Chapter 27
Cole
Quinn parked at the curb of Sam and Jamie's house.
The drive back from Savannah had taken two hours.
Tessa hadn't said much. She had her hands folded in her lap and her face turned to the window, and she hadn't let go of the sweater she'd been wrapping around herself since the terminal.
Mine, I'd realized somewhere on the highway. She'd taken it without asking.
Quinn cut the engine. The silence dropped heavily, the kind that came when you'd been moving too long, and your body finally remembered it had been waiting to stop.
"He's here?"
"Yeah." Her hands stayed on the wheel a beat longer than they needed to. "Sam and Jamie kept him."
I let my head fall back against the seat. The first full breath I'd taken since Savannah.
She looked at me in the rearview. Quinn had a way of looking at people. Steady, unhurried. The way someone watches a thing they've decided needs watching.
"Cole. You should be in a hospital."
I shifted in the seat. The ribs answered first. A deep, dull pull that didn't need translating.
"Quinn."
"I'm just saying."
She got out without saying anything else, came around, and opened my door. The pain meds had worn off somewhere outside Pooler, and I was running on the kind of nothing that came after them. She helped me out, let me lean on her for the half-step it took me to find my feet.
Tessa was already on the sidewalk with the bag, not even looking at the house yet.
I touched her elbow.
"He's going to be fine, Tessa. Take a breath."
She nodded and took a breath.
The front door opened before we got to the steps.
Jamie was in the doorway with Noah behind her. She was half blocking the doorway and Noah, because she hadn't known whether Tessa or he wanted to be seen first. Noah was a head shorter than Jamie's hip, and he was already trying to come around her.
Then he saw Tessa.
And his face did that thing.
He ducked under Jamie's arm, came down the steps at a run, and threw himself at Tessa's middle.
She caught him with both arms and went down on one knee on the walk and held him against her chest the way she'd held him at the door of the apartment the night the fire happened.
The bag had landed somewhere I hadn't watched.
She had her face in his hair, her eyes shut, and her shoulders were doing something I didn't have a word for.
I stayed back and let it happen.
The house was full inside.
Aunt Jenna in the armchair by the window. Quinn coming through from the kitchen with a tray of mugs. Carol on the couch. Sean at the mantle with both hands in his pockets.
I stopped in the doorway.
I had not asked anyone to come. Sam already had.
"Cole." Aunt Jenna was up off the chair and across the room before I'd set my keys down. She caught my good arm—the one not in the sling—and held on. She didn't hug me. She didn't even try.
"Aunt Jenna."
"You're an idiot." Her hand tightened on my arm where she'd caught it. Her voice came out even, the way it always did when she was furious and trying not to show it.
"I know."
"You scared me." She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet, and she wasn't going to let any of it fall. "Don't do that again."
"I know."
I meant it. I'd have said it again. And again.
She let go. She held the air between us a beat longer, like she had more to say and had decided not to say it. Then she looked past me.
Tessa had come in behind me with Noah's hand in hers. I watched Aunt Jenna take her in. The tired face. The boy half-hidden against her leg. The way she was holding still, like she wasn't yet sure she was allowed to be in this house.
Her face went all the way soft.
"Honey."
Tessa was crying again. I had watched her trying to stop on the drive back, and now she had stopped.
Aunt Jenna crossed to her and folded Tessa against her shoulder the way she folded everyone she loved, and Noah, who had not let go of his mother's hand, was now in the small space between the two of them with his head against his mother's hip.
Sean was watching from the mantle.
He nodded at me when I caught his eye. Once.
I crossed the room to him. The ribs reminded me of what they thought of crossing rooms. Sean watched me make the walk without moving. No offered hand. No step forward. No fuss. He was letting me come.
"Sean."
"Cole."
We held the look for a beat. He had a face that didn't tell you anything you hadn't earned.
"Thanks for coming."
"Don't." His voice came out flat. Not unkind. Just closed.
I didn't.
It wasn't a rejection. It was a refusal to let a moment be more than it was, and I'd learned how to read it somewhere over the last few months.
He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders against the mantel, and he was looking at me, but he was also looking past me, at Sam, who had come through from the kitchen.
The two of them held the look for a beat.
Then Sean looked at the floor. Sam looked at the doorway. Neither of them said anything.
I hadn't been looking for it. But Davis had told me, one night at the station after Sean had come back from a hard call, what had happened in 2007. Carolina Furniture Depot. Two men they don't talk about. Sean had not been the same after. He had left the department within the year.
He had carried that for eighteen years.
Yesterday, in a gravel lot, he had been the one to get to me first.
The look across the room, Sam to Sean, was the size of eighteen years.
It had everything in it. The names of the two men.
The smoke they hadn't gotten out of. The half-year after when Sean had come to work, done his job, gone home, and not been Sean.
The day he handed in his papers. The years after, in the back of his store, hands moving, mouth shut, mind somewhere none of us were invited to follow.
Neither of them said it. They didn't need to.
I looked away from the two of them. The room had gone quiet in a way I had not noticed it going.
The lamp by Aunt Jenna's chair had been switched on.
Outside the window, the light was starting to lose itself toward evening, the early dark of February coming down on us before any of us was ready for it.
Carol got up off the couch. She crossed to Tessa and took her hand.
"Come sit with me, honey."
Tessa let herself be led. Aunt Jenna let her go.
I stayed at the mantel with Sean.
The mantel had photographs on it. Jamie's family. Sam at twenty-five in a turnout coat. A wedding picture from years before I knew either of them. I let my eyes settle there because I didn't want to look at Sean while I asked him what I was going to ask.
"How are the ribs?"
"Three of them are broken."
"I noticed."
"Yeah."
He let the silence sit. He didn't fill it with anything. That was Sean. Across the room, Aunt Jenna was speaking low to Tessa. Carol's hand was a small shape on Tessa's back. Sean didn't move.
I watched the side of his face. He was looking at the floor a few feet in front of his boots, the way he did when he was working something out and didn't want it watched.
His jaw was set the way men set their jaws when there is a thing they have decided to carry alone.
There was gray in his stubble that I had not noticed the last time I saw him in good light.
He had aged in some way that didn't belong to the last week.
He had aged the way a man ages when he has been to a place he never meant to go back to.
My chest hurt in a new place. Not a place the ribs explained. The cost of being the reason a man like Sean had gone back into a place he had earned the right to never see again.
After a beat, he said, "I'd do it again."
I looked at him.
He wasn't looking at me. He was still on that patch of floor.
"I know," I said.
I meant it. I meant every shape of it. The gravel lot. 2007. The eighteen years between them. The fact that he had said it now in a sentence as short as a man like Sean could make it.
He nodded.
That was the whole conversation.
But I stood there a long time after, with my eyes on the mantel and the photographs that were not of me, while the room moved around us, and I didn't move.
Quinn found me on the porch later.
I had stepped out for the cold. The pain meds were working again, and I wanted air to come with the working.
The street was quiet. The light was failing toward evening.
Somewhere down the block, a dog barked at nothing in particular and then went quiet.
The cold had a wet edge to it, the February kind that found the spaces between your collar and your skin.
She came out and stood beside me at the porch rail. She had a mug in one hand and nothing in the other. She didn't offer me the mug. She knew I would not have lifted it with the sling, and she knew offering it without thinking would have been a small humiliation neither of us needed.
Quinn looked out at the street for a long count before she said it.
"I've never seen you hurt before. Not like that."
I let that one go past me. The cold was finding the gap between my collar and my neck. I didn't adjust the collar.
"You saw me after Shelby."
She was quiet for a beat. Then she shook her head, still not looking at me.
"That was different. That was your heart. This was your body. I didn't know what to do."
She’d said it to the street. Not to me.
I let the silence hold a count. I wanted to say the thing I was about to say. I wanted it to come out the way it had been sitting in my chest since the back of the rig.
"You held my hand."
"That's not medicine."
I looked over at her. She was still looking at the street.
"It was for me."
She didn't answer that.
The wind moved in the tree at the corner of the yard. Her mug had stopped steaming. Down the street, a man called his dog, and the dog came, the kind of small, ordinary thing that kept happening while everything else changed.
After a moment, she said, "They pulled me off the call."
"Good." It came out before I thought about it.