Chapter 13
Gemma
The coffee maker gurgles and hisses in a way that suggests it has opinions about being operated by someone who isn't Beck, and honestly, fair.
His kitchen is a study in controlled order.
Mugs lined up by size. The coffee beans in a sealed container with a handwritten label — the brand, the roast date, and the grind setting.
There's a sticky note on the filter basket that just says medium-coarse in the handwriting of a man who does not trust other people to make his coffee correctly.
I made it medium-coarse. Pretty sure. The grinder has a lot of settings.
Last night I kissed Beck on the porch and then the stars were out and neither of us said anything about it, which felt right in the way that some things feel right before your brain catches up and starts asking inconvenient questions.
I slept in the in-law suite listening to the quiet of a house I'd somehow stopped treating like temporary housing, and now I'm standing in his kitchen in an oversized Station 7 t-shirt and pajama pants with dinosaurs on them — Ivy's influence — waiting for coffee like this is normal.
It is not normal.
The kitchen smells like coffee and morning and something I don't have a word for yet.
The light coming through the window over the sink is still low and soft, the kind that belongs to early hours before the day has any expectations.
Outside, the mountains are doing their thing — solid, unhurried, not particularly interested in what happened on the porch last night.
Neither am I. Examining it. Not yet. Right now it just exists in the way a good thing sometimes does before you've had enough coffee to start worrying about it.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I ignore it. It buzzes again.
The coffee finishes with a last self-important gurgle.
Then Beck's tablet, propped on the counter, lights up with a FaceTime call.
Ivy
I should not answer that. The pipes are still running — Beck in the shower, which I can hear through the wall. This is absolutely not my call to make.
The tablet buzzes again. And again. Ivy has the persistence of a very small, very determined velociraptor, and I know from experience that she will simply keep calling until someone answers or the device runs out of battery, whichever comes first.
I answer.
The screen fills immediately with an enormous pair of mouse ears, a blurry flash of castle turrets in the background, and then Ivy's face, flushed pink and absolutely vibrating with news.
"GEMMA!" she shouts, loud enough that the people around her — and there are quite a few people around her, at least three strangers and what appears to be a woman in a full Belle costume who looks very surprised to be part of this conversation — all turn to look. "ARE YOU DADDY'S GIRLFRIEND NOW?"
The coffee maker beeps. Very politely. Very quietly.
"Good morning to you too," I say.
"DADDY KISSED YOU, DIDN'T HE. THAT MUST BE WHY YOU'RE ANSWERING HIS PHONE, RIGHT?
" The second part is technically a question.
The first part is a verdict. Ivy has solved this case without a single piece of evidence and from another time zone.
"I TOLD MOMMY SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AND SHE SAID I WATCH TOO MANY MOVIES BUT I KNEW. "
The Belle costume woman is visibly listening. So are the strangers. So is, I'm fairly certain, a man in a Goofy hat behind Ivy's left shoulder who has put down his churro.
"Ivy," I say, "can you use your inside voice?"
"I'M OUTSIDE," Ivy points out. She's got me there. She's technically correct.
"Your outside voice, but quieter?"
She drops her volume approximately three percent. "Did Daddy kiss you?" Her voice drops to what she probably considers a whisper.
Here is the thing about six-year-olds: they do not accept deflection. They accept answers. Ivy in particular has a truth-seeking instinct that would make her an excellent detective, a terrifying lawyer, or a deeply inconvenient podcast host.
"That's kind of a question for your dad," I say.
"He won't answer," Ivy says, with the exhausted certainty of someone who has been trying to extract information from Beck Delano for six years. "He'll make a face and say 'hm.' He always does that."
That is an extremely accurate impression.
Beck walks into the kitchen at exactly this moment, hair damp from the shower, wearing a grey t-shirt that has seen better days and is doing something deeply unfair to his general outline.
He has a towel over one shoulder. He stops when he sees the tablet.
He sees Ivy on the screen. He sees the people behind Ivy.
He processes the fact that I answered his daughter's FaceTime call.
He goes very still in the way he does when he's calculating how bad something is going to get.
"Hi, Daddy!" Ivy announces. "DID YOU KISS GEMMA?"
The Belle costume woman makes a sound.
Beck looks at me.
I look at him.
"You were in the shower," I say.
"Hm," he says.
"SEE?" Ivy says.
"Ivy." Beck crosses to the counter and angles himself into the frame with the posture of a man walking toward something he already knows he can't fix. "Why are you calling from the center of a theme park?"
"Because, Daddy," Ivy says, with the patience of someone who has clearly thought about this much longer than anyone else in the conversation, "this is important.
Gemma is my best friend and if you kissed her then she's your girlfriend and she could come to my class for show-and-tell because Tommy brought his dad's motorcycle helmet and that was cool but having a paramedic girlfriend who saves people is way cooler and also I told Clarence and he already knew but he wants to hear it from you—"
"Ivy." His voice is flat, but there's a muscle working in his jaw that means he is trying very hard not to react to any of this. "Where's your mother?"
"Getting churros," Ivy says. "I have two minutes. Are you dating Gemma? Yes or no."
I press my lips together.
Beck looks at the ceiling.
"We're figuring it out," he says. Which is, I will give him full credit, substantially more than I expected him to say.
Ivy processes this. "Does figuring it out mean yes?"
"It means we're figuring it out."
"I'm telling Clarence it means yes," she announces, and then Vanessa appears in the background holding a churro and looking mildly alarmed at whatever is on Ivy's face, and Ivy shouts "BYE GEMMA BYE DADDY I LOVE YOU TELL CLARENCE I SAID HI" at a volume that could probably be heard from Space Mountain, and the call ends.
Silence.
Beck stands at the counter. I stand at the counter. The coffee maker contributes nothing helpful.
"She called it," I say.
"She calls everything," Beck says. He picks up his mug — the one on the far left, obviously — and pours his coffee without looking at me.
"The Belle lady seemed invested."
"Please stop."
"She had a hand over her heart."
He turns around wearing the face he makes when he's determined to be irritated and it isn't quite working. "How long before she calls back?"
"Thirty seconds after she eats the churro," I say. "Maybe forty-five if Vanessa makes her put the phone away."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. In Beck-to-English translation, it's roughly equivalent to a standing ovation.
The churro estimate was wrong. Ivy called back in under a minute, primarily to make Beck promise to tell Clarence she sends her love and that she's bringing something from the gift shop, which opened a separate and entirely earnest conversation about whether Clarence would prefer a stuffed Stitch or a stuffed Nemo, and Beck said "the fish" with the certainty of someone who has been outvoted by a six-year-old before and learned to commit.
By the time we got off the second call, the morning had shifted into something easier.
I wasn't thinking about the kiss in the way where I wanted to dissect it anymore, just in the way where it sat warm and present in the back of my mind while I refilled my mug and Beck stood at the window looking at the mountains like he needed them to hold still.
Beck pours a second mug. Sets it on the counter. Leans back against the sink with his arms crossed and looks at me the way he looks at incident reports — like he's going to read every word before he says anything.
"So," he says.
"So," I agree.
The refrigerator hums. Outside, a bird makes an argument about something.
"Last night," he starts.
"You don't have to—"
"I want to." He says it flat and certain, the way he says most things. "I'm not — I don't do things halfway. If that's what this is, I need you to know that going in."
My chest does something that takes a second to settle. "What is this?"
He picks up his mug. Studies it. Puts it back down. "I don't know what to call it yet. But it's not nothing."
That's the most words he's voluntarily strung together about feelings since I moved in, and I'm fairly certain it cost him something.
"It's not nothing," I say.
He nods once. Done. Filed. Apparently that's enough for him to function, because he picks his mug back up and some of the tension in his shoulders releases by a fraction.
It's enough for me too, which is its own thing to sit with.
The first text came from Big Jim before I'd finished my second cup. I was leaning against the counter, mug in both hands, watching a pair of magpies argue on the fence post outside the window, when my phone lit up.
Jim: Heard something interesting. About time. Drinks on the house, you two.
I turned the screen toward Beck. He was at the table with his own coffee, jacket on, not quite ready to do anything with the morning yet.
He read it. Set down his mug. "How?"
"Mrs. Delgado's porch light was on when we were outside last night," I said.
He went very still.
"And my guess is Ivy called her before she called us."