Chapter 13 #2
He stood up slowly, the way he does when he's processing something that requires his full height. He picked up his phone, looked at it, and set it face-down on the counter like it had given him bad news. "Ivy called Mrs. Delgado."
"Ivy called Mrs. Delgado."
"From Disneyland."
"She's very committed to outcomes."
A muscle worked in his jaw. He picked up his mug, realized it was empty, and put it back down. "Mrs. Delgado has a phone tree."
"She does," I said.
He crossed the kitchen then — not toward the coffee maker, not toward his phone — toward me. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up slightly to read his face. His hand found mine where it was wrapped around my mug, and he held it there, warm and unhurried, not making a thing of it.
"You doing okay with all this?" he asked.
The question was quiet. Not worried, exactly. Just — watching.
I thought about it honestly, which was its own kind of new. "Ask me again after the third text," I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. He didn't let go of my hand.
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free one.
The next message came from Hazel, who I am fairly certain does not sleep and instead refreshes the Station 7 social feeds until something actionable happens:
Hazel: omg omg BECK AND GEMMA. a fire captain and a paramedic?
? the branding is IMMACULATE. I'm requesting a joint feature.
dual professionals. a powerful duo for the community.
just a few photos, maybe a short reel, very tasteful, this is literally the content Station 7 was made for. please say yes.
I read it twice. I showed it to Beck.
"No," he said, without breaking eye contact with his mug.
"She said tasteful."
"She put 'reel' in the same sentence. I rest my case."
Fair. I sent Hazel a smiley face and a "maybe later," which in Hazel-language would be interpreted as a soft yes, but buying time felt like the responsible move.
Mrs. Delgado arrived at the front door mid-morning with a covered casserole dish and a note in handwriting that did not leave room for debate: Feed that girl.
Beck accepted it with the expression he gets when resistance has already been ruled out.
The dish was still warm. The whole kitchen smelled like green chili and someone's grandmother had decided we needed looking after, and I stood there in dinosaur pajamas thinking: yeah, fair enough.
And then Riley texted.
Riley Pritchard, who is one of the sharpest people I have ever met and who either has Hazel as a source or has developed the small-town information osmosis that everyone in Copper Ridge seems to acquire within six months of arrival:
Riley: FINALLY. I've been watching that man make you coffee for weeks. Tell him congratulations and that if he hurts you I will make an excellent prosecutorial witness. Also congratulations to you. You look happy. Don't run.
The last two words landed somewhere behind my sternum.
Coffee came out of my nose. Beck looked up from across the kitchen.
"Riley," I said, and turned my phone so he could read it.
He read it. His jaw moved in the way it does when he's working out what to do with something. "She's not wrong about the witness part," he said finally, and went back to his coffee.
I started laughing, and the thing was — the thing I noticed, standing there in Beck's kitchen with Mrs. Delgado's casserole on the counter and Hazel in my texts and Ivy's voice still echoing — was that I didn't want to be anywhere else.
That was new. Not the happiness. I'm good at happy; I've always been good at happy.
But this was different. This was the kind of happy that doesn't need an audience to stay in place.
The kind that's still there when you check, quietly, to make sure it's real.
I waited for the familiar pull — the part of me that starts calculating distances and lease terms and how long until it gets complicated — and it didn't come.
The last text had been answered, the casserole was covered and in the fridge, and the kitchen had gone quiet in the way it does when the day stops demanding things.
Beck stood at the counter with his third coffee and his thinking-at-nothing look, and I was trying to remember if I had anywhere to be.
I didn't.
"What are you doing today?" he asked, without turning around.
"Nothing," I said. Which was true, and also something I was still getting used to — days that were genuinely mine, with no shift to prep for and no reason to manufacture somewhere to be.
He turned then. Not all the way, just enough. "You could stay."
It wasn't phrased as a question, exactly. More like something he'd decided to say out loud after considering it carefully, which was how Beck did most things.
"Here?" I said.
"Here." He picked up his mug. Looked at the window. "No agenda. You can read, or do nothing, or — whatever you want. I just." He stopped. Turned his mug in his hands the way he does when he's deciding whether to finish a sentence. "I'd like you to be here."
The refrigerator hummed. Outside, one of the magpies was back, having apparently won its earlier argument.
Every version of me that had ever lived somewhere temporarily, every version that had kept one bag half-packed and her options open, had a very predictable response to this kind of moment. That version would have said sure, for a bit and been gone by noon.
I set my mug on the counter.
"Okay," I said.
Beck nodded once. Turned back to the window. The line of his shoulders had eased by a fraction, which on him was the equivalent of visible relief.
I stayed.
We ate Mrs. Delgado's casserole at the kitchen table for lunch, and Beck had an opinion about the green chili that he delivered in exactly two sentences, and I told him Mrs. Delgado did not require his feedback, and he said he wasn't giving her feedback, he was giving me feedback, and I said that was worse, and he ate a second helping without another word.
The mountains outside the window did their thing.
Clarence appeared from somewhere, sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, and stared at the casserole dish until Beck put a small piece of chicken in his bowl without being asked and without acknowledging that he'd done it.
After, Beck moved to the table with what looked like a building permit and the silence he goes quiet in when the day is finally off him. I migrated to the living room with a book I'd been meaning to finish for three weeks.
Clarence finished his chicken, took a lap of the kitchen, and followed me into the living room, where he draped himself across the armchair with the settled weight of an animal who had already decided this room was his.
"Good call," I told him.
He blinked once and went to sleep.
The afternoon light came through the windows at a low angle, turning everything amber, and I read half a chapter and then read it again because I'd stopped absorbing words somewhere around the paragraph where the detective finds the body — not because the book was bad, but because the room felt so comfortable that my brain had quietly opted out of processing anything external.
Beck walked in. He didn't announce himself. He crossed to the side table, set my coffee mug — refilled, still steaming, made the way I take it, which he had apparently catalogued at some point without making any production of it — on the table beside my elbow, and walked back out.
No question. No comment. No particular look on his face that asked for anything in return.
Just: I know how you take it and I thought of you.
Clarence opened one eye, decided this wasn't worth getting up for, and went back to sleep.