16. Skylar
The first thing she registered was warmth.
A solid warmth that came from another person’s body pressed against hers.
Her cheek rested on cotton. Beneath the fabric, a heartbeat knocked steady and slow, and for a few disoriented seconds Skylar let herself stay inside the sound without asking where she was or why.
Then her neck screamed and reality crashed back.
When she dragged her eyes open, she sat in the back seat of the car from last night. The one she’d left the house in New Haven in. With Charlie.
Her brain assembled the facts. Jake’s phone call. The kitchen floor tilting. Charlie’s arms, safe and secure. His “let me” request and how she’d given in, grateful for someone else to make the decisions. She could accept a short ride to the bus station.
Fluorescent light poured through the car window. A gas station canopy, rust bleeding down the support poles, cast greenish light across the parking lot. Beyond the canopy, a sign she hadn’t seen in three months announced: Ironwood, 4 Miles.
She was home.
And Charlie still held her.
Charlie’s head tipped against the window, his eyes closed, one arm still draped around her shoulders.
His other hand rested on her forearm, fingers loose in sleep.
Fresh-cut grass and a hint of the ocean clung to the collar of his shirt, and her lungs reached for the next breath like a lifeline.
In the gas station light his jaw looked sharper, bruised with stubble and exhaustion.
A raw, unguarded version of his face she’d never witnessed.
Eight hours. He skipped the bus station and drove her home. Sat in a car all night with her dead weight against his ribs, his arm at an angle that had to be agony, and hadn’t woke her. The realization lodged in her heart like a fishhook, sharp and impossible to pull free.
Skylar peeled herself upright. Every vertebra protested and her eyes burned, gritty and swollen. She pressed her palms against her cheeks and the skin was tight, salt-crusted from dried tears.
Charlie stirred. His arm flexed where she had been and his eyes opened. Blue and bloodshot and immediately focused on her.
“Morning.” His voice was gravel.
“You drove me home.”
“I sat in a car for eight hours.” A trace of a smile surfaced, small and lopsided and gone before he could hold onto the shape. “The driver did the work.”
Her “Thank you” came out stripped and insufficient.
Charlie’s thumb grazed her wrist. “I couldn’t leave you.”
A pressure swelled behind her ribs, too large for the space.
“I didn’t have your address, so we stopped here for the night.” Charlie nodded at the driver, who stood outside pumping gas. “I don’t suppose there’s a good diner in town that serves coffee this early.”
“Grams will have a pot on. Gramps is—” A fresh wave of sadness bowled over her at the use of the present tense for a man who no longer existed. “Gramps was an early riser.”
Charlie took her hand in his. “Let’s get you home.”
The car pulled back onto Route 21 and the landscape shifted from highway commercial to the version of Pennsylvania that tourists didn’t photograph.
Houses with worn porches and lawns browned by October frost. The Ironwood she carried in her chest collided with the real town scrolling past her window and the collision made her teeth ache.
Only twelve weeks ago she’d left. Yet the place looked smaller. Or maybe Thorndale had recalibrated her sense of scale, stretched every measurement so that the house she grew up in now belonged to a different girl’s life.
Her grandmother’s house sat halfway down Ellen Crescent, a narrow two-story with green aluminum siding. This morning, every window blazed and cars lined the curb. A pickup she recognized as Mr. Duncy’s from the hardware store straddled the sidewalk, and Mrs. Laver’s minivan blocked the driveway.
Skylar climbed out on legs that didn’t belong to her.
The October air hit her lungs, sharp with woodsmoke and cold dirt, the smell of Ironwood at five in the morning.
Charlie unfolded from the car behind her, all six-foot-two of him in a wrinkled Thorndale crewneck and jeans, blinking at the row of modest houses and parked trucks.
He stood beside her on the cracked sidewalk and waited.
A line of warmth carved down her spine at his presence.
The front door opened before she reached the steps.
Jake.
Broad shoulders filling the doorframe, dark circles carved under his brown eyes, wrinkled work shirt untucked. He’d been here for hours. Of course he had. Jake Cooper showed up. That was who he was.
“Sky.” Her name cracked on the single syllable.
She fell into him because her body remembered the shape of his arms the way a hand remembers a doorknob in the dark and the grief she’d kept at bay since waking up broke open again.
His grip carried the memory of a hundred embraces, predictable in their shape and pressure, a place her body could rest without bracing for surprise.
Charlie’s arms from the car still imprinted along her shoulder blades, unfamiliar and electric.
When she pulled back, she caught Jake staring at Charlie.
Jake returned his glance to her, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Grams needs you.”
Skylar stepped inside, into Mrs. Laver’s arms, into Mr. Delaney’s firm handshake and his wife’s soft cheek against hers. The house smelled of coffee and Mrs. Laver’s cinnamon rolls.
Her grandmother sat at the kitchen table in her blue housecoat, hands folded around a mug she wasn’t drinking. Smaller than Skylar remembered. The chair beside her, the one where Hanson Hartley sat every morning for Skylar’s entire life, gaped like a wound.
Skylar knelt and pressed her forehead against her grandmother’s knuckles. The papery skin smelled like lotion and dish soap. Tears came again, silent and hot, and her grandmother’s free hand found the back of her neck and held.
“It’s just us two now.”
Skylar wiped her face and turned to find Charlie hovering a full step back from the kitchen threshold.
His hands were at his sides, and he held himself as if trying to take up less space than his frame allowed.
A billionaire’s son standing on linoleum that curled at the edges, surrounded by homemade dishes and other people’s grief, and the expression on his face wasn’t pity.
Skylar had become an expert at identifying pity the year she turned twelve.
What Charlie wore was closer to reverence.
“Grams.” Skylar reached for his hand and pulled him forward. “This is Charlie, a friend from school.” She could feel the weight of Jake’s gaze from where he stood by the counter. “He drove me here.”
Charlie took Grams’ small hand in his broad palm. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She studied Charlie from head to toe, then nodded. “Thank you for bringing my girl.”
His gaze flicked to Skylar and back. “It was nothing.”
That sharp pang rose in her again and her jaw locked against the pressure.
Her grandmother patted his hand twice and let go. “Have you eaten? There’s enough food in this kitchen to feed the whole street.”
“Thank you.” Charlie knelt to her level. “Can I get you something as well?”
Grams glanced at her mug. “I’m set for now.”
The morning moved in a blur of coffee and logistics and the particular choreography of small-town grief.
Skylar sat with her grandmother, her laptop wheezing as they coordinated funeral arrangements online.
Every few minutes a new face appeared at the door with a covered dish, a word of condolence, an offer to mow the lawn or drive to the church.
At noon two flower arrangements arrived.
The first a sweet bouquet of white roses with a note of condolence from Poppy and the other a large arrangement of flowers from the Thorndale Titans, signed by Grant, Seb, Wyatt, and Erik Booker.
Skylar spotted a sprig of white flowers. “This isn’t in season.”
Charlie inhaled and his eyes lit up. “I recognize this. What is it?”
“Honeysuckle.” Skylar breathed in the sweet scent. “My favorite.” She turned to him. “Charlie. Could I ask a favor?”
His whole body angled toward her, shoulders squaring, chin dropping, and the eagerness in the shift reminded her of the way he leaned into a huddle. Every cell oriented toward the problem. “Anything.”
“Would you read Gramps obituary? I can’t…”
His hand brushed her shoulder. “Show me.”
She handed him her laptop, the screen open to the draft she’d spent an hour grinding through.
Charlie read in silence, his thumb scrolling, his brow furrowed in concentration. After a minute he looked up. “Can I change one thing?”
She nodded.
He deleted “beloved husband and grandfather” and typed: “beloved husband, grandfather, and mechanic, whose shop on Maple kept Ironwood’s engines running for forty-one years.”
The specificity landed under her breastbone. Charlie had given her grandfather back his hands, his trade, the grease under his fingernails and the pride he took in every engine he rebuilt.
She turned the laptop toward her grandmother. Grams read the line, her lips moving, and her hand found Skylar’s knee under the table and squeezed. She glanced at Charlie, giving him a nod.
Charlie stayed on the periphery, but he didn’t stand idle.
He brewed a fresh pot of coffee when the first one ran dry, and carried cups to the table without being asked.
When newcomers entered the house, he took their jackets and placed them in the living room.
When Mrs. Duncy’s youngest knocked a box of crayons off the table, Charlie crouched to pick them up and the boy tugged his sleeve and showed him a drawing of a yellow truck.
Charlie studied the drawing with the same focused attention Skylar had seen him give a playbook, and the boy beamed.
By noon the kitchen had emptied to a manageable rotation. Skylar excused herself to shower and change, and when she came back down the narrow staircase fifteen minutes later, her hair still damp, she stopped on the third step.
Her grandmother stood in the hallway with Charlie.
Both faced the gallery wall of Claire Hartley’s photographs.
Family photos alongside Little League games shot through chain-link.
A woman laughing on a porch while rain hammered the street behind her.
The old quarry at sunset. Two sisters in rubber boots.
At the far end, separated from the rest by a gap of bare plaster, three photographs. Peeling paint. Exposed wiring. A child’s bedroom with black mold climbing the baseboards.
Her grandmother pointed at a photograph near the center of the wall.
Skylar recognized the frame: Claire at the county fair, early thirties, camera slung over one shoulder, laughing at the person behind the lens.
Skylar’s father had taken that photograph.
Her mother’s eyes were half-closed, caught mid-laugh, her hair wild in the wind.
“We weren’t sure about her at first,” Grams ran her thumb along the edge of the frame.
“Our son brought home this girl from the other side of town. She talked too fast and laughed too loud and had opinions about everything.” A breath.
“She amazed us all. She was a wonderful mother, a devoted wife, and the most talented photographer I’ve ever known. ”
Charlie stood very still, his head tilted toward the wall, listening.
“Her dream was to be a journalist. Thorndale offered opportunities but she came back to Ironwood because of her love for my son. She contributed to the local paper while she taught middle school.”
Her grandmother’s hand dropped from the frame.
“After the paper retracted the article, no one would take her stories. She put the camera away. We kept it for her, thinking after enough time passed, she’d try again.
” Grams shook her head. “She gave up the one thing that made her feel like herself, and a year and a half later she was gone. I think about that. What those people stole from her before the fire ever started.”
The wood of the staircase railing bit into Skylar’s palm. She’d inherited her mother’s mission but had never stopped to grieve her mother’s surrender.
“I see so much of her mother in Skylar. But I don’t want my granddaughter to close parts of herself off like Claire.
” Grams touched his arm. “I was thrilled when she accepted the scholarship to Thorndale. At first, we didn’t think she would, that she’d stay because of the obligations she thinks bind her to this small town. ”
“She loves you very much.”
“As I love her. Without her around things have been difficult. It will be harder now, but my girl can’t live someone else’s life. She deserves not to be hurt.”
“I want that too.” Three words, and every one of them landed like a hand placed over a wound.
Skylar descended the last three steps. Both of them turned. Charlie’s blue eyes found hers and the rawness in his expression stripped the air from the hallway.
“There you are.” Grams turned to Skylar. “We should head to the funeral home to sign the papers.”
Charlie shuffled his feet. “Can I drive you?”
“That’s not—” Skylar started.
“That’s kind of you.” Grams smiled at him.
That evening, after the last neighbor had gone and the kitchen was clean and her grandmother had retreated to bed, Skylar stood on the back porch and let the October cold press against her face.
The screen door creaked and Charlie stepped onto the porch carrying two mugs, handing her one.
Tea. When had he learned she only drank tea in the evening?
“I should check into my hotel.” He ran his hand through his hair. “But I’d like to attend the funeral, if that’s okay with you.”
Under her sweater, her ribs cinched around a memory of the last time she sat in Miller’s Funeral Home.
Tomorrow she would occupy the same chair she had occupied at twelve years old.
She’d stand under the same fluorescent lights, stare at the same fake wood paneling, listen to the same plastic sympathy from the funeral director.
A town of friends would hear her attempt to deliver a eulogy to the man who raised her, then gather in the cemetery where her parents and Kate already lay and watch another person she loved disappear into the ground.
Their forearms nearly touched, and Skylar let herself notice the truth coiled low in her belly that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the fact that Charlie had driven eight hours into a world he didn’t belong to, had stayed and washed dishes and now asked to stay by her side longer.
Her hand drifted to the hollow at the base of her throat. “I’d like that.”