Chapter 9
Tessa
In a paid-by-the-hour office, in front of a stranger, without warning me, without giving me a moment to step into a conversation he was starting on my behalf—he had said it, and Miranda had nodded, and the eighteen years I had been carrying alone had ended in a beat I had not been ready for.
We hadn't talked about it. Not once. In all the time between him saying yes at the firehouse and us walking into Miranda's office together, he had not brought up Ryan's name or the year my father had moved us out of state.
I had been waiting for him to. Since the day I'd asked him.
For years before that, in cities where I'd thought I might run into him by accident and drafted what I'd say.
I'd had the words since I was nineteen and twenty and twenty-three and thirty-one.
I'm sorry. You were right. You were the only person who told me the truth.
I had imagined the room we would be in when I said it.
I had imagined his face. I had imagined the version of me who, one day, would finally be brave enough to do it.
He hadn't given me the room. He hadn't given me any version of me. He had walked into Miranda's office and put 2007 down on her desk himself, because that was apparently what he believed was the right thing.
I had sat there in the chair next to him while he did it, and I had not said one word that was worth the weight of what he was doing.
For eighteen years, I had carried a version of Cole in my head that justified what I'd said in a parking lot when I was sixteen. The grudge had done a job. As long as he had been the boy who'd had no right, I had not had to be the girl who'd been cruel.
He was killing that version. Every day. Every quiet thing he did. He was making it impossible for me to keep him as the boy I had needed him to be—and what was coming in under the grudge was eighteen years of guilt I had not yet earned the right to put down.
I didn't know what I could give him back for that. I wasn't sure there was anything.
I parked in front of the building. Noah unbuckled himself and slid out without being asked, his backpack over one shoulder, the paper sack of leftover focaccia from Mrs. Thompson tucked carefully under his arm.
I unlocked the front door and let us in. The mailboxes were in the entryway, the long bank of them along the wall by the stairs. Noah leaned against the banister and waited.
I turned the small key in 2A and felt the door of the box give.
There was an envelope inside, red and stiff, the kind people sent Christmas cards in. It was addressed to Noah in handwriting I didn't have to read twice.
I kept my body between him and the box. I pulled the rest of the mail out, slid the red envelope under the stack, and only then did I turn it over against my thumb.
The return address was Nicholas's.
"This is not good."
Cole had arrived twenty minutes after I called him. Noah was in his room with the door closed. Cole stood at my kitchen table with the envelope in his hand, the return address turned toward him.
I hadn't opened it. I hadn't been able to make myself.
"It's addressed to Noah."
He turned it over. Looked at the front. Set it down.
"That means he's found you."
My hands went cold. I couldn’t get the next breath.
Noah was ten feet away in the next room. He didn't know yet.
He had picked up a pen. He had written my son's name on an envelope. He had paid for postage. He had put it in the mail with intent.
I threw the letter in the trash.
I’d been afraid of this every day for eight months. The fear had not done its work.
"But the filing hasn't gone through," I said. "Miranda's still—how could he?"
"The news crew found you, didn't they?"
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.
Every part of me was telling me to run. The go-bag was still in the closet.
I could pack what was left of our things—the fire had taken most of it; what was left fit in two duffels—put Noah in the car, get to the highway by dark.
We'd done it before. The first time wasn't the worst time. We could do it again.
I stopped.
Another city. Another bakery. Another small life I'd build out of nothing and lose the minute I started to like it.
You can't keep running for the rest of his childhood, Mrs. Thompson reminded me a few weeks ago.
Cole's voice pulled me back into the room.
"You two can stay with me."
"What?"
"You two should stay with me tonight." He said it again, slower this time. "We can figure this out with Miranda tomorrow."
"But I don't—"
I stopped. I didn't know how to finish the sentence.
I don't want to owe you more than I already do.
The thought of being in his apartment sat heavy in my chest. I had already asked him for too much. Now I was about to bring my son and my fear inside his front door.
Cole was looking at me, steady and waiting. He was not going to let me find a way out of this.
"It's not up for debate. You two are in danger. Pack your bags. You're staying at my apartment."
Cole's apartment was on the third floor. He unlocked the door and let us in.
It looked exactly the way I had pictured it. Minimal. Functional. Orderly. There was a couch, a coffee table, and a kitchen with a single coffee mug in the sink that he picked up and washed before he turned around. A bookshelf along the far wall. Two pairs of boots lined up by the door.
Noah found the models before I did.
Three things on the top shelf of the bookcase, the only personal items in any room I could see—a half-finished aircraft carrier, a row of small tanks, a bomber with its decals laid out beside it like a project a kid had stopped halfway through.
Noah stopped at a respectful distance from the shelf. He didn't ask to touch them. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked.
Cole had been heading down the hall with our duffel bag. He came back when he saw where Noah was.
"You like planes?"
"Yes, sir."
"You can touch the carrier. The bomber's still drying."
Noah looked up at him. Then at me. I nodded.
He picked up the aircraft carrier with both hands and held it like he was handling something that might break. He turned it over once, looked at the deck, and set it back down exactly where it had been.
"Thank you."
Cole nodded.
It was the smallest exchange, and I watched Cole take it in.
The careful asking. The careful hands. The thank-you.
The nine-year-old who handled a stranger's model like it was something he couldn't afford to break.
Cole looked at Noah for one beat longer than the moment had asked him to.
Then he picked up the bag again and went down the hall.
It surprised me. I almost smiled.
Cole had been cold to me since the day he found out my real name. I had thought he'd be cold to Noah, too. I had braced for it.
He hadn't been. He'd set the bag down and given Noah a careful answer.
And Noah—who pulled into himself in every new room, every grocery store, every parking lot—had walked into a stranger's apartment, stood at the shelf, and stayed there when a man twice his size came toward him.
In eight months, he had not done that with a man he didn't know.
Cole came back out to the living room.
"Bathroom's down the hall. Bedroom's at the end."
I helped Noah change in the bathroom. Toothbrush from the duffel. Pajamas. The familiar steps of a bedtime routine done in a strange place. He let me help him without saying anything about it.
When we came out, Cole was at the bedroom door.
"Sheets are changed. You two take the bed."
"Cole—"
"It's a couch. It's not the first one I've slept on. We'll figure the rest out in the morning."
He moved past us down the hall.
I tucked Noah into Cole's bed. He was asleep before the blanket was up to his chin.
I went back out to the kitchen for a glass of water.
Cole was at the counter. He turned when he heard me. Reached for something. Set it down between us.
A small ring box. Black velvet. Closed.
"Wear this."
I looked at him.
"You bought me a ring?"
"We can just return it when this whole thing is over."
He didn't look at me when he said it. He just moved past me down the hall and went into the bathroom.
I stood at the counter and opened the box.
It was a simple ring. A small stone. Nothing showy, nothing extravagant, nothing that would have looked wrong on a baker.
He had thought about that.
Cole had gone to a store, stood at a glass case, and picked out a ring.
I closed the box and held it in my hand for a beat longer than I needed to.
I was starting to feel something I had not felt in years. I didn't know what to do about it.
I picked up my glass of water and took the ring back to the bedroom with me.
Noah hadn't moved. I set the ring on the side table next to my water and slid under the covers.
The sheets smelled like Cole.
It was the first thing my body registered. Before the dark. Before Noah's steady breathing. Before anything else.
I should have been thinking about Nicholas. He had found us.
But I lay in Cole's bed, wrapped in his sheets, with his ring on the table beside my head, and the part of me that knew how to be afraid was quiet.
I turned, pressed my face into the pillow that smelled like soap, clean laundry, and the man whose neck I had put my face against on the worst night of my life.