24. Chapter 24
Mara
The knock comes at four in the afternoon. The day before the hearing, and nothing has felt like mine since I walked out his gate.
I open the door already knowing it's him, before I see the truck two blocks down, before the hood, before the grey shirt he had on yesterday and apparently never changed.
He's standing on Junie's back stoop like a man who has not noticed his own ridiculous behavior. Hood up. No coat that fits the weather. Looking at me like he drove here without deciding to.
I look at him for a second. My chin does the thing it does when I'm making a decision.
"You broke the strategic call," I say.
"I broke the strategic call."
"Liz is going to be mad."
"Liz can be mad."
I step back to let him in.
He follows me up the narrow stairs into Junie's kitchen, the crooked lampshade, the pull-out couch already made up, my bag still half-unpacked in the corner because I couldn't commit to staying and couldn't commit to leaving either.
I walk into him before I've finished deciding to.
Both arms, all the way, my face against his chest. I am shaking. Not crying. The kind of shaking that comes from being alone with something too long.
"Thank you for coming," I say into his shirt.
"I should have come last night."
"No. Last night was right. You stayed on the phone until I was asleep. Don't take that back now."
He presses his mouth to the top of my head and holds it there, his hand finding the back of my neck, the kind of stillness that says more than the words he isn't using.
"It's going to be over Monday," he says, eventually. "One way or another."
"Marcus thinks we win."
"Marcus thinks we win."
I pull back enough to look at him. "And the article?"
"Dies with the rest of it. The second a court sees the truth, the story becomes proof they were running an operation instead of a case." He keeps my hand in both of his. "It only works if you're still standing in it Monday. Which is the part I am not letting you talk yourself out of."
"I already tried. You already said no."
"Becoming a theme."
That gets a corner of my mouth moving, against my will.
"What if it doesn't work Monday."
I've been carrying the question since I walked out his front door yesterday. I want to ask it once and put it down.
"If the judge takes Owen, I lose, and I keep fighting it. But I'm not going to ask you to live in the version of my life where you're the reason I lost."
"That's not what I'm asking."
"I know. I'm telling you anyway."
My eyes go wet. I don't let them spill.
"You came over here," I say, after a moment. "Twelve hours after the strategic call."
"Twelve and a half."
"Second-fastest you've ever changed your mind about something."
"What's the first."
I tilt my head, look at him sideways. "You. Me. The first night."
I've surprised him. I can tell. We've both been pretending the first night was something we decided over twelve days. I'm done pretending.
"You knew on the first night," he says.
"I knew when you stood next to me at the stove with the spatula. The twelve days were administrative."
He covers my hand with both of his. I lean my head against his shoulder, and we stay like that long enough that I stop tracking the time.
We end up on the pull-out with our shoes off. He pulls me into him, and I go, and for a minute neither of us moves to sleep.
His mouth finds my temple first. Then my jaw. I turn into it and he's right there, slow and unhurried in a way the kitchen counter never was, like he has all night and nowhere safer to be than right here, in a room above a bakery, with a hearing eight hours out.
"We don't have to," he says, against my mouth. "I didn't come here for this."
"I know what you came here for." I pull him back down. "This is what I want."
It's quiet. It has to be, with Junie's apartment walls thin enough to carry sound, and that quiet makes it slower, his hand under my shirt unhurried, like he's memorizing instead of rushing, and when I come it's with my face pressed into his neck and his hand over my mouth so the sound doesn't carry past the room.
After, my head finds his chest. I'm asleep before I mean to be.
I wake an hour later. His arm is heavy across me, his breathing slow and even, but the bar in the middle of the couch has found my hip and I'm awake enough now to notice it.
I ease out from under his arm. He doesn't stir. I sit on the edge of the mattress with my phone in my hand.
The hearing is in a few hours.
I almost don't call. Then I do.
Hannah answers on the third ring. Past eleven in Charlotte. She should be asleep.
"You okay?" Careful, the way she's been careful for fourteen months.
"Yeah. I just wanted to call."
"Mara, it's eleven-thirty. You haven't called at eleven-thirty since..."
"I know, Han."
Her voice drops to almost nothing on the last word, the way it did the night I called from the floor of a sublet I couldn't afford.
"This isn't that," I say, glancing back at Cole asleep on the couch. "Last time I called because I had nobody and nothing. This time I called because tomorrow matters and I wanted your voice before it does. Different call."
She's quiet a beat. "No. It's not."
I give her the shape of it: the job that turned into more, the aunt who hired a man to watch the house, the headline with my name in it again, the hearing in the morning. Not Mercer. Not the boot print. Not what happened on a kitchen counter after a break in.
"There's a kid," I say. "Owen. Drew me into a family picture before he'd even met me. Told me last night the scary parts are easier when you're not by yourself for them. He's eight and he figured that out the hard way."
"You fell for the kid first."
"At day three. The man took a little longer." I look back at Cole. "He's asleep on a pull-out couch right now because he couldn't stand the idea of me being alone tonight."
She laughs, soft and thick. "Is he good to you?"
No qualifications. Just that.
"Yeah. The quiet kind of good. The kind you only see if you're paying attention."
"How do you feel? About tomorrow."
"Steady," I say, surprised it's true. "There's a record. The sheriff's been keeping notes since my first week. Cole has lawyers. A whole town's decided I'm one of theirs. Whatever happens in that room, I'm not standing in it alone. That's the only part that ever broke me last time."
"Being alone in the room," Hannah says.
"Yeah."
"And you won't be."
"I won't be."
"Glad you turned left at that gate," she says, before we hang up.
I set the phone down. Cole is still asleep, one arm stretched toward the space I left.
I'm easing back under the blanket when the text comes in. Junie.
Told the early crowd if anyone says a word about you in my shop tomorrow, they can buy their bread in the next town. You've got people, honey. Sleep.
I read it twice.
You've got people. That's the whole difference between this room and a sublet floor fourteen months ago. Same headline, same machine, same old adjectives. But a different room, with people in it.
I settle back against Cole's chest. His arm finds me without waking, the way it did the first time, like his body learned the shape of me before his mind caught up.
Tomorrow I walk in with a record on paper, a town at my back, an eight-year-old who put me in his family before he met me, and a man asleep beside me right now who broke a strategic call and walked two blocks in a hood because he couldn't stand to let me be alone with it.
I close my eyes and let it come.