Chapter 5
Tessa
Cole Weston.
The name had landed sideways at the firehouse.
By the time I reached my car, the rest of him had come up around it.
It had ridden home with me from there. It had gone into Mrs. Thompson's spare room with me while Noah slept.
It had sat at the breakfast table while I made him his cereal.
It had walked into the bakery with me this morning, and it was still in my head now, in the slow part of Sunday, with the lunch rush behind me and my hands in dough.
Cole Weston.
Of all the people in this city. Of all the firefighters at all the stations. Of all the men who could have been on the engine that pulled up to the house. The universe had handed me him.
I tipped the dough out of the bowl onto the counter. Country loaf. I had four to make for Monday. I dusted the surface with flour, set the heel of my hand against the dough, and started to work.
Mrs. Thompson had woken up rough that morning—a head cold, she said, but the kind that pulled the color out of her face and made her sit down in the middle of folding boxes. I'd told her to go home. She'd argued for about ninety seconds and then gone.
Benjie had walked her back to the house, then come back, then walked out again twenty minutes ago because she'd called him about something from the pharmacy.
The bakery was quiet. Noah was in the corner, near the back window, with a book, the way he liked to be when I worked weekends.
He had not asked me a single question all morning, which was its own piece of information.
I worked the dough.
The boy in my head was sixteen.
He was sitting at a table in the back booth of a diner that no longer existed. There was a folder open between us, a textbook I couldn't now name, and a cup of bad coffee he hadn't finished. He was thin. He was quiet. He had hair that needed cutting.
He was looking at the page in front of him and not at me, because he had figured out, somewhere around the second week of our project, that not looking at me was the only way to get me to do any work.
If he looked at me, I talked. If he kept his eyes on the page, I eventually got bored of talking and started on the project.
He had read me, that boy. From the side. Without making me feel watched.
I pushed the dough away from me, folded it, pulled it back.
My boyfriend that year was Ryan. He was eighteen, which felt like a relevant fact about him, and he didn't like me being at the diner with another boy, which also felt, at sixteen, like a sign of how much he cared.
Most afternoons, he came to the diner. He leaned in the doorway.
He called my name. I packed my things and went out to him.
I'd tell Cole on my way past that he had the project down. Cole would nod. The next time I came in, the part we'd been working on would be in his handwriting in the folder, neat and complete. I'd thought he was being responsible. I had not understood, at sixteen, that he was being kind.
The afternoon Ryan was out of town—some trip, some errand, I had not asked because asking made him angry—Cole let me work the whole way through. We finished the section that had been hanging for a week. He set down his pencil. He looked at me for the first time in days and asked me about Ryan.
He didn't say your boyfriend is bad for you.
He asked. And I, the sixteen-year-old girl who had finally been picked, told him.
Not all of it, but enough. The drugs. The stealing.
What Ryan said to me when I didn't want to do what he wanted.
I told it the way a sixteen-year-old girl told somebody about the boy who had picked her, the boy who saw something in her, the boy who was the way out of the house she didn't want to keep going home to.
I thought I was telling Cole how cool my boyfriend was.
Then he said it.
You do know that what he's doing is wrong?
Quietly. The way he said most things.
And I, the sixteen-year-old girl who had finally been picked, told him, calmly, that maybe he just didn't get it.
I pushed the dough down hard.
He reported Ryan to the police. He didn't tell me he was going to.
He didn't ask me. He walked out of the diner that afternoon, went home, and made the call.
I didn't learn this until the police arrived at Ryan's house two days later.
Ryan's mother called my mother. My mother told me.
The look on my mother's face when she told me was a look I had not seen on her since we'd moved to Havensworth.
Ryan went to jail. My father got us packed inside a week. Before we left, I found Cole.
I didn't remember every word I'd said to him.
I remembered the shape of it. Who asked you?
Who gave you the right? I remembered telling him he had ruined my life.
I remembered how I said, hated, the way a sixteen-year-old girl said a word like that when she had not yet had occasion to know what hating actually was.
I remembered him standing there. He didn't defend himself. He didn't tell me I was wrong. He stood there and let me say it.
When I was done, he said, quietly—
I'm sorry, Natalie.
I turned and walked away.
I worked the dough. I worked it harder than I needed to.
He had been right. He had been the only person, in any of the cities we had lived in, in any of the schools I had been in, who had told me the truth. I'd told him I hated him. I'd left.
What I did with the next seventeen years was prove him right.
My parents got harder on me after Ryan—the trust gone, the leash shorter—until I was twenty-one and they let me go because Nicholas was a lawyer ten years older than me and seemed, on paper, like a man who would settle me down.
He had. He had settled me down all the way to a marriage that took me twelve years to get out of.
The dough was starting to come together under my hands. Smoother. Springing back when I pushed.
I had carried a piece of him, on bad nights, all those years.
The thin, quiet boy with hair that needed cutting, sitting at a diner booth, doing my project for me because I would not stay long enough to do it myself.
That was what I had of him. I had not built a picture of who he had become.
He was a boy in a booth in my head, and he had stayed a boy in a booth, because I had not given myself permission to imagine him grown up.
I'd imagined finding him sometimes. I had imagined what I would say. The I'm sorry I should have said when I was sixteen. The you were right I had owed him for almost two decades. I had imagined the apology landing in a quiet exchange somewhere ordinary.
I had not imagined him as the man at the bakery counter who had ordered the Reeves cake.
I had not imagined him as the man on the lawn.
I had not imagined him as the man whose hand my hand had been in.
I worked the dough. My face did the thing it had been doing on and off since the firehouse. I didn't let it do anything else.
The night I left Nicholas, my hands had turned the wheel toward Havensworth before my head did.
I had told myself, in the seven months since, that it was because I'd stayed here once as a teenager and Nicholas didn't know I'd been here.
I had told myself it was the only city he wouldn't think to look.
I'd built a story about Havensworth as the city where nobody would recognize me, and I had built a life inside that story.
Standing at the counter with my hands in dough, I finally understood what my hands had known seven months ago.
It hadn't been about Nicholas not finding me.
It had been about coming to a city where someone was who had once tried to save me.
I divided the dough into four pieces. I shaped the first one into a round, tucking the edges under, sealing the seam against the floured counter. Then the second. Then the third. My hands knew the work.
"Mom?"
Noah was at my elbow with his book tucked under his arm, the way he always tucked it when he wanted both hands free.
"Hey, bud."
"Can I help?"
I looked at him. There was flour on the cuff of his sleeve from earlier, a small streak he had not yet noticed.
His hair needed cutting. His eyes were on the dough, not on me.
He had been quiet all morning because he was being quiet for me, the way Noah was quiet when he could feel something working inside me, and now he was offering to come into it with me, the way a kid did when he was tired of standing on the edge.
"Yeah," I said. "I'd love that. Wash your hands first. You can fold boxes for me."
He went to the sink. I watched him push the sleeves of his shirt up—the careful way he did everything—and reach for the soap.
I pulled the stack of flat pastry boxes out from under the counter and set them on the prep table near where I was working.
Noah climbed up on the stool with his hands still damp, picked up the top one, and started folding—bottom flap first, sides, and tuck the top.
He had done it before. He gave it the kind of focus he gave any task he had been given on purpose.
The boy in the booth could wait.
The boy in the booth had waited eighteen years. He could wait the rest of the afternoon while I made bread with my son.
I'd shaped the four loaves and put them in cold proof for Monday's bake. The dough work was done. Noah had folded boxes for an hour, then asked if he could lie down on the sofa in Mrs. Thompson's office. I'd told him yes. He'd been asleep for twenty minutes.
Benjie had texted that he was on his way back.
I was at the front, wiping down the case, trying to think about anything in this city other than Cole Weston.
I was failing.
The bell on the front door jingled.
A couple came in—a man and a woman, maybe my age, maybe a little younger. The woman had her phone in one hand and a small leather purse in the other. The man held the door for her and let it swing shut behind them.