Chapter 29
Audrey
The gravel crunches under my shoes, and I stand there with one hand still on the open car door like it might hold me up.
Sophie and Eli are already gone. They spotted their friends near the front steps and cut across the parking lot, Eli's church shoes slapping the pavement, Sophie calling his name to slow down. Nobody's watching them yet. They get to be just kids for another thirty seconds.
I don't.
I can feel the morning sun on the back of my neck, my pulse going in my wrists, and the way my fingers won't quite let go of the door.
Then he's there.
Asher comes around the front of the car, unhurried, the way he moves when he wants me to slow down too.
He's in a gray button-down with the sleeves rolled, no tie, and he looks like he belongs anywhere he decides to stand.
He stops in front of me and takes my free hand.
His thumb finds my knuckles and presses.
"Hey." He tips my chin up with one finger so I have to look at him. "You ready?"
"No."
His mouth curves. "That's okay." He squeezes my hand once. "I'm ready enough for the both of us."
A truck pulls in beside us and parks crooked.
Nora's out before the engine's all the way off, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and she takes one look at the two of us standing there holding hands in the open and grins.
"We'll give them something to talk about," she says, slamming her door. "Those women can bawl their eyes out when they see the arm candy we get to go home with."
She comes straight to me, taking my shoulders. She looks me over once, fast, the way she used to check my clothes before recitals when we were kids.
"Let's do this."
"Heck yeah," Asher says.
Nora rolls her eyes so hard I'm surprised they come back. "I think I almost liked you better when you swore like a normal person."
He shrugs, easy. "I like me better like this."
"Me too." It comes out without a second thought, then I'm smiling at him in broad daylight, and I don't care.
Nora makes a small gagging sound.
"Yep. You're ready." She turns toward the doors, decisive. "This congregation’s not gonna know what's about to hit them."
"Us?"
Nate's come up on her other side, Owen trailing him with his shirt already half-untucked, and he loops an arm around Nora's shoulders.
"Both of us,” Nora says. “It's a double play.”
Nate raises an eyebrow. "That wasn't too bad, babe."
"I'm getting there," she says, flipping her hair.
I have no idea what she means.
We walk in together.
It takes about four steps.
The lobby's full of people waiting for the service to start—coffee cups, bulletins, low talk—and the talking stops in a ripple that moves out from us like something dropped in water.
Heads turn. Of course they do. Two enormous, handsome men in Sunday dress, flanked by the Bellinger sisters. You couldn't not look.
Then they start coming.
A man I recognize from the Sunday school committee gets to Nate first, hand already out, asking about the season.
Two more peel off toward Asher, and a kid no older than twelve materializes out of nowhere with a ball cap in one hand and a marker he undoubtedly stole from the bulletin board in the other, looking like he might throw up.
Asher crouches down to his level without missing a beat. "Hey, bud. This for me?"
I watch him sign it. Watch him ask the kid his name and check the spelling before he writes it on the cap next to his signature. I watch three fathers arrange themselves around him in a loose, grinning half-circle, all of them suddenly twelve years old too.
And I watch the women.
They cluster near the entry table, four of them, and I can see the exact second it all rearranges itself in their heads.
The scandal they came prepared for, colliding with the man crouched on the carpet signing a hat for somebody's son.
A couple of them soften before they catch themselves and stiffen back up.
Jenna isn't softening.
She’s watching me.
The chimes sound from inside the sanctuary, the two-minute warning, and the lobby starts to drain.
Sophie and Eli find their way back to us through the crowd. Eli's already campaigning before he reaches me.
"Can I sit with Owen? Please?"
"If Aunt Nora’s okay with it."
He's gone before I finish the sentence.
We don't take my usual pew.
I steer us four rows up and to the left, somewhere I've never sat in eleven years, and it feels like planting a flag.
Sophie slides in first, claiming a spot next to Asher.
I take the other side of him, and that's its own small flag.
Nora, Nate, and Owen file into the row behind, Eli scrambling in beside Owen, and Nora pats my shoulder once over the back of the pew before she sits.
The organ starts.
I stand when everyone stands. I find the hymn in the book and hold my half of it open. I mouth the lyrics at the right times.
I don't hear a word of it.
My whole body's gone to the six inches on my left where Asher is. His hand has settled between my shoulder blades, warm and steady, his thumb moving once, twice, against the thin fabric of my blouse.
We sit.
His hand leaves my back. A second later, his arm settles along the top of the pew behind me.
The pastor reads from Ecclesiastes. A time to mourn, a time to dance.
Asher's thumb keeps going on my shoulder.
Behind me, Eli and Owen have started a whispered argument about something, and I hear Nate's low growl cut it off. There’s a pause. Then it starts back up, quieter, and Nate shushes them again.
There’s a different rustle, closer, and then Nora's voice pitched down to a hiss right at the back of my neck.
"Tone it down, lover boy. I do not need a front-row seat to this."
He doesn't even turn around.
He does it more.
His arm tugs, just slightly, just enough that I tip into his side, and I have to bite down on a laugh in the middle of the sermon.
Sophie looks up at the ceiling, letting me know she sees exactly what's happening and finds it embarrassing. Asher’s arm comes around her, squeezes her for a moment, then drops back to his side.
She doesn’t acknowledge it, but the corner of her mouth tilts up.
I keep my eyes forward.
The thing is, I can't track the service at all now.
The pastor's voice goes up and comes down, the congregation murmurs back the responses, and I'm aware of all of it the way you zone out in traffic.
What I'm actually doing is sitting inside the warmth of his arm in a building where everyone can see, and finding out my body doesn't know how to be afraid and this happy at the same time.
I turn my head.
Just once. Just to look at him.
He's already looking at me.
And it's not the look from the bar—the one that started all of this—all heat and dare. It's quieter than that. His eyes go over my face slow, like he's reading something, and whatever he finds there changes his expression into something so open it stops the breath in my throat.
I know what's on my own face. I can feel it sitting there, plain as the sun on the back of my neck this morning.
It's want. But it's the other thing too. The bigger one. The one I keep folding up small and putting away.
It's all the way up at the surface, and it would take nothing, less than nothing, to say it.
The organ swells into the closing hymn, breaking the moment, and I face front and stand up too fast.
The recessional lets out, and the sanctuary turns into noise.
We don't make it three feet up the aisle before people start collecting around us again, and I let the current move us toward the back.
Jenna's waiting by the doors.
"Audrey." Her smile is the plastered Sunday smile, the one that doesn't reach anything. "I didn't know you were bringing a guest."
"Jenna." I match it. Then I turn and put my hand flat on Asher's chest, light, claiming, and I feel his heart going under my palm. "This is Asher. Asher, Jenna's in the play with me."
"Pleasure." He puts out his hand and gives her the full smile—the one that's gotten him out of a thousand rooms—and Jenna takes his hand because there's nothing else a person can do when Asher Calloway decides to be charming at them.
Her eyes flash. Something hot and small goes across her face, and for one bright second I let my smile sharpen so she can see it has teeth in it.
Then I don't need it anymore.
It just goes. The need to prove something to her. I'm holding too much good to keep my hands on a thing that small.
"It was nice seeing you," I say, not needing to see her reaction anymore. I steer us past her toward the lobby.
That's when I see Melinda.
She's across the room, already moving, and my stomach drops out from under me before I can stop it. Thomas's mother—in her blue Sunday dress, her good pearls, the face that has his eyes in it—crossing the space toward us.
I don't know what I'm going to say to her. I've turned it over a hundred times this week, and I've got nothing.
She doesn't go to me first.
She goes to the kids. Gathers Sophie and Eli both into her, kisses their hair, asks Eli something that makes him grin.
Then she straightens and finds Nora, and there's a hug there too.
Nora introduces her to Nate and Owen, and Melinda is shaking hands and nodding and being gracious the way she always is.
Then she turns to me.
I open my mouth.
She doesn't let me get there. She reaches out and takes both of my hands in hers, her thumbs pressing into my palms, and she looks at me the way she has since the day Thomas brought me home.
"You look happy, Audrey."
My throat burns instantly.
I've spent weeks wondering if seeing me with Asher would hurt her.
Whether happiness would feel like a betrayal.
The room goes small. It narrows down to her hands around mine, the blue of her dress, the burn climbing the back of my throat.
"I'm not sure what to say," I tell her. It's the truth. It's the only thing I've got.
She pulls me in.
Her arms go around me, and she holds me. It's longer than a regular hug, long enough that I feel the next breath go out of her against my shoulder.
"You grieved my son for a long time, dear." Her voice is right at my ear, low, just for me. "I know you loved him. And he would want you to be happy." She leans back just enough to find my face. Her eyes are wet and steady. "You are, aren't you?"
"Yes." It cracks coming out. "Probably more than I have any right to be."
"Hush." She gives my hands one more squeeze and lets them go.
Then she turns to Asher.
He straightens up. "Ma'am." He dips his head toward her, and it's the most formal I’ve ever seen him, this man who calls the entire world by a nickname.
Melinda waves the whole thing off, steps in, and hugs him.
His arms come up a half-second late, surprised, and his eyes find mine over the top of her head, wide, asking me what's happening. I have no idea. I press my lips together so I won't laugh and cry at the same time.
I hear what she says to him. She's not trying to hide it.
"You take good care of them." She waits a beat. "Okay?"
Something settles across his face. "Always." No hesitation. The word comes out of him like it was already loaded.
She pats his arm twice, satisfied. She steps back and looks at the four of us standing there—the kids, Asher, me—and she smiles at all of us at once.
Then she walks away.
I watch her go. The blue dress, the pearls, the careful upright walk of her, weaving out through the crowd toward the doors.
When I turn back, I catch them.
The cluster of women by the bulletin table. Jenna's found her way back to them, and they've got their heads tipped together, one of them looking at me and away too fast.
They're talking about me. Of course they're talking about me.
I wait for it to land. The dread. The recalculating. The part of me that's spent over a decade running every choice through the narrow gate of what these exact women will say about it.
It doesn't come.
I stand in the lobby of Millbrook First with my husband's mother's blessing still warm on my hands, a baseball player signing a kid's hat over by the doors, and Sophie nearby flipping through a bulletin she's not reading. I look at those women, and I feel nothing about what they think of me.
Not because they've changed.
Because I have.
I make myself a promise, standing there. Quiet. Whole. The cleanest one I've made in years.
I am done living my life through them. Through anyone.
I turn away from them and go to Asher.
He's got the hat back to its owner and his hand free, and when I step into his side, he opens his arm without looking, like he knew I was coming. I press in against his chest right there in the middle of everyone. His shirt's warm. His arm closes around my back.
"Hey." His chin comes down to the top of my head. "You good?"
I nod against him.
I'm more than good. I'm so far past good I don't have words for it, and that's the problem, because the words I want are sitting right there in my mouth where they’ve been sitting all morning, all week, longer than that.
I love you.
They’ve been ready since the pew. They’ve been ready since he carried me to bed at two in the morning after a concert he took my children to alone. Maybe they’ve been ready since the first time he came to my house, if I'm honest, which I'm trying very hard to be now.
I tip my head back to look up at him.
His gaze drops to mine, and his face does the thing it did in the pew, that slow open thing, and I know he can see it. He can see the words right there. He's just waiting, the way he's been waiting for all of it, ready enough for the both of us.
The lobby's emptying out. Sophie says something to Asher that I don't catch, and he laughs. Somewhere behind us, Nora's telling Nate the double play landed.
And I have never in my life wanted to say three words so badly, stood so close to a man I could say them to, and held them in.
Just a little longer.
Just until it's mine to give and not the whole congregation's to watch.
I take his hand instead. I lace my fingers all the way through his, the way I never let myself do where people could see, and I hold on.