Chapter 14
Cole
Tessa had drifted toward me in the night. Her face was a foot from mine. Her hand was on the comforter, palm up, four inches from my shoulder, fingers curled the way a person's fingers curled when they had reached for something and stopped.
I lay still and gave myself one minute to look at her. She was beautiful in the way she was beautiful when no one was looking. The small line that lived between her brows during the day was gone. The corners of her mouth had given up the tightness they held when she was awake.
The minute ran out. I got up slowly, picked my shoes up by the laces, carried them down the hall, and put them on at the kitchen table. I went to work.
I bought the pullout after my shift.
The visitation wasn't until two. I had the morning, and Sean's was open at nine. I'd told Tessa I'd take Noah by the shop, pick up the rest of the bathroom supplies, and let the kid see the materials we'd be putting into the house—wood, tile, the things he'd been hearing me talk about for weeks.
Noah climbed out of the truck with the supply list in his hand. He had asked if he could carry it on the way over. I had said yes. He held it the way he held things I had given him to be in charge of—with both hands, like he was afraid of folding it wrong.
The bell on Sean's door went off when I pushed it open.
Sean was at the counter; Carol was somewhere in the back, on the phone in the office.
The store was warm in the way Sean's store always was, the heat coming off the radiator by the front window cooking the smell of sawdust and oil into the air.
Sean looked up. Set down the invoice he'd been reading and grinned.
"Lieutenant. About time."
"Yeah."
"You missed the barbecue."
"I know. Sorry, man. We've been settling into the new place. Took longer than I thought."
Sean nodded. Then his eyes dropped to Noah and lit up.
"There he is. Cole's been keeping you a secret."
"Sean, this is Noah," I said. "Noah, Sean. He owns the store."
Sean came around the counter and crouched to Noah's level. "Good to finally meet you, bud. Cole's been talking about you for weeks. Won't shut up about it, frankly."
Noah looked at me. "Really?"
"Don't believe him."
Sean laughed. "What are we working on, bud?"
"The bathroom."
"What part?"
"Floor."
"Tile or wood?"
"Tile."
"Good answer."
"Show him the list, Noah," I said.
Noah handed it over. Sean scanned it and nodded.
"I've got most of this in the back. You want to come help me round it up?"
Noah looked at me.
"Go ahead."
Noah followed Sean through the door behind the counter. Sean's hand was on Noah's shoulder for the half-step it took to point him through. I watched them go. Sean didn't have a son of his own. The way he was already pulling Noah into the work made sense.
I leaned against the counter and waited.
That was when I heard the footsteps behind me.
"Excuse me—sorry, do you work here?"
I turned. She was in her mid-twenties—dark hair pulled back, a heavy coat she had not unbuttoned coming in from the cold. She had a phone in one hand, screen up, like she'd been reading something off it.
"No. The owner's just getting something out of the back. He'll be a minute."
She laughed. "Of course he is."
She didn't move. She tilted her head and smiled.
"Maybe you can help me anyway? You look like you'd know."
"What are you trying to do?"
"I'm trying to seal a leak under my kitchen sink. I bought what I thought I needed, but the guy at the place I went to last time said this stuff is for tile, not pipes, and I'm—honestly, I'm in over my head."
She held up the phone. A picture of a tube of caulk on top of a shopping receipt.
I knew the aisle. The seal she wanted was two rows over, and I'd bought it myself for the Ashford house in the last month.
"Yeah. I can show you."
I started for the aisle. She came with me, closer than she needed to be—a step behind on the way down the aisle, half a step beside me by the time we reached the row. When I stopped at the shelf and reached up for the right tube, she was at my elbow, looking up.
"You really do know what you're doing."
"Plumber's putty for the threads. This is for the seal." I handed her the tube. "Read the back. Cure time's on it. Don't run water until the time it says."
"You're so good at this."
The coat she hadn't unbuttoned was a foot from my arm.
I took a step back. "That'll do you."
I turned to head back to the counter.
"Wait—there's one more thing—"
"Cole."
Noah's voice. He came around the corner of the aisle holding a small cardboard box of tile spacers. Sean was a step behind him with the rest of the order in a stack.
"Sean," I said. "Lady's got a question."
Sean took the cue. "What can I help you with, ma'am?"
I put a hand on Noah's shoulder and walked him back to the counter.
Sean had set the heavier items on the floor next to the register. Noah climbed onto the stool by the counter and started naming everything he saw.
"Trowel. Spacers. Spackle. The tape stuff."
"Backer board tape," I said.
"Backer board tape."
"Who was that lady?" he said.
"Just another customer asking for help."
He nodded and went back to the tools.
Sean came up behind us a minute later, the girl behind him with her tube of caulk. He'd answered her one more thing. He stepped behind the register and started ringing me up.
"Trowel. Six bucks. Spacers. Three. Backer board tape, eight."
He ran the items through. The girl waited her turn behind us, polite, hands folded over the tube.
When Sean had everything punched in, she leaned toward me.
"Cute kid. Yours?"
"About to be."
It came out clean.
I had not thought about saying it. I had said it.
"That's seventy-two ten, brother," Sean said.
I ran my card, picked up the smaller bag, and handed it to Noah. Lifted the heavier one off the floor.
"Thanks, Sean."
"Anytime."
I had to pass the girl on the way out. She stepped sideways to let us through and put a hand briefly on my forearm.
"Thank you for your help."
"Don't mention it."
The bell went on the door.
In the truck, I set the heavy bag on the floor of the passenger side and got Noah buckled in. He was already turning a tile spacer between his fingers like a coin.
I sat behind the wheel for a second before I started the engine.
Women had come up to me before. It came with the uniform—a number on a napkin, a hand on the bicep at a fundraiser, the occasional civilian on a scene who held eye contact past help. None of them had stuck to me the way the woman at Sean's had.
I didn't know what was wrong about it. Something was wrong.
I started the engine and drove.
The court-monitored facility was a brown-brick building on Beaufain Street, two blocks off the courthouse. There was a sign with a bird on it. The bird was supposed to be reassuring. It wasn't.
I parked in the lot, killed the engine, and we got out.
The lobby was beige—two chairs against the wall, a receptionist behind a low counter with a sign-in sheet on a clipboard, a woman behind her at a desk who I assumed was the monitor, doing something on a computer.
I signed Noah in.
I crouched in front of him.
"Bud."
"Yeah."
"I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here. Four hours. I'll be here when you walk out."
He nodded.
"You okay?"
He looked at me. Looked at the door at the back of the lobby. Looked at me again.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"I'm not going home with him, right?"
I looked at him.
Noah had never said anything about his father.
Not the night the apartment burned. Not when Tessa told him about the hearing.
Not in any of the careful weeks since. He'd been a quiet, hesitant kid about a lot of things, and his father had been the quietest of them all.
The question had cost him something to ask.
"No, bud. You're coming home with me."
He nodded once. "Okay."
Behind us, a door opened, and Nicholas walked through.
"Lieutenant Weston."
He held out his hand. I took it. His grip was firm, dry, and held a half-second longer than it needed to. He let go. I put my hand back in my pocket.
He crouched. "Hey, buddy."
He went down to Noah's level the way you went down to a child's level. Slow. Practiced. "I missed you."
He put his hand on Noah's shoulder.
Noah flinched. It was small—a tightening, a half-step's worth of stillness in his body that no one would have caught who had not spent the last month watching him learn what it felt like not to flinch.
I caught it.
For half a second, something happened to Nicholas's face. The pleasant got cold. The corners of his eyes set. The look of a man recalculating. Then it was gone. The pleasant came back. He squeezed Noah's shoulder once, gently, and stood up.
"Thank you for bringing him, Lieutenant."
The monitor stood up from her desk and came around to take Noah back to the visit room. Noah looked back at me once. I gave him the nod I had practiced giving him on the drive over. He nodded back. Walked through the door behind the monitor.
Nicholas didn't follow. He stayed in the lobby with me. Turned. Hands in his pockets, mirroring mine.
"How's she doing?"
"She's well."
"I worry about her."
I didn't answer.
He tilted his head—the way a man did when he was about to give a piece of advice. "Natalie has always been impulsive, Lieutenant. You'll have seen that by now. She makes a decision, and the decision is made."
He used her real name like it was his.
I didn't move.
"She's younger than she presents. In ways that take time to see. She doesn't always know what's good for her."
He let it sit.
"You seem like a steady man. She'll need that. She's always needed that."
I kept my eyes on the wall behind him. There were eleven beige tiles between the corner and the door. I had counted them when I'd come in, and I was counting them again.
"I don't know what she was like at sixteen, Lieutenant. I came into her life at twenty-one. But I understand you had reason to step in for her then. Natalie makes bad decisions. She always has.