Chapter 19
Tessa
Cole had taken me to dinner.
I had not made a thing of it at the time.
I was trying not to make a thing of it now.
He had come out of the bathroom with his hair still damp and asked me, the way a person asked about coffee, if I felt like eating out.
I'd said yes before I thought about whether I should.
He'd taken me to a small place on King Street.
Twelve tables. Brick walls. A tin ceiling.
He'd paid the bill. He'd walked me back to the truck.
He hadn't made a thing of it either.
In the days since, I had caught him looking at me.
Not often. Not long. Across the kitchen while I was at the counter.
Down the hall, when I came out of Noah's room at night.
From the driver's seat once, while I was buckling my seatbelt and my hair fell in the way I never let it fall in front of strangers.
Each time, by the time I lifted my head, he was looking at something else.
I had not said anything about it.
I had let myself smile, once, when I caught him. The smile had lasted longer than I'd meant it to. By the time I'd put it down, Cole had already turned back to whatever he had been pretending to do.
I had been telling myself, in the days since the dinner, that the warmth I was carrying around was the warmth of a woman whose lawyer had a strategy and whose son was sleeping through the night and whose locks had been changed by a man who knew which locks were good.
I had been telling myself it was relief.
It wasn't relief.
Miranda called me at the bakery the day before, while I was wiping down the counter.
I knew before I picked up.
"Miranda."
"Tessa. Are you somewhere you can talk?"
"Hold on."
I told Benjie I'd be right back. I went out the back door into the alley, the one that smelled like restaurant grease and wet cardboard, and put my back against the brick where the dumpster blocked the wind.
"Okay."
"Nicholas filed for a gag order this morning."
I shut my eyes.
"He's citing concern for Noah's well-being. The media circus. The viral exposure. He's framing it as protection. Both parties are prohibited from speaking to the press, posting on social media, or making public statements about the case."
"Will the judge grant it?"
"Probably. It's not unreasonable on its face. A child is involved."
"What's he actually doing?"
"Controlling the narrative. He's losing it, and he knows it. The kiss photos from Sean's are making the rounds again this week. He can't spin the hero couple. So he's trying to silence the story he can't tell."
I leaned my head back against the brick.
"I want you off social media completely," Miranda said. "Don't comment, don't like, don't post, don't read. I want a paper trail of compliance starting today. The judge is going to grant it because it's reasonable, and the moment he does, I want our hands clean."
"Okay."
"He won't move in the open after this. Whatever he does next, he'll do quietly."
"Okay."
A pause. The kind of pause Miranda took when she was deciding whether to give me a thing she didn't have to.
"Tessa. He's not winning. He's adjusting. There's a difference. You're still in the strongest position. Keep doing what you're doing."
"Okay."
I stood in the alley for a minute after she hung up. The wind was cold against the back of my neck. A delivery truck rumbled at the mouth of the alley, idled, and pulled away. I put my phone in my apron pocket and went back inside and picked up where I'd left off on the counter.
I didn't tell Cole about the call until the truck. He'd come to pick Noah and me up at three. I waited until Noah had his headphones on in the back seat and the bakery was a block behind us.
"Miranda called."
"Yeah?"
"Nicholas wants a gag order."
He looked over.
"Both parties. No press. No social media." I watched the side of his face. "She said he's losing the narrative. The kiss photos and King Street made the rounds again. The internet hasn't forgotten the girl who kissed the firefighter who saved her."
He drove a block before he answered. "Good."
"Good?"
"He's reaching."
"That's what Miranda said."
He nodded once and didn't say anything else. I watched his hands on the wheel for a second longer than I needed to and turned back to the windshield.
The crew wanted to see the house.
That was how Cole had put it—not asked us, not made a thing of it, just mentioned over coffee that the boys at the station had been ribbing him about the project for months and he'd finally told them they could come look at it.
He'd be grilling. We'd be hosting. Tessa, you've been working too hard. I'm doing the food.
I had not corrected him on the we.
Ashford Street wasn't done. The porch was painted now, and the front door, and the front room had real walls instead of stripped studs, and the kitchen had a stove that worked.
There was a sofa. There was a dining table Cole had found at an estate sale and refinished in two weekends.
The bedrooms upstairs were still mostly empty. We hadn't moved any furniture in.
But the kitchen worked, and that was all the barbecue needed.
I'd come over with Cole and Noah at eight in the morning.
I'd brought trays of food from the bakery—sandwiches, three kinds of cookies, a peach pie in a foil pan.
Cole had set up the grill on the back patio.
Noah had taken his beginner toolbox out of the truck and disappeared into the front room with the seriousness of a man going to work.
By eleven, the spread was done. The drinks were on ice. The platters were on the table on the porch under cling wrap. I'd checked everything twice. There was nothing left for me to do until the first car pulled into the driveway.
Cole and Noah were downstairs. I could hear them. Cole's voice was low, Noah's questions in the particular pitch he used when he was concentrating. I didn't need to be in the room to know what they were doing.
I went upstairs.
The hallway smelled like fresh paint. Three doors.
I'd been in this hallway twice before—once when Cole had first shown us the house, once when I'd come over to drop off coffee one morning while Cole was working—and both times, I'd stayed in the doorway of the bigger bedroom and looked at the long stripe of afternoon sun on the floor and not gone in.
Today, I went in.
The bigger room had been painted a soft white, almost cream, the kind of color that took the sun and held it. The window had been replaced—newer glass, the seal tight. The floor had been refinished. There was no furniture. The room was waiting.
I walked back into the hallway and opened the next door.
This was the smaller of the two bedrooms. The one with the window over the side yard. Cole had been working on it for weeks. I knew, because Noah had told the woman from the state, in a voice I'd overheard from the hallway, that Cole was building him a room.
I had not asked Cole about it. I had not known how to.
The room was finished.
There was a bed frame already in it—wooden, low, sized for a nine-year-old. A small bookshelf on the wall by the window. A lamp on the floor, still in its box. The walls were a soft blue. Not babyish—the blue of a real boy's room.
He hadn't told me he'd finished it.
I stood in the doorway, held the doorframe, and felt the thing in my chest do what it did when Cole made a thing without telling me. The slow gather. The small hot spot behind the sternum. The decision, every time, not to cry about it.
He had told Noah he was building him a room.
He had said it once, to Noah, in the way Cole said most important things—once, plainly, and then never again.
And Noah had believed him. Noah had carried it through the visit with the woman from the state and used it as an example of what safe meant.
Noah had been right. The room was here. With a bed.
With a bookshelf. With a lamp Cole had not yet had time to put on a table.
I let go of the doorframe.
The third door was at the end of the hallway. I had not been in that room. I'd assumed it was unfinished, the room Cole would do last, the room there had been no reason to talk about.
I opened the door.
The room was painted.
Green.
The exact green I had picked up at Sean's the day Cole had taken me to look at swatches—the green of my own eyes, the eyes I had been hiding behind contacts for nine months. I had pulled the swatch off the wall, held it for a second, and put it back on the hook.
He had registered.
The walls were the green. Two coats. Even, careful, the corners cut clean. The window had new trim. The floor had been refinished like the others. There was no furniture. There was no bed. There was no shelf.
There was just the green.
I remained in the doorway, and the thing in my chest did the gathering again, harder this time. I put my hand flat against the wall the way I did at the bakery when I needed to remember that the wall was real.
Behind me, in the hallway, the floor creaked.
I turned.
Cole was standing there. He had a paint can in one hand, the lid still on it, and a brush in the other, the brush still wrapped in plastic. He had come up the stairs to put them in the room and had stopped when he saw me.
He looked at the wall. He looked at me. He looked at the wall again.
"Was thinking I'd do an accent wall," he said. "The one behind the bed. If you wanted."
He said it once. Plainly. Like he had already worked it through and was telling me the conclusion.
I found my voice on the second try.
"Why?"
"Trick of the eye." He set the paint can down on the floor inside the doorway. "Makes the room read wider."
He stepped in.
I didn't move. He came in slowly. He stopped a step away from me. The brush still in his hand, the plastic still on the bristles.
"No," I said. "Why are you building a room for me here?"