Chapter 19 #2
His head tilted, just barely. The smallest version of a man registering a question. He looked down at me.
"Was I not supposed to?"
The way he said it—flat, almost confused, like he hadn't understood the room could mean a thing he should have asked about first—went through me.
He hadn't known he had to ask. He'd bought a house with three bedrooms, and one of them had been waiting, and he had filled it.
He hadn't made an announcement. He hadn't asked.
He'd just done it. The way he'd done the locks, the smoke detectors, and the ride to the school.
I couldn't make my mouth move.
He was close enough now that I could smell him. Soap and the trace of paint and whatever he had on, which was not cologne, just clean. His eyes were on mine. His eyes had dropped to my mouth once and come back up. I had felt them do it.
I felt my chin tilt. I didn't tell it to.
He set the brush down on the windowsill without looking. He brought his hand up and rested it on the doorframe above mine. He was so close his breath moved my hair.
"Tessa."
He'd never said my name like that before.
"Cole." It came out almost as a question.
He bent his head.
"Mom!"
Noah's voice came up the stairs ahead of his feet. He hit the landing at a run.
"Cole! They're here!"
A car door slammed in the driveway. Then another. A laugh I knew—Sam's—then Jamie's voice, high and pleased, calling something to a kid.
Cole pulled back. Not fast. The slow way a man pulled back from something he was not done with.
He looked down at Noah, who had skidded to a stop next to him in the hallway and was looking up at us both with the open face of a kid who didn't know he had walked into anything.
"Let's go say hi," Cole said.
"Okay," Noah said.
Cole's eyes came back to me for one count. Then he turned and went down the stairs. Noah followed.
I stayed in the green room and breathed for one count. Two. Three.
Then I went down to host the barbecue.
It was a good day.
That was what I'd remember about it. The crew came in waves. Sam clapped Cole on the shoulder and said the house looked like a house now, and Jamie hugged me the way she hugged me, which was hard and a beat too long, and Ben and Jack went straight into the front room with Noah and disappeared.
Within ten minutes of the first car pulling in, Noah had Jack and Ben by the wrists and was walking them through the house like a man giving a tour of his life's work.
"This is the corner I sanded," he was saying, in the front room, when I came through with a tray. "Cole let me do the whole bottom of it. You can feel it. It's smooth."
Jack ran his hand on the corner. "Yeah, I feel it."
"And the trim on the doorway—see this piece? I held it while Cole hammered. The first time we tried it, I let go too early, and he had to do it again. But the second time, I held it the whole way."
Ben was nodding seriously the way Ben nodded.
Cole was at the grill on the back patio. From where I was, in the kitchen with the screen door propped open, I could see the line of his shoulders. He was talking to Sam and Tyler and turning a piece of chicken with a pair of tongs and not looking at the front room.
He was not looking at the front room the way a man does not look at something he is listening to with everything he has.
I saw him pretend not to watch.
I didn't say anything.
Keith was the one who found me in the kitchen.
I'd met him twice before, briefly—once at the first crew gathering, once when he'd dropped by the apartment with a beer and a roll of plans.
Keith was the younger Davis brother, the architect, the one Cole had said had made him widen the kitchen doorway over Cole's argument.
Cole had admitted that day that Keith had been right.
Keith had a beer in his hand and was running the other hand along the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.
"He widened it," he said, more to the doorframe than to me.
"He told me you made him."
"He fought me on it."
"He told me that, too."
Keith tapped the wall above the doorway. Tilted his head. Listened to the sound. Nodded once.
"He did good work in here," Keith said. "The cabinets line up. The counters are level. He didn't cut a corner I can find."
"You looked?"
"I looked."
He raised the beer at me, an inch, the smallest version of a toast, and then he carried it out to the patio without saying anything else.
From the kitchen window, I watched him cross the yard to where Cole was at the grill.
He stopped a few feet away. Cole looked up.
Keith raised the beer at him. Cole raised his back.
Two men who had been in the project from the plans up.
That was all.
Quinn pulled into the driveway at twelve-thirty with someone in the passenger seat I'd never seen.
I was on the porch when she came up the front walk. She was carrying a bottle of wine in one hand and dragging a tall man behind her with the other. He was thin, smiling, in a button-down that had been ironed by someone who wanted him to look ironed.
"Tessa! Hi!" Quinn hugged me with the wine still in her hand. "This is Will. Will, Tessa."
"Hi." Will put out a hand. I took it. "Quinn talks about you."
"Quinn talks about everybody."
"Yeah, fair."
Quinn was already through the door, calling for Cole. Will followed her in. I followed them.
Cole was in the kitchen, getting another beer out of the cooler. He straightened when Quinn came in.
"Cole," Quinn said. "This is Will."
"Will."
"Hi." Will offered his hand. Cole took it. "Heard a lot about you."
"Yeah?"
"Quinn says you're a lieutenant now."
"That's right."
"That's great. Congratulations."
"Thanks."
The room got quiet.
I watched Cole's hand on the counter—flat, steady, the thumb tapping once and then stopping.
His face had gone into the version that was technically polite.
Will was still smiling. Quinn was watching her brother across the kitchen with no surprise on her face at all.
She had brought Will here, knowing exactly how this was going to go.
"How long have you been at the hospital?" I asked Will because someone had to.
"Two and a half years. I'm finishing up a residency in internal medicine."
"That sounds like a lot."
"It's a lot."
"Will," Quinn said, "do you want to wash your hands? The bathroom's down the hall."
"Yeah, sure."
He went down the hall. I waited until I heard the door click.
I turned to Cole.
"Hey."
He looked at me.
"Be nice."
He didn't say anything.
"Quinn's standing right here. He's her boyfriend. He came to a barbecue. Be nice."
Cole looked at Quinn. Something passed between them—a long-running conversation I had walked into the middle of. Quinn's face didn't change. She didn't argue with me. She didn't argue with him.
Cole set his beer down. He nodded once at me, the smallest nod, and walked out the back door.
I watched him cross the patio. He stopped at the grill, put the beer on the side table without drinking from it, and picked up the tongs.
"He's been like that ever since Shelby died."
"His ex-girlfriend?" I said.
Had Cole lied to me? The thought came before I could stop it. He had told me, in his truck, that he had never been with a woman. And here was Quinn naming a woman he had been carrying for years.
"No." Quinn shook her head. "His older sister. The one who raised him."
The kitchen was quiet. Down the hall, the bathroom door opened.
"He doesn't talk about her," Quinn said.
The words came faster now—Will's footsteps were coming down the hall, and she had decided to give me this before he got to the kitchen.
"He never does. But I think you should know.
Their dad died when Cole was little. Their mom—she was a mess.
Wasn't around. Shelby raised him. That kitchen he grew up in? It was hers."
I felt something settle in my chest in the wrong way.
"Her husband killed her," Quinn said. "She was going to leave him.
She'd told Cole. He was working on getting her out.
And then one night, her husband—and Cole has blamed himself ever since.
He hesitated. He had defended a girl before, and she'd told him she hated him for it.
He thinks if he hadn't, she'd still be here.
"He's been carrying her ever since."
Will came around the corner.
"Hey," he said. "Did I miss something?"
"No." Quinn turned her face on like a light. "I was telling Tessa about my mom's lasagna."
"Oh, the lasagna's incredible."
Quinn looked at me. Her face was Quinn again—the bright one, the cousin, the woman who had walked in with a bottle of wine. But her eyes weren't.
"You're good for him, Tessa. He's calmer. I haven't seen him like this in a long time."
She said it the way a sister says a thing she's been wanting to say. Not knowing.
I couldn't answer her.
"Babe," Quinn said to Will, "let's get you a drink. Cole's got something on the patio."
She took Will's hand and pulled him toward the back door. He waved at me on the way out.
The kitchen went quiet.
I stood at the counter with my hand on a glass I had picked up for no reason and could not now remember setting down.
The screen door swung shut behind them. From the patio, I could hear Sam laughing at something Tyler was saying.
Noah's voice, somewhere in the front room, telling Jack he was wrong about something with the kind of confidence I had not heard out of my son in eight months.
You're good for him.
I felt it land somewhere I didn't have a word for.
I was not good for him.
I was the girl from the parking lot. I was the reason he had hesitated with Shelby. I was the hand that had pulled the first thread loose in his life eighteen years ago, and the woman he had now picked up and carried through every door of mine.
He had said yes to me at the firehouse, knowing.
He had walked into Miranda's office, knowing.
He had said I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do.
Not because I want to—and I had thought he meant the case was hard.
He had meant me. He had not been able to want to.
How could he have? I was the woman whose sixteen-year-old self had stood in a parking lot and screamed at him for trying to do the right thing, and a year later, his sister had told him she was leaving her husband, and Cole had hesitated because of me, and Shelby was dead.
Shelby was dead because of me.
I set the glass down. I put both hands flat on the counter. I dropped my head and shut my eyes.
Shelby. Who had cooked in a kitchen on Marlboro Street. Who had raised the boy who had grown up to put a lock on my door, a smoke detector on my ceiling, and a bed in a room for my son. Who had died waiting for her brother to be ready. Who was not here because I had taught him to wait.
A sound came out of me. I put my hand over my mouth.
He had said yes anyway.
He had said yes after the night I walked into the firehouse and asked him.
He had walked into a lawyer's office two days later and put his worst memory on her desk for me.
He had picked Noah up from school. He had paid the early-termination fee on his lease without making a thing of it.
He had bought a tea I had mentioned liking once.
He had taken me to dinner on King Street and walked me back to the truck with his hand at the small of my back.
He had bent his head over mine in the green room two hours ago and almost—almost—
He had almost kissed me.
He had almost kissed the girl from the parking lot.
A man who had been doing the right thing for eighteen years had been doing the right thing again, with his body, with his house, with his hands, with his mouth, and I had stood in the doorway of a room he had painted in the color of my eyes and tilted my chin up and let him.
I had let myself want him.
I had been carrying a warmth around for two days and telling myself it was relief.
It had not been relief. It had been the start of a thing I now knew I didn't get to have.
I had been telling myself, since the dinner, that we were becoming something.
We had not been becoming anything. He had been carrying me.
He had not been falling for me. There was no version of this where the man whose sister had died because of me looked at me and let himself want me back.
The almost-kiss had not been a man losing control. It had been a man caught in a doorway with the woman he was performing a relationship with. He had pulled back. He had been glad when Noah came up the stairs. He had walked down to the barbecue and not looked at me again.
The case would end. The custody order would issue. The petition would close. And Cole would walk out of this apartment and out of this house and out of my and Noah's life, and he would do it cleanly, the way Cole did everything, and he would not look back.
I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known I was standing on a thing I was going to lose.
The go-bag was in the closet in the apartment. I knew where it was. I knew what was in it.
I didn't move toward the door.
I straightened, slowly. I wiped under both my eyes with the heel of my hand. I picked the glass back up and put it in the sink. I ran water over my fingers and dried them on the towel.
I would not make him carry me any more than he already had. I would not let him catch me looking at him. I would not smile when he looked at me. I would not stand in a doorway with my chin tilted up and ask him for a thing he could not give me without it costing him his sister all over again.
I would make myself easy to leave.
When the case was over, he would go. I would not make him say it.
The screen door creaked.
"Tessa?"
Cole's voice from the back patio.
"Coming," I said.
It came out almost normal.