Chapter 3 Spare Room
Rules
Delilah
He lets the phone ring.
Four times. Five. The screen glows with Cole's name, and Bishop just stands there watching it like he's deciding something. Then it stops, and he sets the phone face-down on the counter without a word.
We're in his kitchen now, small and clean, the marina office behind us.
I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse.
"Okay." He crosses his arms. The kitchen light catches the ink on his forearms. Dark geometric lines, something that looks like a bird with its wings folded. "Rules."
"Rules."
"You stay inside. No calls, no texts, no posting anything."
I open my mouth.
"I mean it. One photo from this address and I can't keep you hidden."
"I wasn't going to"
"No social media." He holds up a finger. "No calling your mom, your friends, your anyone.
Not until you've had time to think and whatever search party they're assembling loses the scent."
The words search party sit in my stomach like a stone.
"No leaving the property without me." He tilts his head toward the window. "The dock out back is fine. The front yard isn't."
I stare at him. "You're treating me like a fugitive."
"You ran from your own wedding." He says it without judgment, which is worse.
"Somebody's going to be looking for you. I'm just making sure they don't find you until you're ready."
He's not wrong. That's the irritating part.
"I follow rules," I say, and my voice comes out pricklier than I meant. "I've followed every rule my entire life. I don't need you to list them at me like I'm."
A firework goes off somewhere over the lake.
The boom cracks the air and I flinch so hard my shoulder hits the cabinet behind me. My whole body drops like I expect the ceiling to fall.
Silence.
Bishop doesn't move. Doesn't say a word. He just watches me press a hand flat against my sternum and try to breathe through the embarrassment.
"The fireworks," I manage. "They're louder than I," I stop. "I'm fine."
He nods once, slow. "I know."
He doesn't push it. Doesn't explain it back to me or ask me what's wrong. He just turns and walks toward the hallway, and I follow him because I don't know what else to do.
The spare room is small and honest about it.
A full bed with a dark green comforter that looks like it's been washed a hundred times. One nightstand, no lamp, just a phone charger coiled on top. A window with the blinds already pulled, a thin strip of colored light leaking in from the fireworks outside. The walls are bare. No photos, no art, nothing personal.
It looks like a room belonging to someone who didn't plan on staying.
It smells like cedar and something faintly like him, which I choose not to think about.
"Bathrooms across the hall," Bishop says from the doorway. "Towels are under the sink. There's a new toothbrush in the top drawer, still in the packaging."
The detail catches me off guard. The fact that he has a spare toothbrush. The fact that he thought to mention it.
"Thank you," I say.
He shrugs like it's nothing. Like sheltering a runaway bride on the Fourth of July is something he does regularly.
I nod, still holding the skirt of my dress up off the floor. It's cream silk with a twelve-foot train and forty-three buttons up the back that my mother fastened one by one this morning while telling me how proud she was.
I've been hauling it around for hours and I hate it more with every step.
Bishop disappears, and I hear a drawer open down the hall. He comes back with a folded shirt in one hand.
"It's big," he says. Like a warning.
I take it. Heather gray, well-worn, the neck stretched loose. The logo is faded too almost nothing. I can feel how soft it is just from the way it drapes over my hands.
"Thank you."
He looks at me for one second too long. Then he looks at the wall.
"Get some sleep." He pulls the door mostly closed behind him.
I stand there with his shirt in my hands and listen to his footsteps move down the hall.
Just tonight. That's what I agreed to. One night, and tomorrow I figure out what I actually want to do.
I have absolutely no idea what that is.
The buttons on the back of the dress take me twenty minutes.
The first twelve I manage on my own, twisting and reaching until my shoulders burn. The next ten I work from the bottom up, bent in half in the small bathroom mirror, fingers clumsy. By the time the last one slips free I'm breathing like I ran a mile and the dress is puddled on the tile floor.
I gather it up anyway.
Twelve hundred dollars of cream silk and forty-three buttons leaving it on the floor feels like a line even tonight. I carry it back to the bedroom and set it on the chair in the corner. Then I turn it to face the wall.
Some things you just can't look at.
The bathroom is clean and spare, same as the bedroom. One brand of soap, one brand of shampoo. A razor on the edge of the tub, a single towel on the rack. I find the toothbrush exactly where he said it would be and brush my teeth staring at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out who I'm looking at.
My makeup is mostly gone. There's a faint shadow under each eye where the mascara tracked and dried. My hair is still pinned in whatever's left of this morning's work, half of it already falling, and I reach up and pull the pins out one by one until it drops around my shoulders. Half-curled, half-wrecked.
I look like myself again.
I stand there a moment longer than I need to.
I don't remember the last time I looked like myself.
His shirt hits mid-thigh. The sleeves hang past my elbows and I push them up, and the fabric is so worn it feels like it's been lived in for years. I press the collar to my face before I can stop myself.
Cedar and lake air and something clean underneath.
I drop it fast.
This is not that kind of situation.
I can't sleep.
The mattress is fine. The room is quiet. Outside the window, fireworks are still going off in distant clusters over the lake. Soft pops now, not the violent cracks from before. The light bleeds through the blinds in faint color. Pink. Then gold.
I think about Cole.
I think about my mother's face when she zipped me into that dress this morning and said you look exactly right.
I think about standing at the back of that church, the doors sealed shut, the organ starting, and feeling nothing. Not nerves. Not love. Just the particular cold of realizing I was about to disappear into a life that fit everyone around me perfectly and had never once been built for me.
Twenty-seven years old and I had no idea what I actually wanted.
I'm starting to think that's not an accident.
The floorboards creak once in the hallway. Then stop.
I tell myself it's the house settling.
It creaks again.
I push back the comforter, cross the room in bare feet, and ease the door open. The first aid tape pulls against the floor with each step.
Bishop is standing in the hallway with a glass of water, very clearly on his way somewhere that is not my door. He stops when he sees me. His jaw tightens just slightly.
He's changed into a dark t-shirt and gray sweatpants, the drawstring loose at his hips. His feet are bare too, and there's something about that. About seeing this contained, watchful man standing in his own hallway at midnight with a glass of water like he couldn't sleep either. It makes my chest pull in a way I don't know what to do with.
The tattoos go further than his forearms. I can see the edge of something dark curling up the side of his neck, disappearing behind his ear. I look away before he catches me looking.
He holds out the glass. "Thought you might be awake."
I take it. Our fingers don't touch. I drink half of it standing there, and he watches the wall beside my head.
"The fireworks are almost done," he says.
"I know."
The silence stretches. It's not uncomfortable, exactly. It's loaded. The kind of quiet that has weight to it, that presses against your ribs and asks you to say something true.
I should say thank you, goodnight, I'll stay in my lane. I should be sensible. I have been sensible my entire life, and look where it got me. Barefoot in a stranger's hallway in a borrowed shirt at midnight, hiding from my own wedding.
"Bishop."
He looks at me.
"Why did you let me stay?"
Something moves across his face. Just for a second. There and gone, buried under the careful stillness he wears like armor.
He doesn't answer.
And that tells me everything.