15. Aria
ARIA
Apparently in a town this size, holding hands at the fair counts as taking out a full-page ad.
I had not even done anything scandalous.
We had walked through the weekend market with the kids, matching cones of shaved ice already melting faster than either child could keep up with, and somewhere between the tomato stand and the man who sold jam out of mason jars, Jake had taken my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. I had let him.
Apparently half the town had a clear line of sight to that particular decision.
The woman at the coffee counter congratulated me on my way in for something I had not announced.
The librarian asked, with entirely too much delight, whether I would be needing books on a certain contractor's favorite genres.
Even the man at the hardware store, who had never once addressed a single word to me beyond the price of paint, told me Jake looked happier than he had in years, like I had personally engineered the improvement with my own two hands.
Carol found me outside the bakery, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed up into her hair like a woman settling in for a report she had already fully written in her head before I arrived.
"Well," she said. "It's about time."
"Good morning to you too, Carol."
"Don't good morning me. I sent that man off with twenty minutes at the fair a month ago and I have been waiting very patiently for him to do something worth those twenty minutes ever since." She squinted at me, not unkindly.
"You make him hum, you know. Same as the boy."
"I didn't know that was a metric."
"It's the only metric that matters." She patted my arm once, decisive, and walked off toward the market before I could ask what exactly she meant by it, leaving me standing there turning the comment over like a coin I could not quite place the value of.
I called Jake from the car afterward, still holding a bag of tomatoes I did not entirely remember buying, and relayed the whole gauntlet in order, the coffee counter, the librarian, Carol's ambush outside the bakery.
"You're famous," Jake said, when I told him about the hardware store. "Small towns don't really do subtlety."
"I noticed. I got an enthusiastic thumbs up from a woman I've never once met in my life."
"That's Denise. She thumbs-ups everything. Weddings, funerals, parking violations, minor property disputes. It's just her whole personality."
"Comforting to know I rank right alongside a parking violation."
"You rank considerably higher. Denise saves the double thumbs up strictly for special occasions, and I hear you got one."
I had already agreed to dinner at his place that evening, nothing formal, just the four of us and whatever he decided to cook, and I told myself the whole drive over that it did not mean anything more than it already obviously did.
Noah met us at the door already talking, sketchbook tucked firmly under one arm like he had something urgent to show Lily the second she crossed the threshold, and the two of them vanished toward the back porch before either of us managed a proper hello.
"They've officially stopped needing us," I said, watching them go.
"Give it a year. They'll need us again the second they want money or a ride somewhere."
The kitchen smelled like garlic and something simmering low on the stove, and Jake handed me a glass of wine without asking if I wanted one, which I decided to allow purely on the grounds that he had guessed correctly.
"This is domestic," I said, settling onto a stool at the counter. "Alarmingly domestic."
"I contain multitudes. I believe we've established this."
"You really have leaned hard into that line."
"It's a good line. I'm not letting it go just because you've heard it twice."
He stirred the pot with the kind of focus he brought to everything, measuring a pinch of something between two fingers like the recipe had opinions and he intended to respect them, and I watched him work with the particular satisfaction of someone who had stopped pretending she was not watching.
"What exactly are we eating?" I asked. "Or is that classified?"
"Some kind of pasta thing my mother used to make. I'm reconstructing it from memory, which is either going to be delicious or a genuine tragedy. There's no in between with this one."
"Comforting odds."
"I contain confidence. Results are not guaranteed."
"Is that also a line you've used before?"
"Every good line gets used more than once. That's what makes it good."
"Deacon called me today," he said, not looking up. "Wanted to know if we're official now. His words, not mine."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him it was complicated."
"That's your answer for everything lately."
"It's been accurate all summer, honestly." He glanced at me, something warm and a little unsteady in it.
"Are we? Official, I mean. I've genuinely lost track of what that word requires at our age."
"I think it requires two people agreeing on it, which we've never actually done out loud."
"Then let's do it out loud. I would like us to be officially something. I just haven't figured out the paperwork."
"There's no paperwork, Jake."
"There should be. I'm a details person. Ask anyone."
I laughed, and something in my chest settled the way it had been settling more and more lately, quiet and certain in a way I had stopped bracing against.
Dinner turned into the kind of chaos that only two small children could generate, Lily narrating her meal like a nature documentary, Noah correcting her narration with the seriousness of a man twice his age, both of them arguing cheerfully about whether vegetables counted as a punishment or a suggestion.
"Carrots are a suggestion," Lily announced. "I am suggesting I don't eat them."
"That's not how suggestions work," Noah said, deeply unimpressed.
"It's how mine work."
"You can't just make up rules."
"I'm five. I can do whatever I want."
"That's not a real rule either."
"It's my favorite rule."
Jake set down his fork long enough to point it in Lily's general direction, entirely failing to hide his own amusement. "She's not wrong that she's five. That part checks out."
"Thank you," Lily said, with the deep satisfaction of a child who considered the argument officially won.
Jake caught my eye across the table, the twitch at the corner of his mouth giving him away completely, and I felt something warm settle low in my chest at the easy, unguarded shape of his face in that moment.
"You two are going to be running this town in about fifteen years," I said. "I want it on record that I saw it coming."
"I want it on record that I'm terrified," Jake said.
"Healthy instinct."
"Should I be more terrified? You've known them both far longer than I've had them under one roof together."
"Terror is appropriate. Lean into it."
"Noted. Filing that under things nobody warns you about."
Noah, apparently unbothered by being discussed like a natural disaster, reached across the table and stole one of Lily's carrots without breaking eye contact with her, which she allowed with the magnanimous air of someone doing him an enormous favor.
Somewhere between the main course and the bowl of berries Jake produced like a magician revealing his last trick, Lily set down her fork and looked at Jake with the particular directness only a five-year-old can manage without meaning any harm by it.
"Are you coming to my end of summer show?" she asked.
"The one at the rec center. Like a regular dad would."
The kitchen went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the question itself and everything to do with the several seconds it took Jake to answer it.
"I wouldn't miss it," he said finally, his voice doing something careful and unsteady at once. "Front row, promise. I'll even wear a real shirt for the occasion."
"You have to clap the loudest."
"I will clap so loud they'll hear it in the next county."
Lily accepted this with the total satisfaction of someone who had gotten exactly the answer she wanted and returned to her berries without a second thought, chattering on to Noah about what color ribbon she planned to wear, completely unaware of the several seconds Jake had just spent somewhere else entirely.
His eyes had gone distant and unreadable in a way I had only seen a handful of times before, gone and back again so fast I almost convinced myself I had imagined it.
"You okay?" I asked quietly, once the kids had drifted back toward their sketchbook and whatever elaborate mythology they were building on the back porch.
"Fine. I'm just thinking about Emily, probably. That kind of question tends to bring her back."
"That makes sense."
"She would have been good at this part. The show, the front row, all of it. She never missed anything, not once, not even the year she had the flu bad enough that Carol threatened to drag her home by the collar."
"You don't have to explain it to me."
"I know. I want to, sometimes. Just not always sure how."
It did make sense, and I did not push, because grief moved on its own schedule and I of all people understood not wanting to explain every place it decided to visit uninvited.
We cleared the table together, an easy rhythm we had fallen into without discussing it, dishes passed hand to hand without either of us needing to ask who was drying and who was washing.
Lily wandered back in long enough to grab a napkin and a stray pencil from the junk drawer, settling at the counter to draw while the adults finished the dishes around her.
She held the pencil the way she always did, gripped low near the tip, tongue caught between her teeth in fierce concentration, and I glanced over out of pure habit to see what masterpiece was forming itself this time.
Jake glanced over too, and this time whatever crossed his face did not recover as quickly, his hands going still in the sink for three full seconds before he remembered he was holding a plate.
"Jake?"
"Sorry. I lost my train of thought." He turned back to the dishes, quicker than the moment warranted, and the water ran a beat too long before he finally shut it off.
"You've had a couple of these little moments tonight, you know."
"Long day. Rough one, actually. Contractor stuff catches up with me sometimes, that's all it is."
He dried his hands on the towel slung over his shoulder, deliberate, not quite meeting my eyes while he said it. "Ignore me. I'm fine."
"I'm not trying to interrogate you here."
"I know. I appreciate that more than you'd probably think." He managed a small smile that almost reached the rest of his face, and I let myself believe it because the alternative meant pushing at something neither of us seemed quite ready to name out loud yet.
I did not ask again. Some part of me filed it away anyway, the way you do with anything that does not quite match the story you have already decided to believe, and told myself grief looked exactly like that sometimes, unpredictable and uninvited and gone as fast as it arrived.
Later, driving home with Lily half asleep in her booster seat and the porch lights of both our houses glowing steady against the dark, I replayed the whole evening the way I always did, sorting the good parts from the ones that snagged, and Jake's face kept surfacing in that second version no matter how many times I tried to file it under ordinary grief and move on.
He went somewhere far away behind his eyes twice tonight. I told myself it was grief. I was half right.