Chapter 15
Tessa
The barbecue was at Sam's and Jamie's house, the same backyard Cole had been telling me about for weeks. The crew had been asking after us. There had been no time.
We'd moved twice. We'd lost an apartment to a fire. We'd sat through a custody hearing, a supervised visitation, and a long string of other things that had taken every hour we'd had. A barbecue had not made it onto the list.
But Quinn had been texting. According to Cole, she had not stopped since the day she'd learned about us.
By the time a Saturday-morning text on his phone said, if you don't bring her by this weekend, I am coming over, and I am sleeping in your living room until you do, we'd run out of gentle ways to put it off.
Aunt Jenna's name was on the same string. Hers had been kinder. Hers said please.
So I put Noah in his cleanest shirt, dressed myself, and told Cole I was ready.
Sam and Jamie lived on a street where the front yards still had basketball hoops nailed to garages.
The house was a two-story with a deep porch and a screen door that slapped twice while we were getting out of the truck.
The grill was already going around the back—the smell of charcoal had reached the curb.
Cole came around the truck and opened the door for Noah and me. He set a hand at the small of my back as we walked up the path.
It was the lightest touch. He was telling me I wasn't walking up there alone.
I wanted to lean into it. I made myself walk straight.
Jamie opened the door before Cole could knock. She was warm and smiling, already mid-greeting before her hand left the doorknob.
"Tessa. Finally."
"Hi—"
"Get in here. Cole. About time."
She pulled me into a hug. She hadn't asked first. She didn't intend to.
I came out of it a little startled. I'd been hugged by exactly one person who wasn't Noah since I'd come to Havensworth.
"It's so nice to finally meet you. We've been pestering this man for the longest time to bring you out."
I looked up at Cole. He shook his head.
Sam came up behind her. He nodded at me, and I knew before he opened his mouth that he said one sentence at a time.
"Glad you could make it, Tessa."
"Thank you for having us."
"Anytime."
He turned his head over his shoulder. "Jack. Ben. Get out here."
A thunder of feet came through the house and two boys appeared at his hip. The older one had Sam's face. The younger one had Jamie's smile.
Cole crouched beside Noah. "Bud. This is Jack and Ben. Sam's and Jamie's boys."
Jack—the older—looked at Noah for half a second and made his decision.
"You wanna play?"
Noah looked up at me.
"You know how to play wiffle ball?" Ben said.
Noah shook his head.
"That's okay," Jack said. "We'll show you. C'mon."
They had him by the wrists, pulling him toward the yard. Noah looked back over his shoulder at Cole and me. I felt the question on his face—is it okay?
I nodded.
He ran.
Jamie threaded her arm through mine. "Come on. They've all been waiting."
She walked me through a kitchen that was already loud—sun coming in through the back screen, the radio on low under the noise of women cooking and men yelling at each other in the yard. The sliding door opened onto a deck that opened onto a yard that ran clear back to a stand of pines.
The yard was full.
Men around the grill. Women in clusters on the lawn with drinks. Kids running through the spaces between. A folding table under a tree set with food.
Aunt Jenna was the first to reach me. She came up the deck steps with both hands out, Quinn a step behind her with a beer in one hand and a bowl of strawberries in the other.
"Oh, honey. There you are."
Her voice closed the distance before she did. She took my hands the way some women took hands—like you'd already met before.
"Look at her, Cole. Look at her. You took your sweet time bringing this girl to me."
Cole looked at the deck.
"I'm counting from the night you sat in my kitchen and wouldn't say her name."
Jenna squeezed my hands. "I hope he's been treating you alright, honey. He'll be a man of few words about it. I want to hear from you."
I looked up at Cole. He looked back at me with the look he had when he was waiting to hear what I was going to say.
"He has," I said. "He's been good to us."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smile.
Quinn set the bowl and the beer down on the railing in one motion. She came around Aunt Jenna with both arms out, and Aunt Jenna released my hands without looking—practiced.
"Oh my god."
She pulled me into a hug. She smelled like sunscreen and citrus. She held me the way Jamie had—a beat too long, on purpose.
"Quinn," Cole said.
"Oh my god, Cole."
She let me go and stepped back, both hands flying to her mouth.
"Quinn."
"I thought you were going to die celibate. I’d accepted it."
I felt the heat hit my face. Cole's neck went red.
Aunt Jenna patted my arm once like an apology. "She's the romantic in the family, honey."
"I'm not the only one."
"You're the loudest one."
"I'm the most enthusiastic one."
I laughed before I knew I was going to. It came up out of me like it had been waiting.
"Where's Will?” I asked, remembering her partner's name.
"Pulling another thirty,” Quinn said. “You'll meet him next time, I promise."
After that, the afternoon happened around me.
I lost track of names. I lost track of how many times I said thank you and how many times someone said we've been wanting to meet you.
They asked what I did. They asked where I was from.
They asked how I was settling in—not the way questions came from people positioning you, but the way they came from people who wanted to know.
Eight months, going on nine, my family in this town had been Mrs. Thompson, Benjie, and the small ring of people who nodded at me at the grocery store. I had been careful. I had let it be small.
This was bigger. It was overwhelming, the kind of good I had not been ready for. They pulled me into conversations and didn't drop me out of them. They asked about the bakery and listened the whole way through the answer. They refilled my drink without asking.
I caught myself laughing at things. I had not laughed like that in a long time.
From time to time, I would glance up across the yard to find Cole.
He was at the grill. The picnic table. Leaning against the fence. The crew gave him grief in a running rotation. He nodded at whatever they were saying—monosyllabic, two-word. The way he was with me.
One of those times, when I looked, he was already looking at me.
He didn't look away.
The heat went up my throat and into my face. I smiled at nothing in particular and turned back to the women I was standing with.
Jamie had caught it. She didn't say anything. She just smiled at her shoe and refilled my drink.
At one point, Aunt Jenna pulled a chair next to mine and sat down. She wasn't looking at me.
"He's a good kid," she said.
"He is."
"My Cole was just like that at his age. Polite. Watchful. Didn't go anywhere without checking back."
I didn't know what to say to that. She didn't need me to say anything.
A few minutes later, she got up, walked over to where the boys were starting their soccer game, and sat down on the grass beside Noah. She said something to him. He nodded politely. She pressed something into his hand. She put a hand on the top of his head.
He came over to me later with what she'd given him—a flat river stone painted with a fox, neat, copper, and white.
“Aunt Jenna had been painting them,” he said. She'd given him the one she'd been working on this morning. "She said it's for keeping."
"Then we'll keep it."
He ran back to the boys.
People started saying goodbye around five, in waves—no one wanting to be the first to leave, and then everyone leaving at once.
Aunt Jenna held both my hands and told me to bring Noah by the house.
Quinn hugged me again and made me promise to come to dinner.
The crew lifted beers at me from across the yard.
I gathered Noah from where he had collapsed in the grass with Jack and Ben.
Jamie walked us to the truck with her arm through mine, the way she had walked me into the yard at the start. At the curb, while Cole was getting Noah buckled in, she squeezed my elbow and told me Noah was welcome over for playdates with Jack and Ben anytime.
“I'll take him for a week. Drop him off. Sam will teach him how to throw a curveball.”
"Thank you, Jamie."
"Don't thank me. They needed a third."
She kissed my cheek and stood at the curb until we pulled away.
Cole drove us home in the dark. Noah fell asleep against the door before we hit the bridge—the juice box empty in his fist, the painted fox tucked into his other hand.
Cole carried him up to the apartment without waking him. I changed Noah into pajamas. Cole pulled the blanket up. We left his door cracked open behind us.
I changed in the bathroom. When I came back to our room, Cole was already there. He was sitting on the edge of the pullout in his T-shirt and sweats, untying the corner of the sheet that always rode up.
I got into our bed. The lamp was on his side now—he'd moved it the second night so I wouldn't have to reach over him to turn it off. I clicked it off myself anyway.
Then I lay on my side, looked across the foot of dark between us, and said, "Cole."
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For today. For taking us."
He was quiet for a moment. The quiet he held when he was choosing words, not when he had nothing to say.
"You don't have to thank me, Tessa."
"I do, though. I haven't—" I had to find the right words. The third try worked. "I haven't been part of something in a long time. Years. Nicholas—"
I stopped. I hadn't said his name in this room, and I wasn't sure I wanted to bring him into it.
"He didn't like me having friends. That was a thing. It started slowly. There was always a reason why a friend was wrong, and the reasons sounded like he was protecting me, and by the time I noticed there was a pattern, I didn't have anyone left."
Cole didn't say anything. He was very still.
"I forgot what it felt like to be in a room full of people who weren't going to use the conversation as evidence of something. That whole afternoon, no one was—building a file."
I was crying a little. I didn't let myself sound like it.
"They like you, Tessa."
"They were kind."
"They like you. And they like Noah. They were waiting on us."
"I noticed."
He let out a breath. I heard it in the dark.
"Aunt Jenna said something to Noah."
"He showed me the stone."
"She doesn't give those to everybody."
I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, he was looking at me. The way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I wasn't going to catch him.
"I haven't seen Noah that happy in a long time, Cole. Not for years. I want you to know that. Whatever else we say about whatever we're doing—that part's because of you."
He was quiet again.
"Tessa."
"Yeah."
"Get some sleep."
"You first."
"Stubborn."
"I know."
A long beat. Then him, quietly: "Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
I lay in the dark and listened to him settle on the pullout. The sheet rustled. The mattress shifted twice.
I thought about all of them.
I thought about Aunt Jenna, who had raised this man and given my son a painted fox. About Jamie, who had hugged me without asking and said anytime about Noah like she meant it. About Quinn making the joke that had run my face hot.
I thought about the people who had made Cole. The ones he'd come up under. The ones who'd shown him what being good was for.
And then I thought the other thing.
I hadn't earned them. I'd borrowed them.
They were Cole's people, and they had welcomed me because I came with Cole, and someday—maybe not soon, but someday—Cole and I wouldn't be coming places together anymore.
The case would resolve. The arrangement would end.
He would go back to his life. I would go back to mine.
The people in that yard today would still belong to him.
They would still be kind to me when they saw me. Of course they would. That was who they were.
But I would no longer be the woman whose hand Jamie squeezed on her way past, whose son Ben tackled into the grass, whose afternoon Aunt Jenna had been waiting on.
I would be someone Cole used to bring around.
I closed my eyes against it.
Sleep came before I was done.