14. Chapter 14
Mara
Ididn't sleep.
I'm already dressed when I hear Cole in the kitchen.
Sweatpants. The soft sweatshirt that used to belong to my college roommate.
Hair in the kind of knot that isn't trying.
The mirror caught my collarbone on the way out, a small mark there, the size of a thumbnail, the color of an old plum, and I pulled the collar up and kept moving.
He's already in the kitchen.
Dressed. Coffee made.
He looks up when I come in. I see it land, the half-second where his shoulders shift and his jaw resets and his eyes go through something complicated before he locks it down.
"Morning."
"Morning."
I cross to the counter. He nudges the second mug toward me without looking directly at me.
Two feet apart. The kind of two feet that used to be polite professional distance and now is a measured choice.
"Owen?" I ask.
"Still asleep."
"Storm?"
"Gone but road's still out."
I notice the faint edge of a mark where his collar doesn't quite cover his shoulder. The place where I bit him last night. He has not tugged the fabric up to hide it.
I look back at my own mug.
"Mara."
"Don't. Not yet. Let me have my coffee first."
He nods. One small nod. He doesn't argue.
Then he sets his cup down.
"There is one thing I need to tell you. Before Owen wakes up."
His voice has changed. I set my mug on the counter.
"What."
"The text last night. From Dev." He's looking at me directly now. No locking down. "Mercer's escalated. Extended surveillance, not just drive-bys. Dev's people have him on the property line three separate times this week. He's been photographing the house."
My hands go flat on the counter before I've made a decision about them.
Not a flinch. Not a step back. Just my palms pressing down against the cold surface, fingers spread, the way you brace when the floor shifts. I stay exactly where I am and I let the information land in my body before I let it go anywhere else.
He's been photographing the house.
Three times this week. While Owen slept twenty feet from the window. While I was in the kitchen making pancakes. While Cole and I were boarding a window not thinking about anything except each other.
My shoulders have pulled in by half an inch. I make them go back.
I build the record. It's automatic by now, the way I sort a thing the second it lands. Three sightings. Property line. A camera. Mercer, who is patient, who waits, who stood under a child's window once already and is now standing far enough back to use a lens.
I file it next to the boot print and the sedan and the two men in wrong shoes.
The column is no longer a column. It's a case.
"How close," I say.
"Close enough to see the porch. Not close enough to see windows."
"Owen's windows?"
He nods.
The half-inch comes back. I let it.
"You knew last night."
"Dev's text came in while we were in the den. I read it after I carried you to bed."
"And you waited."
"I wanted to tell you after the storm passed." He flattens his hand on the counter. "I'm telling you now because waiting was the wrong call."
I look at the boarded windows over the sink. The thin gray light bleeding around the edges.
My hands are still flat on the counter. I lift them. Pick up the mug.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Thank you for telling me." My hand is steady. "What does it change."
"For Owen, nothing. He stays close to the house. He doesn't go anywhere without me or you or Dev's team."
"For me?"
"Same."
"And for you?"
He looks at me for a long second.
"I don't know yet."
Owen wanders in twenty minutes later, hair a complete disaster, one sock missing, holding his stuffed dinosaur by the tail in a way that has to be uncomfortable for both of them.
"Why is it dark," he announces. Not a question. An objection.
"Storm," Cole says.
"Still?"
"Still."
Owen processes this with great seriousness. He climbs onto the stool at the island and says, with the dignity of a man entering negotiations, "Pancakes."
"We have eggs."
"Pancakes."
"Eggs."
"Mara." He turns to me. "Mara, you can make pancakes."
I look at Cole over Owen's head. His face is the closest thing to neutral I've ever seen on it.
"I can make pancakes," I say.
Owen punches the air.
I make pancakes.
It's a kind of penance. Flour on my hands. A kid bouncing on a stool. A man I had my mouth on six hours ago standing four feet from me. All of us pretending to be a normal morning.
Cole keeps his distance. Doesn't reach past me for anything. Doesn't brush against me getting the syrup down.
He's overcorrecting. The working-hard is louder than the touching would have been.
I notice. I don't say anything yet.
Owen narrates the entire breakfast like we are all extremely interested in his pancake-stacking strategy.
"Can we do fancy camping again tonight?" Owen asks. "I'm good at it now."
"We'll see," Cole says.
"That's a yes," Owen tells me, confidentially.
"That's a we'll see," Cole tells him, firmly.
Owen grins at me. I grin back. The grin almost holds.
After breakfast Owen disappears to the living room with a stack of comics.
Cole picks up a plate.
I take it from him.
Our fingers touch on the rim. He pulls his hand back like he was burned. Fast enough that I notice. The four feet are louder when he closes them by accident.
"I've got this. Go check the perimeter."
"It's still raining."
"I know."
He looks at me for a long second. Then he sets the dish towel down, walks out, and I hear the back door close behind him.
I stand at the sink and grip the edge with both hands.
He didn't fight me on it. That's the part that hurts. I gave him a door and he took it.
Owen catches me staring out the window.
"Are you sad?" From three feet away. Very direct.
I turn. "What? No. Why?"
"You have your sad face."
I crouch down so we're eye-level. "Bug. I'm okay. I'm just thinking."
"About what?"
I can't lie to him. Owen reads adult faces the way most kids read picture books.
"About your dad. And me. And how complicated it all is."
He tilts his head. "Are you fighting?"
"No. We're not fighting."
"Then what's complicated?"
"Sometimes when two adults like each other a lot, they have to figure out a bunch of stuff before they know what to do with that. The figuring-out is the complicated part."
Owen absorbs this with great focus. "You and Dad like each other a lot?"
I close my eyes. "Yeah, bud."
"Cool." Like the matter is settled.
He pats my arm once, in a way I'm pretty sure he learned from his father, and walks back to the living room.
I find Cole in his office around three.
He's at his desk. Laptop open. Phone in his hand.
"Dev?"
"Working on it."
I sit on the arm of the chair across from his desk.
"You carried me to bed."
"I did."
"Why."
"Owen could have come into the den in the morning."
"You could have woken me up. You didn't. Which means you wanted me asleep when you made the call."
He doesn't deny it.
"I'm not angry," I say. "I'm trying to figure out what last night was. To you. Because I know what it was to me."
He closes the laptop. Slowly.
"I don't know yet."
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
"I'm not asking for a promise. I'm asking you to not put me in a room and close the door on me because the morning made you nervous."
He crosses the office and sits on the arm of the chair next to me. Reaches over and takes my hand. Doesn't lace his fingers through mine. Just covers it.
"Last night I gave you something and didn't take anything back.
Do you know how long it's been since I did that with anyone.
" He's not looking at me. "And I haven't worked out what it means.
With Owen. With Mercer outside. With any of it.
So, I carried you to your own bed because if I'd woken up next to you I'd have wanted to do it again.
And again. And I'm not ready to want something that much yet. "
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"That's an honest answer."
He squeezes my hand. Once. Then lets it go.
"Don't carry me to bed again. If you don't want to wake up next to me, say so."
"Noted."
"And don't overcorrect. Owen's going to notice."
"Already noted."
I get up.
At the doorway he says, "Mara."
I turn.
"Last night. Whatever else it was. It wasn't a mistake."
"I know."
That night we move the mattresses back to our separate rooms. He doesn't comment. I don't either.
The three of us watch a movie on Cole's laptop. Owen is asleep by the second act. Cole and I sit on the couch with the kid between us, his head on my arm, his feet kicked into Cole's lap.
It should feel like a thing that needs managing. It doesn't. That's what scares me. The three of us folded onto one couch in the dark, a sleeping kid bridging the space between us, and the only thing in my chest is how badly I want this to be allowed to stay ordinary.
Cole's hand is on the back of the couch behind me. He doesn't move it toward my neck. He doesn't trace anything down my spine. After last night he knows he doesn't have to. The not-touching is its own sentence now, and we're both fluent in it.
His phone lights up on the coffee table.
He picks it up. Reads it. His hand drops from the back of the couch.
He stands up. Pockets the phone. Does not look at me.
"I have to take this."
He goes.
I hear his office door close down the hall. Not slammed. The deliberate kind. The kind that says I am putting a door between us right now and that is the door.
I sit with Owen asleep across my lap until the credits end. Then I carry him upstairs, tuck him in, press my mouth to his forehead.
The light under the office door is still on when I pass it.
I stop.
His voice is low on the other side. The voice that means something has moved and he has already decided how to handle it before he tells me there was anything to handle.
I press my hand flat against the wood.
I do not knock.
Whatever is on the other side of that door is going to change something tomorrow. I can feel it the way you feel weather coming in, not the storm itself, just the pressure dropping, the air going still and wrong.
I walk away.
But I count his footsteps until I hear him stop moving.
In my room my own phone is face down on the nightstand where I left it.
It lights up. Once. The screen throws a square of white at the ceiling.
A number I don't know. A local area code.
The message is four words.
Nanny. We should talk.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at it for a long time.
Then I turn the phone face down again and I do not answer.
Not tonight.