Chapter 9 Tessa
I lasted one full day before the silence became unbearable.
The festival materials were essentially finished.
I could have sent the last files from the cabin and avoided the workshop entirely.
Instead, I found myself parking in the gravel lot mid-morning, heart beating too hard against my ribs, portfolio under my arm like a shield I no longer needed for work.
The big sliding doors were open. The radio played low. Noah was at the far workbench fitting a set of drawer slides, movements precise and controlled. He looked up when my shadow crossed the threshold, and something closed in his expression before he could stop it.
“Files are ready,” I said. “I can email them. Or I can put the drive on your desk and go.”
He set the screwdriver down carefully. “You drove out here to say that?”
“I drove out here because yesterday was bullshit.”
The words came out sharper than I intended. A muscle in his jaw flexed. He glanced toward the open office door—Lily was at school—and then back at me.
“Not here.”
He walked past me into the small office.
I followed and closed the door behind us.
The room still smelled of coffee and wood and the faint vanilla that had started to cling to my own clothes after so many days in this place.
Family photos watched from the shelf. The picture of his wife faced us squarely.
Noah leaned against the edge of the desk, arms crossed. The charismatic ease he showed customers was gone. What remained was the guarded man who had kissed me under the pines and then spent the next day pretending it meant nothing.
“I overstepped,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
“That’s not what this is about.” I set the portfolio down harder than necessary.
“You don’t get to kiss me like that and then treat me like a vendor who delivered the wrong order.
I can handle temporary. I can even handle you deciding it was a mistake.
What I can’t handle is the cold version of you acting like I’m the problem for noticing. ”
Silence stretched. Outside the workshop, a truck rumbled past on the road. Dust motes floated in the shaft of light from the window.
Noah’s voice came quieter. “Lily asked if you were coming back. She already misses you being here. I watched her face when I told her the work was almost finished, and all I could think about was the last time someone she loved left and didn’t come back.”
The admission landed heavy between us. My anger cooled into something more complicated.
“I’m not trying to replace anyone,” I said.
“I know that.” He ran a hand through his hair, the controlled movement fraying.
“Erin died four years ago. Short illness. One day she was tired, and then everything moved too fast. I did everything the doctors said. It still wasn’t enough.
After she was gone, I made a simple rule: nothing gets close enough to hurt Lily like that again.
Nothing gets close enough to hurt me like that again.
Then you walked in with your coffee and your questions and your way of talking to my daughter like she was a whole person, and the rule started looking harder to keep. ”
I swallowed. The rawness in his voice stripped the last of my own defenses.
“Someone I loved told me I was too much,” I said.
“Too intense. Too energetic. Too many feelings in too small a space. I got very good at making myself easier to keep around. Smaller. Brighter without the sharp edges. Being here with you and Lily is the first time in a long time I forgot to edit myself. And then you pulled back, and every old voice in my head said, of course, you did it again.”
Noah looked at me for a long moment. The gray-blue of his eyes seemed darker in the office light.
“You are not too much,” he said. “You’re exact. And I don’t know what to do with exact right now.”
The honesty was almost harder to stand in than the coldness had been.
Desire still hummed under everything—the memory of his mouth, the way his hands had felt steady on my skin—but neither of us moved to close the space.
The air felt charged with everything we were finally saying and everything we still couldn’t.
“I’m scared too,” I admitted. “Of caring about a man who might decide the safe version of his life is the only one he can afford. Of caring about a little girl who already has my whole heart when I’ve only known her a few weeks. Of leaving and realizing I want to stay.”
Noah exhaled slowly. Some of the rigid line in his shoulders eased, but the conflict remained clear on his face.
“I don’t have clean answers,” he said. “I only know that pushing you away yesterday felt worse than the fear of letting you stay.”
We stood in the small office with the weight of dead wives and old rejections and the living pulse of whatever was growing between us. No kiss. No easy resolution. Just the truth laid out on the scarred desk like a piece of wood that still needed shaping.
“I need time,” he said finally. “Not space to disappear. Time to figure out if I can be the man who doesn’t run.”
“I can give you time,” I answered. “But I won’t keep showing up to be treated like a mistake you regret in daylight.”
He nodded once. “Fair.”
I left the drive with the final files on his desk and walked back out into the workshop. The big space smelled of cedar and dust and the life he had built from loss. Lily’s latest drawing was taped to the wall near the office— a birdhouse with two figures standing beside it, one tall and one small.
I drove back to the cabin with the windows down, mountain air rushing through the car, and the conversation replaying in every quiet mile.
We had stopped pretending the connection wasn’t real.
What we did with that truth was still an open question.