18. Jake
JAKE
Third time trying to say four sentences to one woman, and I am starting to think the universe is doing this on purpose.
I'd rehearsed it in the truck on the drive over, out loud, alone, like a man who had lost every shred of dignity he'd once possessed. Aria, there's something about Lily I need to tell you. It's about her father.
It's about me. Four sentences. I'd counted them twice.
The plan was simple. Wait until the kids were occupied, get Aria somewhere quiet, say the four sentences before my nerve caught up with my mouth and shut the whole operation down.
I'd survived Deacon's pep talk, Noah's drawing, her own mother almost saying my name at her kitchen table the night before, and two straight weeks of lying awake at two in the morning rehearsing openings that all sounded like confessions from a bad courtroom drama.
Tonight was the night. I'd decided that in the shower, which felt like as good a place as any to make a life-altering decision.
I texted Deacon on the way over, just to say it out loud to someone before I said it to her.
Tonight's the night, I typed. Wish me luck.
Don't need luck, he wrote back almost instantly. Need a spine. You've got one.
Use it.
Encouraging, I typed.
I try, he replied, and then, a few seconds later: Seriously though. Good luck. She deserves to hear it from you before the whole town beats you to it.
I put the phone away and told myself he was right, which didn't make the drive any shorter or the knot in my stomach any smaller.
Somewhere around the last stretch of road before her driveway, I ran through the four sentences one final time, out loud, alone, feeling like a man auditioning for a part he badly wanted and was fairly certain he'd bomb.
Attempt one happened in her kitchen, twenty minutes after I arrived, while Lily and Noah were supposedly watching something in the living room and Aria was drying a pan that did not need any more drying.
"Can I talk to you about something?" I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected, which felt like a small miracle worth noting.
"Sure. What's up?"
"It's about Lily, actually. And me. There's something I should have told you a while ago, and I keep not doing it, and I think tonight I need to just..."
"Dad! Noah says the show's over and he wants to watch mine now and he's not even asking nice!"
Lily arrived at full volume, indignant, sock-footed, planting herself directly between us with the particular authority of a five-year-old who considered herself the final word on all household disputes.
Aria set down the pan and went to referee, and I stood there holding four sentences that had just been demoted to zero.
"Hold that thought," Aria called back over her shoulder, already gone.
I held the thought. The thought did not appreciate being held.
"Everything okay?" Aria called from the living room, where the vegetable dispute had apparently escalated to include volume levels a courtroom would have found excessive.
"Fine. Family diplomacy in progress."
"You want to referee? You've got more patience than I do most days."
"I would rather face the pipe again."
"That bad?"
"I have opinions about broccoli that a wiser man would keep to himself." I leaned against the doorframe, watching Lily argue her case with the fierce, unshakable conviction of someone who had never once lost an argument and did not intend to start tonight.
"She's going to be a lawyer. Or a dictator. Possibly both."
"God help us all."
I gave it fifteen minutes, long enough for the television dispute to resolve itself into an uneasy truce over some show about talking vegetables, and tried again once Aria came back to the kitchen, wine glass in hand, looking like a woman who deserved better than what I was about to do to her evening a second time.
"Okay," I said. "Where were we?"
"You were about to tell me something. You had that face on."
"What face?"
"The face you get right before you say something you've clearly been rehearsing." She leaned against the counter, patient, giving me the exact kind of space I'd asked her for without ever actually asking.
"Go ahead. I'm listening."
I opened my mouth. I got as far as her name.
"Aria, there's..."
My phone rang, loud and insistent against the counter where I'd set it, and I glanced down to see Deacon's name flashing like a personal betrayal.
"You can ignore that," Aria said.
"I should probably take it. Might be the Whitfield job. Give me one second."
It was not the Whitfield job. It was a burst pipe at a rental property Deacon and I had done work on last spring, water pouring into a finished basement while the homeowner stood in it screaming into her own phone about lawyers, and there was no version of that call I could ignore without risking a client and a friendship in the same night.
"I have to go handle this," I said, already grabbing my keys, hating every syllable of it. "I'm sorry. This isn't me running."
"I never thought it was."
"I mean it. I'll be back."
"Jake. Go. The pipe isn't going to wait for you to finish a sentence."
She said it lightly, no idea how true it actually was, and I drove to the rental property with my chest tight and my four sentences sitting useless in the passenger seat the whole way there.
The pipe took ninety minutes to shut off properly, most of that spent arguing with a shutoff valve that had rusted itself into a permanent no, and I came back to Aria's house soaked from the knees down and smelling like a basement, my second attempt as dead as the first.
"You look terrible," Aria said, opening the door.
"Thank you. I feel terrific."
"What happened?"
"A pipe decided tonight was the night to end its career, and it took me down with it. There's a homeowner two streets over who now knows several words I didn't know she had in her vocabulary."
"Sounds like quite an education."
"For both of us." I toed off my wet boots by the door, leaving a small apologetic puddle on her mat.
"Sorry about the smell. I tried to rinse off at the site, but there's only so much a garden hose can do."
"I've smelled worse. You should meet Noah after a soccer practice."
"Kids are down. It's just us for a bit, if you want to sit."
We sat. The house had gone quiet the way houses do once the small chaos inside them finally exhausts itself, just the hum of the refrigerator and the porch light throwing a soft yellow square across the floor, and I decided this was it, the actual moment, no more interruptions left to throw at me.
"I need to tell you something," I said, and this time I made myself keep going before anything else in the universe could object. "It's about the summer I spent up at Millbrook. Six years ago."
Aria went very still, something shifting behind her eyes that I couldn't quite read, and for one terrifying second I thought she already knew, that my mother had somehow said the name after all and I'd missed it.
"Millbrook," she repeated, careful. "When were you there?"
"Six years ago. One summer, start to finish."
"That's specific."
"It was a specific summer."
"That's where I grew up. Where my family used to go every summer." She was watching me now with an intensity that hadn't been there a minute ago.
"What are the odds?"
"Pretty small odds, honestly."
"Small world." She said it slowly, like she was turning the coincidence over, looking for the seam in it. "What were you even doing there?"
This was it. This was the exact door I needed, standing open in front of me, and all I had to do was walk through it and say the rest of the sentence I'd been building toward for two weeks straight.
"I built a dock," I said. "Out on the east cove. For a family that summer, actually, a mother and a daughter who stayed at..."
Noah's door creaked open down the hall, and small feet padded across the floor with the unmistakable rhythm of a child who had woken up needing something urgently and was not going to be quiet about the request.
"I need water," he announced, standing in the doorway in dinosaur pajamas, rubbing one eye with his fist. "And I had a bad dream. There was a shark in it."
"There's no sharks in Cedar Cove, bud," I said, already standing, already moving toward the kitchen for a glass, my sentence collapsing behind me like a house of cards someone had breathed on.
"I know that. It was still scary."
I got him water. I sat with him for ten minutes while he described the shark in exhaustive detail, its teeth, its general attitude problem, and how it had apparently followed him from a dream three weeks ago and was, in his words, getting persistent about it.
"Maybe he just wants to be friends," I offered, mostly to see where that went.
"Sharks don't have friends. They have snacks."
"That's dark for a six-year-old."
"I watched a documentary." He said it with the flat authority of someone who considered the matter closed, and I decided not to argue with either the shark or the documentary.
By the time he finally drifted back to sleep, the whole shape of the moment downstairs had changed, the door I'd been standing in front of closed again, quiet and final.
I came back out to find Aria on the couch, feet tucked under her, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read anymore, whatever had been building between us a few minutes ago folded neatly away for another night.
"Sorry," I said. "Shark emergency."
"I heard. Sounded serious."
"Life or death stuff."
She smiled, but something in it had gone careful, like she was holding a question she wasn't sure was hers to ask yet, and I sat back down beside her with the whole conversation sitting dead in my chest for the third time that night.
"For what it's worth," she said, "you can tell me things. Even the complicated ones. Especially those, probably."
"I know I can."
"I mean it, Jake. Whatever it is."
"I believe you. I'm just bad at timing, apparently. Tonight's been a real showcase of it."
"You've got time. I'm not going anywhere."
That was the part that made it worse, somehow, how easy she made the waiting sound, like patience was a gift she had endless supply of and no reason yet to ration.
"You okay?" she asked.
"You've seemed a little far away tonight. More than usual, even."
This was it again. A fourth chance, unearned and undeserved, and I decided I was not going to waste it, not this time, not with the water glass empty and the house finally quiet and nothing left in the world to interrupt me.
I thought about every version of this conversation I'd rehearsed, in the shower, in the truck, standing at my own kitchen counter with Noah's drawing folded in my back pocket like a talisman.
None of the versions had accounted for how much easier it was to say the words to an empty room than to the actual woman sitting three feet away, watching me with patient, open eyes that had no idea what they were about to lose.
"Okay," I said, more to myself than to her. "Okay."
"You keep saying that like you're talking yourself off a ledge."
"Close enough."
"Aria, there's something I need to tell you. About Millbrook. About the family that stayed there that summer."
I had the words lined up. I finally had them, when Carol's headlights swung into the driveway like the world's worst timing device.