Chapter 3 #3
It doesn't. It makes me feel fourteen and furious and grateful all at once, like I've been granted a reprieve from adulthood and all its complications.
For the length of that word — boys — we aren't two men carrying a dying woman and a decade of unsaid things.
We're two kids who shared a bed and fought over the blanket and once, exactly once, fell asleep with our fingers touching on the mattress between us and woke up pretending it never happened.
Cole hates it. I can tell by the way his jaw tightens every time, the slight narrowing of his eyes that says he's measuring the gap between who we are and who she needs us to be.
But he doesn't correct her. None of us do.
In this house, Eileen gets to call things what she wants, and the rest of us live with it.
I start noticing Cole's hours the way you notice anything you're not supposed to — in fragments, at odd angles, building a picture from edges and absences.
It begins with water. I wake at 2:17 because my throat is dry and the heat has turned the upstairs into a sweatbox despite the fan.
I go down for a glass, moving through the dark house by memory, and that's when I see the drive is empty.
Cole's Toyota, which usually sits beside the Ford in a loose approximation of parking, is gone — just dark gravel and the faint gleam of dew where it should be.
I stand at the kitchen window with a glass I don't remember filling and watch the empty drive longer than is reasonable. The side door is unlocked. I check it without thinking, finding the deadbolt disengaged.
By 5:45 the truck is back. I hear it before I see it — the grumble of the engine turning off Cembrook onto the gravel, the crunch of tires, then the engine cutting out.
I've been awake since four, and I listen to the sequence with the focus of a man tracking movement through underbrush: engine off, door open, door closed quietly, footsteps across the backyard, the scrape of the side door, then silence as he moves through the kitchen and up the stairs.
The floorboards mark his progress. The third step. The landing. Outside my door — he pauses there; I hear the shift of his weight — and then his own door opening and closing. The lock turns. Soft, but I hear it.
This becomes the pattern. Not every night, but most. I track it without meaning to, the way I tracked patrol schedules in Iraq — not on orders, but because knowing when people move tells you things they don't want known.
The garage light bleeds under the back door in the small hours, a thin yellow line across the dark grass. I see it from my window when I get up for water, or when I'm lying awake watching the ceiling stain and the fan turning overhead.
The truck engine in the dark has a careful quality, muffled, like a man who doesn't want to wake neighbors who are two hundred yards down the road and asleep anyway.
Cole is quiet for his own reasons, and those reasons live in the garage, on that workbench with its maps and clippings and the scattered evidence of whatever he's digging into.
I think about Calloway at the funeral, his hand crushing Cole's, his eyes sharp with warning. The pieces don't connect yet, but they're sliding toward each other, and the gap closes a little with every night Cole spends out in the dark doing God knows what.
After three nights I try to ask. Casual. Over coffee at six, both of us moving through the pre-dawn gloom with the heaviness of men who haven't slept enough.
"You're up early," I say, leaning on the counter with my mug between my palms.
Cole doesn't look up from the pill organizer. He's counting out the morning dose, fingers moving with the automatic precision of long practice. "Errands."
That's it. One word, flat, no elaboration. He closes the organizer, sets it in its designated spot, and the conversation's over before it started.
I let it sit. For a day I let it sit, and I watch the pattern hold — Cole in and out, hours that don't match any job I know about, the garage light at strange times. Mick's shop doesn't open at three in the morning. Nothing in Roan does except maybe the diner, and Cole isn't going to the diner.
On the fifth night I try again. This time I'm waiting in the kitchen when he comes through the side door at 5:30, still in yesterday's clothes, eyes hollow.
"You're out every night," I say. No lead-in. Just the observation, dropped between us like something that's been sitting on my tongue for days.
Cole stops, halfway to the refrigerator, hand outstretched. He freezes a beat before he turns to look at me.
Unreadable. Not angry, not defensive — blank, like he's weighing answers and finding none of them good enough.
"Get some sleep, Trevor," he says finally. Quiet, almost gentle, which is worse than if he'd snapped. Gentleness from Cole means he's decided I'm not worth the energy of a real answer.
He opens the fridge, takes out a water bottle, and walks out the back without another word. The screen slaps shut. Through the window I watch the garage light flick on, yellow spilling across the grass, and I stand there with my coffee going cold and everything unsaid pressing down like a sandbag.
I don't go out there. Not yet.
The restraint costs me. I feel it in my jaw, in the set of my shoulders, in the way my hand wants to close into a fist around nothing.
Going out there would mean admitting I care where he goes at night.
It would mean admitting I've been lying awake tracking him like a man possessed, and possession isn't a state I'm comfortable naming, especially when the thing possessing me wears Cole's face and Cole's hands.
So I stay. Rinse my mug. Check the clock — 5:42 — and go up to the spare room where the fan turns its slow, useless circle and the mattress sags like it's given up on comfort.
I close my eyes. The house breathes around me.
Down the hall, Cole is finally in his room doing whatever he does in the hour between coming home and the alarm for Eileen's meds.
Sleeping, maybe. Or lying awake like me, staring at his own ceiling, counting the same creaks, tracking the same absences.
The distance between us is the same as it's always been. A hallway. Ten years of silence. One locked door.
I listen to the quiet until I can almost hold it in my hands, and then a little longer, and the fan turns, and the heat presses down, and somewhere in the dark Cole breathes, and I match my breathing to his without meaning to, the way we did in that bed when we were kids pretending not to notice how close we were.
Some patterns you can't break even when you try.
I lie there until the alarm goes — Cole's phone, the sound cutting through the quiet like a wire — and then I get up and face another day in a house too small for everything it holds, and the Toyota is parked beside the Ford like they belong there, and for now, that's enough.
For now.