20. Jake
JAKE
There is no good way to tell a woman her daughter might be yours. I tried four openings on the drive over and used none of them.
Carol had Noah for the night, a lucky break I hadn't planned on and wasn't about to waste, and Aria had texted asking if I wanted to come over once the house went quiet.
I sat in her driveway for a full minute before I could make myself get out of the truck, running through every version of this conversation one last time, none of them sounding any less like a demolition than they had an hour ago.
I'd called Deacon from the parking lot of the hardware store an hour earlier, standing beside my own truck like a man working up the nerve to jump off something tall.
"You're doing this tonight," he said. Not a question.
"Tonight. Kids are at Carol's. No interruptions this time."
"Good. It's time, Jake."
"I know it's time. Knowing that doesn't make it easier."
"Nothing worth doing is ever easier for knowing it's necessary. You'll say it wrong, probably. Say it anyway."
"Encouraging. Truly."
"I'm not in the business of comfortable lies. You want comfortable, call someone else." His voice softened, just slightly, the way it did when he meant something more than the joke let on.
"You'll be all right. Both of you will, eventually. Might not feel that way tonight."
I hadn't fully believed him then, and sitting in Aria's driveway an hour later, engine ticking as it cooled, I believed him even less.
Not since the macaroni night, since holding her while she cried about a man she thought she'd lost, with that man's own arms wrapped around her the whole time.
I couldn't carry that particular kind of cowardice any further than I already had.
She opened the door before I knocked, wine glass already in hand, looking soft and unguarded and entirely unprepared in a way that made what I was about to do feel even crueler.
"You're early," she said. "I like it. Means you actually wanted to be here."
"I need to talk to you about something. It's important, and I need you to just let me get through it without stopping me, if you can."
Something shifted in her face, quick and wary, and she stepped back to let me in without asking the question I could already see forming behind her eyes.
"Okay," she said, setting the wine down untouched. "You're scaring me a little."
"I know. I'm sorry. I just need you to hear the whole thing before you say anything."
"Do you want water? Tea? I feel like I should offer you something before whatever this is."
She was already moving toward the kitchen, nervous energy looking for somewhere to land.
"Aria. Sit down. Please."
She sat, slow and careful, studying my face like she was trying to read the ending of a book from its opening page.
We sat on the couch, a careful foot of space between us that felt more like a mile, and I made myself start before my nerve could find another excuse to bail.
"Six years ago, I spent a summer in Millbrook. I told you that already, the dock job."
"I remember."
"What I didn't tell you is that everyone up there called me Hart. Not Jake. My crew called me that the whole summer, short for Hartley, and it stuck so hard that half the town never learned my first name at all."
I watched her face for the moment it landed, but nothing moved yet, just careful attention.
"I met a girl that summer. Twenty years old, up at the lake with her family, the kind of girl who told me on day one that I was measuring a dock wrong and then spent the next six weeks proving she wasn't wrong about much of anything. "
Her hand had gone still around the stem of her wine glass, even though she wasn't holding it anymore.
"Jake."
"Let me finish. Please."
She nodded, barely, and I kept going before either of us lost our nerve entirely.
"I fell for her that summer. Hard, faster than made any sense, harder than I'd ever let myself fall for anyone before or since, and when the season ended and her family drove off, I told myself I'd find a way back to her.
I didn't have a last name, just like she didn't have mine, and by the time I worked up the courage to actually go looking, too much time had passed and I told myself it wasn't meant to be. "
My voice was shaking, and I let it, because pretending to be steady felt like one more lie I didn't have room for.
"I kept a box. Photos, a piece of driftwood, a matchbook from the inn. I never opened it again until a few weeks ago."
"Jake, what are you saying?"
"A few weeks ago I opened that box, and I called the inn, and I talked to the old owner, who still had every guest book he'd ever kept. He found the record. Mitchell, party of three, booked two weeks and stayed six."
I made myself hold her eyes even though every part of me wanted to look somewhere else entirely. "The dates lined up exactly with the dock job. Exactly with Lily."
The color went out of her face slowly, like watching a light dim instead of switch off.
"You're saying Lily is..."
"I think Lily is my daughter, Aria. I've thought it for weeks now, and I've been trying to find the right way to tell you, and every version I tried kept getting interrupted or falling apart in my own mouth before I could get it out."
She stood up so fast the couch cushion shifted beneath me, putting the length of the room between us, one hand pressed flat against her stomach like she needed something to hold onto.
"Weeks. You've known for weeks."
"I wasn't sure at first. I needed to be sure before I said anything that could upend her whole life on a guess."
"You let me tell you about him. About losing him. You sat there and let me cry about a man I never found, and the whole time you were him."
"Aria."
"Don't." Her voice cracked down the middle, quiet in a way that scared me more than shouting would have. "Don't say my name like that right now."
"I didn't know how to tell you. I tried, more than once. The night of the pipe, I almost told you. The day Deacon and I talked on the roof, I almost told you. I've been trying since the day I found out."
"You had weeks, Jake. Weeks of watching me not know, watching me guess wrong about my own life, and you let me keep guessing."
"I know. I know how that sounds."
"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like a man who decided my grief was easier to sit through than his own confession."
That landed exactly as hard as it was meant to, and I didn't have a single word ready that would make it land any softer. Every one I could think of would have sounded hollow the second it left my mouth.
"You're right," I said.
"I was a coward about it. I kept telling myself I needed to be certain first, that I needed the timing to be right, that Deacon's roof, or the pipe, or Noah's bad dream would eventually stop getting in the way and leave me a perfect opening.
There is no perfect opening for this. I think I knew that the whole time and used it as an excuse anyway.
Really, I think I was just scared of this exact moment, of watching your face do what it's doing right now. "
"And what is my face doing, Jake?"
"Looking at me like I'm a stranger."
"You are a stranger. I don't know who you are right now. I thought I did."
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth for a second, composing herself, and when she spoke again her voice had gone terrifyingly level.
"Five years. Five years I raised her alone, wondering, and you were fifty feet away this whole summer, mowing your lawn, teaching her to skip stones, letting her draw pictures of a family that already had you in it, and you knew. "
"Not the whole summer. Only the last few weeks."
"That doesn't make it better. That makes it worse. You had weeks to tell her father was standing right in front of her, and instead you let her ask me at dinner why she doesn't have one."
I had no answer for that. There wasn't one that wouldn't sound like an excuse dressed up as an explanation, and I sat there letting the silence do what my voice couldn't, watching her pace back and forth across the living room like the walls had gotten smaller in the last five minutes and were still closing in.
"I need to know everything," she said. "Every detail. Start from the beginning, the actual beginning, everything you did once you started suspecting."
"I found the box first. Then I called the inn. The current owner, a man named Denny, patched me through to his father, Earl, who used to run the place. Earl still had every guest book he'd ever kept. He found your family's entry in about ten minutes."
"What did it say?"
"Mitchell, party of three. Booked for two weeks, extended twice, six weeks total. He remembered a girl arguing with the crew about board spacing. I knew it was you before he even finished the sentence."
"And you didn't call me. You didn't say anything. You went to Lily instead."
"I went to see her because I needed to see it with my own eyes before I said a word to either of you. She was drawing in the dirt with a stick, holding it the exact way my mother used to hold a pencil. That was the moment I stopped doubting."
I watched her absorb every piece of it, her face doing something complicated and terrible, grief and fury and disbelief all fighting for the same small space.
"I should have told you the day I knew," I said, when there was nothing left to lay out between us. "I'm sorry. I know that doesn't fix anything."
"No. It doesn't." She stopped pacing and stood very still in the middle of the room, arms wrapped around herself like she was holding her own ribs together.
"Sorry doesn't undo five years, Jake. It doesn't undo weeks of watching you eat dinner at my table knowing what you knew."
"What about the receipt?" I asked, my hand already halfway to my pocket out of habit. "Do you still want to see it?"
"Not tonight. Bring it another time. I can't look at your handwriting right now without wanting to throw something."
"Okay."
"I'm not saying I don't believe you. I believe every word of it. I just need you gone before I say something I can't take back."
"Aria, please. Talk to me."
She was quiet for a long moment, staring at some point past my shoulder like she was doing math of her own, working out how many nights she'd fallen asleep beside a man who had known the whole time and said nothing.
The refrigerator hummed somewhere behind her, steady and indifferent, the only sound in a house that had gone otherwise completely still.
"I need you to leave," she said, finally, and her voice was so quiet I almost asked her to repeat it.
"Aria."
"Please. I need you to leave, Jake."
I stood, because there was nothing else left to do, and every step toward her front door felt like it cost more than the walk should have. Behind me I heard her sit down hard on the couch, the particular sound of a person whose legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold her up.
She did not yell. She just said, very quietly, I need you to leave, and quiet was so much worse than anything I had braced for.