Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Tessa
Ismooth the front of my dress for the fourth time since parking the car, telling myself the deep green was absolutely the right choice for a family dinner in a house full of people who already seem alarmingly inclined to like me.
It was the right choice. Probably.
The Maddox family home is bigger than I expected. There is warm yellow light spilling from every window like something off a Christmas card. It's the kind of house that looks like it smells of cinnamon and good decisions.
I stand on the front step for a moment.
George will be inside.
My stomach does a small, treacherous flip at the reminder, and I ring the doorbell before I can negotiate myself back to the car.
Eleanor Maddox opens the door so fast she must have been standing behind it, and she pulls me into a hug like I'm a parcel she's been tracking the delivery of for weeks. "Tessa! Come in, come in." She steps back and studies me with open, uncomplicated approval. "You look fantastic."
Heat climbs straight to my cheeks and I laugh the kind of laugh that communicates absolutely nothing.
The hallway smells of roasting garlic and something sweet underneath it, caramelised onions maybe, or a dessert already working away in the oven, and the scent hits me with surprising force.
I feel my shoulders relax. I had not realized I was holding them quite that high.
Margaret Maddox appears from the direction of the kitchen, elegant as ever despite the dish towel in her hands.
"Tessa," she says. "I'm so glad you could make it." She glances past me toward the empty driveway. "George isn't with you?"
"No," I say. Quickly. Too quickly.
Margaret hums. It's not quite judgment, but adjacent to it. "Running late. That sounds about right."
Before I can think of anything useful to add, Eleanor is tugging a tall, sandy-haired man forward by the sleeve. "This is Daniel. My fiancé. Be nice to him, he's nervous."
Daniel looks the opposite of nervous. He shakes my hand with an easy grin. "I've heard a lot about you," he says. "Mostly that you're the only person standing between this wedding and a minor international incident."
"That's generous," I say. "I'd say moderate diplomatic crisis at best."
He laughs, and I decide I like him immediately.
Eleanor steers me toward the dining room with a proprietorial hand at my back, narrating the house like a proud tour guide. That is where Daniel proposed. That is where George broke the banister in 2009. Apparently, I am not to ask.
I catch my reflection in a hallway mirror as we pass and realize I am already smiling. A real smile, not the polished professional one I practiced in the car on the drive over.
The dining table is enormous, set with mismatched china that somehow looks entirely intentional, and I love it on sight.
"George always sits there," Eleanor says, gesturing to a chair with the confidence of someone rearranging destiny, "so we put you right next to him." She says it the way you'd say obviously.
I sit down. The empty place beside me has its chair angled almost conspiratorially toward mine, and I make myself look away from it. Someone presses a glass of red wine into my hand before I've fully settled, and I accept it like a life raft.
Daniel drops into the chair across from me and raises his glass. "So," he says pleasantly, "what embarrassing George stories have they told you so far?"
"Daniel!" Eleanor looks delighted by her own outrage.
"What?" He blinks with magnificent innocence. "It's an important bonding ritual."
I take a very deliberate sip of wine.
The family moves around me with the easy, overlapping noise of people who have shared this table a thousand times and for a moment I'm swept pleasantly along with it. Passing bread, refilling glasses, watching the Maddox's talking over each other.
Then I glance at the empty chair again and check my phone under the table.
Nothing from George.
He does know I'm coming, doesn't he. The thought arrives quietly and, once it appears, refuses to leave.
Eleanor refills my glass without being asked and asks about my work with the genuine interest of someone who has actually been briefed on me, which is either sweet or slightly alarming, and probably both.
I answer on autopilot, smiling at the right moments, while one corner of my brain begins constructing a quiet, terrible theory.
Laughter erupts at the far end of the table.
I laugh too, one beat late and with no idea why.
I straighten my cutlery for something to do with my hands.
George asked me to be his girlfriend. This is part of the deal. I pick up my wine again. This is fine.
Dinner arrives and I'm grateful for the distraction of passing dishes. Eleanor, who turns out to have excellent comic timing, informs me that George once got his head stuck between the stair railings at age seven and had to be extracted with butter.
Then the front door opens.
Every cell in my body goes very still.
I can hear footsteps in the hallway and then George Maddox walks into the dining room still in his coat, colour high in his cheeks from the cold, looking like he's just come in from somewhere real and brisk and entirely unaware of what he's walking into.
He is, in his own quietly geeky way, objectively and unfairly good-looking, and I hate that I notice it every single time.
His eyes sweep the table. They land on me.
He stops.
He has the expression of a man who has just stepped off a curb he didn't know was there. His eyes widen like that half-second of freefall before the pavement arrives.
I give him my warmest smile.
He doesn't return it.
"Tessa." My name comes out carefully, the way you'd say the name of something you weren't entirely sure was real.
"Hi," I say. It is possibly the smallest word I have ever produced.
He looks at his mother. Something fast and wordless passes between them and I don't have the decoder ring for any of it.
Eleanor beams at him like she's done something wonderful and is waiting to be thanked for it.
I watch him process that beam, watch something shift and settle behind his eyes, and I can identify the precise moment he begins to understand exactly what has happened here.
My face is very warm. I am deeply, sincerely grateful for the wine.
George pulls off his coat with the deliberate focus of a man who needs thirty seconds to collect himself, and Daniel helpfully lifts it from his hands without being asked.
He sits down beside me (what else can he do, really) and the chair legs scrape against the floor in the sudden, shimmering quiet.
He's close enough that I can smell the cold air still clinging to the fabric of his sleeve, clean and wintry.
"Sorry I'm late," he says to the table.
Dinner resumes. Margaret asks Daniel about the florist. Eleanor debates linen colours with great conviction.
George eats with the careful, methodical focus of a man thinking about several things simultaneously, and none of them appear to be the pasta.
I remember the text he'd sent earlier in the week.
Hold hands. It was written like a logistical instruction, like a note on a meeting agenda. I can follow instructions.
His hand rests on the table near mine.
I take a breath.
I reach across the small, charged space between our chairs and find his hand under the edge of the table. My fingers settle over his.
He freezes. His fork stops halfway to his mouth and stays there, suspended, as though someone has pressed pause on him from a distance.
For a full second he doesn't react at all, like his brain has temporarily disconnected from the rest of his body, and I have just enough time to think oh no before —
He coughs.
Once. Twice. Then with genuine, escalating violence.
Oh no. I killed him. I killed George Maddox with one mildly awkward hand-hold over the pasta, and Eleanor is never going to forgive me, and this is going to be a very difficult wedding to coordinate from prison.
Margaret reaches for the water pitcher with the practised calm of a woman who has weathered many things. "George."
"I'm fine," he manages, hoarse and entirely unconvincing, which is exactly what a person says when they are not fine at all.
He coughs again, harder, and pushes his chair back from the table.
The legs scrape loudly across the floor.
"I just—" He gestures vaguely toward the hallway, the gesture of a man attempting to exit a burning building while maintaining what remains of his dignity.
George disappears through the doorway.
I set my napkin down.
"I should—"
Margaret waves a hand before I can finish the sentence.
"Go."