32. Jake
JAKE
Empty house, no kids until noon tomorrow, and a woman who just told me my toolbelt is doing a lot of work for her.
Diane had taken the Hart discovery about as well as anyone reasonably could, more delighted than scandalized, once the shock wore off somewhere around dessert and the sheer coincidence of it actually sank in.
She'd hugged me twice on her way out the door and told Carol she expected regular updates.
A week later, for the first time in longer than I could remember, nobody in this whole tangled family owed anybody an explanation about anything.
"I'm serious," Aria said, watching me hang it on its hook by the back door like it was a piece of evidence she planned to bring up later. "There's something deeply unfair about a man who looks that competent doing something that mundane."
"It's a toolbelt. It holds tools."
"It holds tools very confidently. There's a difference."
"You're overthinking a piece of leather."
"I contain multitudes. Weren't you the one who taught me that phrase?"
"I regret it deeply."
Carol had swept both kids off an hour earlier with a grocery bag full of snacks she absolutely did not need and the unmistakable satisfaction of a woman executing a plan she'd been quietly organizing for days, if not longer.
Noah went willingly, already negotiating movie rights before he reached the car.
Lily hugged me twice, informed me the goose would be lonely without proper supervision, and left with the gravity of someone embarking on a very important diplomatic mission.
Which left me here, in a kitchen that suddenly felt enormous, with a woman who had apparently decided my toolbelt was a personality trait worth mocking for the rest of the night.
My phone buzzed on the counter. Carol.
They're fed and fighting over the remote, she'd written. Do not call to check on them. I will call you if there is an actual emergency.
Enjoy your evening.
I showed the screen to Aria, who laughed and shook her head.
"She's not wrong to preempt us."
"I wasn't going to call."
"You were absolutely going to call."
"In an hour, maybe."
"See. Absolutely."
"What are we doing tonight?" I asked, opening the fridge and finding considerably less food in it than I remembered.
"I was thinking dinner. An actual dinner, with courses, like functioning adults."
"We're going to attempt courses."
"We are absolutely attempting courses."
I found half an onion, a suspicious amount of cheese, and a box of pasta that had been in the cabinet since before either of us could remember buying it, and decided this was the moment to test whether my confidence in the kitchen matched my confidence with a hammer.
It did not.
"You know there's a recipe app on your phone," Aria pointed out, watching me squint at the pasta box like it might offer instructions I hadn't already read twice. "You could just look something up."
"I don't need an app. I have instincts."
"Your instincts are currently burning an onion."
"The onion is caramelizing."
"The onion is deceased."
I scraped the pan into the trash with as much dignity as a man could reasonably summon while doing it, and started over with slightly less confidence and considerably more caution, Aria narrating the whole process from the counter like a very unhelpful cooking show host.
"And now our chef adds garlic," she said, "a decision history will remember."
"You're not helping."
"I'm providing commentary. It's a service."
"It's mockery with better branding."
"Mockery is a service, if you do it well enough."
"You're burning the garlic," Aria said, from her perch on the counter, watching me with the detached amusement of someone who had chosen not to help on principle.
"I am not burning the garlic. I am aggressively browning it."
"That's smoke, Jake."
"That's flavor developing."
"That's the smoke alarm developing an opinion."
The alarm went off exactly as she said it, shrill and unforgiving, and I lunged for the window while she grabbed a dish towel and started fanning it at the ceiling, both of us laughing too hard to actually be useful.
"This is your fault," I told her, propping the window open with a spatula. "You distracted me with toolbelt slander."
"I stand by every word of that slander."
"The garlic didn't deserve this."
"The garlic brought this on itself."
We ended up ordering food anyway, sitting on the kitchen floor with the containers spread between us because neither of us could be bothered to find plates, and it was somehow better than any actual cooked dinner would have been, easy and unhurried in a way that still felt new enough to notice.
"I used to eat like this in college," she said, stealing a piece of my food without asking. "Floor picnics. Very sophisticated."
"I used to eat standing up over the sink. Less sophisticated."
"That's tragic."
"It was efficient."
"Efficient and tragic aren't mutually exclusive."
"You keep using that phrase."
"It keeps being true."
"What else did you do in college? Besides floor picnics."
"Mostly panicked about exams and drank too much bad coffee. It was not a glamorous era." She stole another piece of food, entirely unrepentant about it.
"What about you? Was young Jake Hartley interesting, or was he already just a very serious man with a tape measure?"
"I was reasonably interesting. I had a whole personality before construction consumed it."
"Tell me one interesting thing."
"I played guitar for about a year. Badly."
"That is the most interesting thing you've ever told me."
"It was a brief, humiliating chapter. Nobody needs the details."
"I need every single detail. This is now the only thing I care about."
"Absolutely not."
"I will find out eventually. Deacon knows things."
"Deacon would sell that story for the price of a beer."
"Exactly. Which means I already know I'll have it by next week."
She leaned her head against my shoulder, comfortable in a way that still occasionally caught me off guard, this easy physical closeness that had taken us the better part of a year and a lifetime of complications to earn.
"This is nice," she said. "Quiet house. No small people demanding snacks every eleven minutes."
"I love our small people."
"I love them too. I also love not currently being asked to locate a specific missing sock at nine at night."
"Fair trade for one entire evening."
"One glorious, uninterrupted evening."
She reached up and tugged at my shirt collar, straightening something that didn't need straightening, and something in the air between us shifted the way it always did right before the easy part of the night gave way to something else.
"You know," she said, tilting her head back to look at me properly, "Carol's going to ask a lot of pointed questions tomorrow about exactly how we spent our night alone."
"Carol always asks pointed questions. It's practically a full-time job for her at this point, unpaid and fully self-appointed."
"She's going to know."
"She already knows. She's known since she volunteered for this so aggressively."
"That woman has no boundaries."
"That woman raised us both without meaning to. I think she's earned the lack of boundaries."
"Fair. I'll allow it, this once."
"Generous of you."
"I'm a generous woman. Deeply misunderstood, but generous."
"Deeply something, at least," I said, biting back a grin.
"Watch it."
"I meant it as a compliment."
"You did not."
Aria laughed, low and warm, and I felt it more than heard it, her shoulder still pressed against mine, and something about the ordinary ease of the whole evening made the moment feel bigger than it probably should have.
"Come here," I said.
"I am here. I've been here the entire time."
"Closer than here."
"Bold of you to assume there's a closer available."
There was, and we found it, the easy kind of closeness that didn't need an occasion or an apology attached to it anymore, just two people who had already said the hardest things out loud and now got to enjoy the part where the hard part was finished.
"For the record," she said, against my mouth, "I still think the toolbelt thing is unfair."
"You brought that up during this?"
"I bring important things up whenever they're relevant."
"This does not feel like the moment."
"This feels like exactly the moment."
I laughed, and she laughed, and somewhere in the middle of trying to argue her out of the point we ended up upstairs anyway, tangled together and still bickering about a piece of leather like it was the most pressing issue either of us had ever faced, both of us too happy to stop long enough to actually win the argument.
"Wait," she said, pulling back just far enough to search my face, laughter catching in her voice. "Are we seriously still doing this argument right now?"
"You started it. I'm just staying committed."
"I respect the commitment. I do not respect the timing."
"The timing is exactly right. Best possible moment to lose gracefully."
"I am not losing."
"You are, and it's a good look on you."
She shoved at my shoulder, laughing too hard to actually push me anywhere, and I caught her wrist and pulled her back in, and whatever remained of the argument dissolved somewhere in the space between one laugh and the next.
"Admit it," she said, breathless, "you wear it on purpose."
"I wear it because it holds tools."
"You wear it because you know exactly what it does."
"I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it might incriminate me."
"That's basically a confession."
"It's a purely strategic silence."
She pulled me down by the collar, laughing too hard to finish whatever argument she'd been building, and I stopped fighting it, because some battles were worth losing on purpose.
Later, tangled together in the unhurried dark, she traced a lazy line along my collarbone, quiet for the first time in an hour, the kind of quiet that felt earned instead of heavy.
"You're smiling," she said. "I can feel it against my hair. Very smug for a man who nearly burned my kitchen down two hours ago."
"I saved the kitchen. Heroically."
"You panicked and opened a window."
"That's what heroes do. They open windows with confidence."
"I'm going to remember that definition next time something actually catches fire."
"Please don't test it."
She laughed again, soft this time, settling further into the curve of my shoulder like she had nowhere else in the world she needed to be, and something in my chest went warm and quiet in the particular way it only did around her.
"I keep thinking about Noah's drawing," she said quietly, tracing one more slow line along my collarbone before she went still. "The one with the four bedrooms."
"He's very proud of that drawing."
"He should be. He saw it before either of us did."
"Kids usually do."
"I used to think it was just a kid being a kid, drawing what he wished was true instead of what was actually true." She traced another slow line, thoughtful. "I don't really think that anymore, not for a long while now."
"No?"
"No. I think he was just early, honestly. Ahead of the rest of us, same as he usually is."
I didn't say anything right away, just let the quiet stretch, comfortable and settled, easy as the whole night had been, and she tipped her head up to look at me with something soft and unguarded settling into her face.
"Someday," she said, quiet, almost to herself, "we're going to be under one roof. All four of us, one house, one address, one absurdly long grocery list. I can feel it coming, the way you feel weather changing before it actually changes."
I could have corrected her, could have pointed out that we hadn't actually talked about it yet, not properly, not the way two adults were supposed to talk about a thing that big before it became real. I could have reminded her that she'd told me herself, not long ago, to ask again in a year.
I didn't. A year suddenly felt like a very long time to wait for something that already felt this certain.
We were still laughing when it turned into something else entirely, and somewhere in the middle of it she said the word someday about us living under one roof. I did not correct her. I liked it too much.