by the time next season starts. Fifty bucks minimum.
I laugh before I mean to. The sound is strange in the empty kitchen.
I should put the phone down. I know exactly what I'm doing, standing here with a half-clean pan in the sink, smiling at a man who lost his family and still finds it in him to check on me. He's good. That's what makes this harder. He is so unbelievably good.
Me: And where do you sit in the standings?
Declan: Gentleman never tells.
The three dots move as he types something else. Then:
Middle of the pack. Asher hid the biggest plates to mess with everyone.
There it is.
His name in my hand.
Dropped into the middle of a sentence about nothing.
And my mind goes instantly, traitorously, to the gym.
To him under a bar with a stack of weights on it.
To the shape of his arms beneath that soaked white shirt before any of it, before the hallway kiss, before the click of the lock.
To the way he lifted me against that door like I weighed nothing.
How my back hit the wood, legs wrapping around his hips, and somewhere in the animal part of my brain I registered, even then, that I wasn't worried.
Not for one second. I knew there was no world in which he would drop me.
Heat crawls up my neck. I'm standing in my kitchen getting turned on by the thought of a man lifting weights with his friends. A man who has no idea I'm thinking about him right now, while another man—the kind one, the acceptable one—tells me about his day.
One makes me feel safe.
The other makes me forget myself entirely.
I set the phone face-down on the counter.
This has to stop.
Not the texting. The texting is innocent enough. Declan has done nothing but be a steady, decent presence in my phone since September, and I have done nothing but politely reply. There is no version of this that anyone could look at and call wrong.
Except I know what it is. I know why I keep the conversation open.
I know that when Declan mentions the gym, the bar, the gang, the Halloween party where he shared a blurry photo of three grown men in costumes clearly thrown together last-minute at a Walmart, my eyes go straight past him to that carefree, cocky grin.
Every time. I know I'm using a grieving man's kindness as a window, and I'm pressing my face right up against the glass.
That's the part nobody could call innocent, and I know it.
I turn the phone back over.
Me: Sounds like you all had fun.
Declan: We did. You'd have hated it. Too loud.
He's right. I would have. And the fact that he knows that, that he's filed away enough about me in such a short period of time, sits warm and uncomfortable in my chest.
The phone rings in my hand before I can answer him back. Different name. Nora.
I accept the call and prop the phone against my shoulder, adding water to the cake pan to let it soak.
"What are you doing Sunday?" she says, no preamble.
"Church. Then nothing. Why? Want to come over for dinner?"
Ever since we had that conversation at my kitchen table, the one that finally pushed her back toward Nate, she hasn't been over as much.
"I love going to your house, but we thought it'd be nice if you came over here instead. Unless you have anything we can help you with? Then we'll totally come over."
"No, no. I think we're good here."
"Perfect! You three come over, and we'll cook for you."
I turn the faucet off. "You're cooking?" I stifle the laugh coming up my throat. I can't help it. "You? You hate cooking."
"God, no." I can hear her grinning on the other side. "Nate's grilling. Otherwise, we'd all starve. Or we'd be out sixty bucks for whatever's open on a Sunday in Harlow, which isn't much."
Something in me eases. A night where food isn't my job. A house I don’t have to clean for visitors.
"Okay," I say. "That sounds nice."
And then my stomach does something it has no business doing.
"Is anyone else going to be there?"
I keep my voice flat. Stare at the half-clean pan in the sink, my heart lodged somewhere near my throat. I don't know which answer I'm hoping for, and that's the worst part—I genuinely don’t know.
"No," Nora says. "It’s just us, just a family day.”
The disappointment lands fast enough to embarrass me.
"Sounds good," I say, voice even. "I'll bring dessert."
"You're the best. Bye, Auds."
I walk through the door with the cake carrier flat against both palms. The warmth hits me first. The fireplace is going in the great room—actual wood, the smell of it folding into the smoky sweetness drifting in from the grill.
The November chill presses against the house, light pouring from the tall, dramatic windows.
Nora gives me a quick squeeze before whisking the dessert out of my hands. I already know she'll crack the lid open to take a "taste test.” She comes back to lead Eli and Sophie up the stairs, searching for Owen.
Nate walks into the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder, searching for something when he sees me sitting at the table.
"Hey, Audrey." His smile is warm. "Glad you came. Nora's been talking about it all week."
Nora recently moved in. They both look so happy. Everything seems so right. I feel a knot in my lower stomach, one that I quickly smother. Nora deserves the world, and Nate has proven time and time again that he'd happily put it on a platter and serve it to her.
"Thanks for having us. It smells incredible,” I say.
"No problem. Hope you like short ribs. We’ll see how they turn out." He tastes the sauce on the counter, frowns, then adds garlic powder. He opens a drawer and pulls out the foil, starting to walk back outside.
I watch him, thinking about my own kitchen with the chair nobody sits in. The knot forms again, and I make myself stop.
"Hey." He turns, and his face has gone a little careful. "I've been meaning to say… At the barbecue, back in the summer? If any of the guys came on too strong, I'm sorry. They can be a lot. I should've kept a better eye."
My body goes still for half a second.
He doesn't say a name. He doesn't have to. There's a particular weight on the word guys that lands on exactly one of them, and we both feel it.
"It was fine," I say, trying to keep my face blank. "Everyone was kind."
"They mean well." He turns back to the stove to grab the tongs. "Mostly."
He knows.
I smile and nod, but the panic ticks underneath like a second pulse. If Nate knew, would he be apologizing, or would he be saying something else entirely? Would Asher have told him? Would Asher tell anyone?
I don't know him. It keeps circling back to that. I slept with a man I don't know, let him shatter me against a door with no condom, no thought, and I've spent weeks not knowing whether he's the kind of man who keeps that to himself or doesn't.
The Harlow Heartbreaker.
A career of rotating women.
Why would I be the one he stayed silent about?
"Declan asked after you, actually," Nate says, pausing at the French doors. "I hope it was okay that I gave him your number. He swore it was just to check on you as a friend. Someone who might understand…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
"It was." My mouth is dry. "He's been kind."
"He's the best of us." Nate says it simply—no agenda—and goes back to his ribs. The panic eases a half-step because a man who suspected anything wouldn't pivot to telling me how good Declan is.
Probably.
The kids end up downstairs, and Owen has Wanda doing tricks in the great room. Sophie and Eli are arranged on the rug like spectators at a small theater.
"Watch," Owen says. He makes a fist and holds it out. "Knuckles."
The cat, who is roughly the size and shape of a holiday ham, considers the fist with an air of ennui. Then she leans in and bonks her enormous head against his knuckles.
Eli loses it on the floor. "She's so fat," he howls, delighted and irreverent.
"She's not fat. She's fluffy," Owen says, with the dignity of a boy who has had this argument before.
"It’s okay, bud. She was fat before she ended up here," Nora says, passing through with mugs.
Sophie migrates to the den off the great room, standing in front of the wall of shelves.
By the time Nora’s added milk and sugar to the coffee, she's folded into an armchair with a book she’s pulled down, knees up, gone somewhere else entirely.
She does that now. Finds the quiet edge of a room and disappears into a page. I watch her for a second too long.
"She okay?" Nora asks, low, beside me.
"She's good. She reads all the time now."
"That's good."
"Mm."
A little? Sure.
All the time? I don’t know the right answer.
Nora wraps both hands around her mug. "So… I have a favor to ask," she says. "And you can say no."
"Well, now I can't say no."
She dismisses it with a wave of her hand. "I feel like I jumped the gun a little on moving in so quickly. I’ve never had to worry about someone else’s kid before, and I already messed up.”
“Nora.” I put a hand over hers to stop the spiral. “You spent months at my house. Putting my kids first. Before yourself, even. You’re not allowed to say things like that.”