Chapter 8
Cole
I already regret this.
I'd been telling myself it was the right thing since Tuesday. The holiday had bought us all a few days. Walking into Miranda Holt's office on Friday morning, I was still telling myself. Repetition wasn't doing what repetition was supposed to do.
Tessa was a step ahead of me on the stairs. She hadn't said much in the truck. She'd told me where to park and how to find the building, and that had been most of the talking.
The receptionist knew Tessa by name and gave her a small smile. "Lieutenant Weston, can I get you anything?"
"No. Thanks."
She took us back. Miranda was already at her desk, but she stood when we came in.
Mid-forties. Navy suit cut clean. Dark hair pulled back. The kind of presence that didn't announce itself but was hard to miss once you noticed it.
"Lieutenant Weston. Miranda Holt."
"Cole's fine."
"Cole." She nodded. "Have a seat."
The office was clean. Legal pad on the desk. Pen. Her phone face down beside the pad. Two chairs across from her. She gestured us into them and sat.
She looked at me for a beat longer than she'd looked at Tessa. Three seconds, maybe. Reading.
I let her read.
"Alright. Some of what I'm about to say, Tessa already knows. I'll move through it for both of you anyway."
She put a hand flat on the legal pad. Didn't pick up the pen.
"The petition is drafted. I'll have the final to you tonight or tomorrow morning.
The institutional records came in faster than I expected—school enrollment, the pediatrician, the bakery payroll Mrs. Thompson sent over Friday.
Mr. Whitaker came through with the rent records yesterday—that was the last piece I was waiting on.
Seven months at the Westbrook house on paper before the fire.
Six is the bar. We have eight months in this state on every line that mattered.
South Carolina is Noah's home state under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act.
We can prove it on paper. We can defend it in court. "
Tessa breathed out slowly.
Miranda turned a page on the pad. Not because she needed to read it. Because she was setting the next thing down on a clean surface.
"That's where I was when you called yesterday morning, Tessa. Now that Cole's in this with us, the petition has to look different. There are a few things I'll need from both of you before I can file."
She turned to me.
"From you, Cole, an affidavit. A sworn statement, in your own words, about your relationship with Tessa and your involvement with Noah.
I'll send the template this afternoon. The fire department already has your background check—I just need a copy.
Most recent pay stub, last year's tax return.
Nothing exotic. From the two of you—a lease at one address before the petition lands.
If the lease isn't ready, a utility bill.
Anything that puts you in the same place on paper.
Have all of it on my desk by Friday. Petition goes out Monday. "
It landed then. The whole size of it. The life I'd kept to myself going on file in a courthouse. For a child I'd met three weeks ago. For a sixteen-year-old girl in a parking lot eighteen years ago who had told me I'd ruined her life.
I shook my head. Looked at Tessa.
She was sitting forward in the chair with her hands folded in her lap. She was making herself smaller in increments I wouldn't have caught a week ago. Shoulders rounding. Chin lower. Her hands folded tighter.
I stopped shaking my head.
She'd held a glass of water like that, the day she'd come to the firehouse. Both hands. Sitting on the curb outside the bay door, her face still wet, the handkerchief I'd given her in her lap. She'd thrown up before she'd gotten to the truth. The asking had been enough.
Noah is the only thing I have, and I have to try everything I can for him. Even this.
I sighed.
I didn't have to want to do it. It was the right thing. That made it worth doing.
"Update on the protective order before we go on.”
She didn't pick up the pen.
“The ex parte was granted.”
Tessa's head came up.
"He doesn't know," Miranda said. "That's how ex parte works.
The judge issued the order on our motion, without notice to him.
It restrains him from contacting either of you, Noah's school, your workplace, or any address associated with you.
It will be served on him alongside the petition, at his home, within the week. "
"What happens when he's served?"
"He gets fourteen days to file his response.
There's a follow-up hearing inside two weeks—both parties present—where his lawyer will move to vacate the order.
We hold the line. But for the next several days, you have the order in your hand, and he doesn't know it exists.
It documents him as restrained from the moment we filed.
Anything he does between now and the hearing becomes a violation of an order he didn't know about, but is bound by.
He's a lawyer. He knows how it works. The minute he's served, he stops moving in the open.
Until then, we have a window, and we use it. "
"Okay."
Tessa's voice came out flat. Relief, but not the kind that had anywhere to land yet.
"After he's served," Miranda continued, "his team is going to dig.
Into Tessa. Into her history, her old addresses, anyone she knew before she got here.
They'll be fast, and they'll be thorough.
Anything they can use to argue she's unstable, that she fled without cause, that this case is exaggerated—they'll use.
Assume they find every paper trail there is to find. We plan around that."
I waited a beat. Then I said it.
"There's a 2007 police report I want to ask you about. I made it. Tessa's boyfriend at the time—he went to prison. I'd assume Nicholas's team is going to find it. I want to know how it plays in court."
Miranda set the pen down. She had not picked the pen up. The not-picking-up was the same as setting-down with this woman.
"There's a 2007 police report?" She looked at Tessa. Then back to me. "You knew each other in 2007?"
I looked at Tessa.
She hadn't told her this. I had assumed she had. I'd been wrong.
She told her now. She gave her the short version.
The bones of it. Her family had lived in Havensworth for a few months when she was sixteen.
She and I had gone to the same school. The boy she'd been seeing was older and abusive.
I'd reported him. He'd gone to jail. Her father had moved them out of state inside a week.
She had not lived here since, until last year.
She told it without crying. Her hands moved once in her lap and went still.
Miranda took it in. Did not write anything down.
"That's why you came back here," she said.
"I didn't think anyone would still be here. I was wrong."
Miranda absorbed it for a beat. Then she turned back to me.
"And the report. Filed under your name?"
"Yeah. Anonymously wouldn't have done it. I had to give a statement."
"And the conviction?"
"Public record. I don't have the docket number. I can find it."
"We'll find it." She tapped the pen on the pad once, lightly. "Alright. This is useful. We'll work with it."
She looked at us. Both of us, then me alone, then back at both.
"Is there anything else either of you hasn't told me. Anything that, six weeks from now, I am going to learn from opposing counsel rather than from you."
Tessa shook her head.
"No," I said.
"You're sure."
"I'm sure."
"Then I want both of you to hear this. Information that lives in your heads is not information I can fight with.
Anything that touches the case—old report, old relationship, old anything—comes to me first. Not because I'm going to spin it.
Because I can only protect a story I know all of. Are we clear?"
"Yes," Tessa said.
"Yes."
"Good."
She walked us through what came next. Our deliverables by Friday. Her work in the meantime. What we should and shouldn't do in the days before Nicholas was served. We agreed to all of it.
By the time the meeting was over, the morning was gone.
I drove out to Sam's and Jamie's the next afternoon. I needed someone to talk to about it, and the list of someones I trusted was short.
Aunt Jenna and Quinn were the obvious calls and the wrong calls. Quinn would tease me until I lost the will to live. Quinn couldn't keep anything from Aunt Jenna. And the story went further if Aunt Jenna and Quinn believed the relationship was real.
That left Sam.
He let me get all the way through the briefing first. The lawyer's office. The petition. The lease. The affidavit due Friday. He took it in the way he took everything—without performing surprise, without asking the questions other people would have asked first. Then he set down his coffee.
"You know I'm going to have to tell Jamie."
It hadn't crossed my mind.
"Got burned once," he said. "Lesson learned. I don't keep things from her."
It made sense. It also meant the briefing I'd just delivered was about to get delivered again, by Sam, in the kitchen. By dinner, every adult in the Reeves house was going to know.
"Alright," I said. "Tell her."
"I will."
He picked his coffee back up.
"Stay for dinner. Rosie's home."
Rosie was leaving for college after the weekend. I hoped that meant it wouldn't be a problem.
"You're going to have to propose to her."
I set my coffee down and looked at Rosie.
The kids were in the yard. The dishes were stacked at one end of the table. Sam was at the head of it, watching me with the corner of his mouth, doing the thing it did when he was about to enjoy something at my expense. He was not coming to my defense.
Jamie was beside him, leaning forward. She was already past convinced and into planning.
"Mom told me," Rosie said.
"Course she did."
"It's not real, Rosie."
"I know it's not real." She picked up her coffee. "That's exactly why you have to propose to her."
I waited. She kept going.
"How do you think this is going to look in court? You and Tessa show up engaged. The other side's lawyer asks how it happened. What are you going to say? We just decided? That's not a thing people do. That's a thing two people on paper do."
"We are two people on paper. We're in a relationship on paper. No one said anything about getting engaged."
"Right." She set the coffee down. "And the judge is going to know. Judges have heard a thousand relationship stories. They know what a real one sounds like. Right now, you don't have one. You need a proposal story to sell it."
Jamie leaned in further.
"When did you propose, Cole? Where? Did you get down on one knee? Did you carry the ring around in your pocket all day? Were you nervous? What did you say? People remember the story. They remember the way you tell it. The story is the thing they'll believe."
Sam still hadn't said anything.
"How're you feeling about this?" he said. Casual. Pleasant.
"I want to throw my coffee at you."
"Don't waste good coffee."
I turned back to Rosie.
"What kind of story?"
She smiled.
"Yours. It just has to be one."
I sat with that.
It hadn't crossed my mind. It should have. Miranda had said it that morning—a sworn statement, in your own words, about your relationship with Tessa and your involvement with Noah. I'd taken it for paperwork. I'd missed that the story had to start somewhere.
I looked at Rosie.
"You're the English major. You come up with one."
Rosie set her coffee down and tilted her head.
"Alright then."
She thought for a second.
"After she kissed you at that fire, you couldn't stop thinking about her.
You started going to the bakery more often.
Buying bread you don't even eat. You just wanted to see her.
Then you asked her out. You took her to dinner.
After that, you were inseparable. You realized you didn't want to spend the rest of your life without her.
So you proposed to her one night at your apartment. "
Sam was grinning into his coffee. Jamie was looking at Rosie like she'd just watched her win something.
I looked back at Rosie.
"In my apartment? That's the best you can come up with?"
"It's realistic. You're not a grand-gesture man, Cole. You're a guy who proposes in his living room. Probably with a beer in his hand."
Damn it.
It wasn't a bad story. She wasn't wrong about the grand gesture, either.
"Is this what they teach you at Wake Forest?"
She picked her coffee back up.
"They teach you to read carefully and write convincingly. The rest is storytelling with a verdict at the end. English Lit was the warm-up."
Sam laughed.
Jamie was already mouthing something to Rosie I couldn't see.
We stayed at the table a while longer. Eventually, I shrugged into my jacket and headed for the truck.
I took the long way home and knew why halfway through.
The picture wouldn't leave my head—my living room, Tessa standing by the window, me with a ring in my hand. I'd never pictured myself proposing to anyone before, and now I couldn't stop. I turned up the radio, but it didn't help.
By the time I parked, I'd stopped trying to push the picture out.
I have to propose to her.