CHAPTER 5
“Something like that.”
“That lobby door's been broken since March. I've called the management office eleven times. Eleven. I keep a list.” She said it like a woman daring him to doubt the number, which he had no intention of doing. “You fixing it, or just looking at it?”
“Fixing it.”
Odessa studied him for a second, the unhurried scrutiny of someone who'd lived long enough to have opinions about strange men showing up with toolboxes, and then apparently decided he passed. “There's coffee in the pot in 3C if you want it after. It's the good kind, not the building kind.”
The lobby door's lock had been broken for two months by her count, and the landlord's response to every complaint had been some version of a promise that never turned into a work order.
It was the kind of small, grinding neglect that made a building easy to walk into — which made it exactly the kind of detail Kepler's people had probably already clocked, if this block was as much on their radar as Cole suspected.
He didn't ask anyone's permission to fix it.
He drove to the hardware store on his way back through, bought a deadbolt and a door closer that actually worked, and let himself into the lobby that afternoon with a drill and the plain, uncomplicated satisfaction of doing something with his hands that had an obvious, visible result.
Nobody thanked him for it, because nobody but Odessa noticed him doing it at all, which was more or less the point.
He was on his knees testing the strike plate alignment when he felt someone watching him from the stairwell.
The kid — Eli, had to be, though Cole hadn't asked and didn't plan to make a thing of guessing right — was sitting two steps up, knees pulled to his chest, a stuffed dog wedged under one arm, watching Cole's hands work the screwdriver with the unblinking focus kids gave things they'd decided, privately, were worth paying attention to.
Cole didn't say anything at first. He'd learned a long time ago that kids who watched quietly usually didn't want to be noticed watching, and the fastest way to end that was to make it a conversation before the kid was ready for one.
He kept working. The kid kept watching. Somewhere around the second hinge, Eli spoke without being asked to.
“That's a real drill. Not the plastic kind.”
“It is.”
“Can it go through metal?”
“Depends on the metal. This one, no. That one” — Cole nodded at the deadbolt's strike plate — “yeah, if you had to.”
Eli considered that with the gravity of a much older person weighing serious information. “Are you fixing it because it's broken, or because someone broke it?”
Cole looked up at that, because it wasn't the question a kid usually led with, and found Eli watching him with an expression far too wary for six. “Why do you ask?”
“My mom said grown-up building stuff. That's what she says when it's actually bad.”
Cole set the drill down. He didn't have a rule about lying to kids, exactly, but he had something close to one, built out of every adult who'd ever fed him a soft version of a hard truth when he was Eli's age and known, even then, that soft wasn't the same as safe.
“It's broken because somebody wanted it broken.
I'm fixing it so it isn't anymore. That's the whole thing.”
Eli seemed to turn that over, testing it for weak spots the way he'd tested everything since Dean left, and apparently found it solid enough to accept, because his next question had nothing to do with locks at all. “Do you know how to fix other stuff too?”
“Most stuff, given time.”
Eli nodded once, filed that away with the same careful precision he seemed to file everything, and went back upstairs without another word, Biscuit trailing from one hand, leaving Cole crouched in the lobby with the odd, unfamiliar feeling of having passed some test he hadn't known he was taking.
~ ~ ~
Mara found him still there twenty minutes later, packing his tools back into a duffel with the door swinging shut behind him on a lock that actually caught now.
“You didn't have to do that.”
“Wasn't hard.”
“That's not what I said.” She stood with her arms crossed, but there wasn't much heat behind it — more the reflexive posture of a woman who'd spent four years bracing for people to want something in exchange for help, and hadn't yet figured out what he wanted for this.
“People who fix things for strangers usually want something.”
“I'm not people.”
“That's not reassuring.”
“Wasn't trying to reassure you. Just telling you the truth.” He zipped the duffel, straightened, and for a second the two of them just stood there in the lobby, close enough that she had to tip her head back slightly to hold his eye, close enough that she was aware of exactly how much space he actually took up in a room this size.
“Your kid's sharp. Asked me if I was fixing it because it's broken or because somebody broke it.”
Something crossed her face — pride, worry, some tangle of both — that she didn't try to hide fast enough. “What'd you tell him?”
“Truth. Figured he'd know if I didn't.”
She studied him a second longer than the moment strictly required. “Most people don't bother with the truth for a six-year-old.”
“Most people didn't grow up getting the other kind.”
It slipped out flatter than he meant it to, more fact than confession, and he watched her catch it anyway — watched her decide, visibly, not to push on the door he'd left open a crack, which was its own kind of mercy he hadn't expected from a stranger he'd known for less than a day.
Neither of them noticed the car idling across the street until it pulled away, easy, the driver's face turned deliberately toward the far sidewalk the whole time it passed — the kind of unhurried that had nothing to do with traffic at all.
Cole noticed it in the mirror of the truck window as he loaded his tools.
He didn't say anything about it. There wasn't a version of that sentence that didn't scare her, and he hadn't earned the right yet to be the one who got to scare her about anything.
He filed the plate number away instead — a habit that had become second nature lately — and told himself he'd hand it to Tucker before the day was out and let the club do with it whatever the club was going to do.
~ ~ ~
Her phone rang forty minutes later, back upstairs, Eli occupied with a cartoon and the hard-won quiet of an afternoon that had almost, for a few minutes, felt normal.
She didn't recognize the number until the voice hit, and then it was like four years hadn't moved at all.
“Mara. Hey. Don't hang up.”
Dean. She sat down slowly on the edge of the couch, watching Eli's shoulders — he hadn't turned around, hadn't reacted, and she still, out of pure old habit, lowered her voice like he might hear something in it anyway. “Why are you calling.”
“I don't know. I've been thinking about you guys. Thought maybe it was time.”
She closed her eyes, felt every wall she'd spent four years building do the same familiar thing it did whenever his name showed up somewhere she hadn't braced for it, and said nothing at all for one long, unsteady second before she found her voice again.
“Time for what, Dean.”
“I don't know. To talk. To see him, maybe, if that's—”
“Don't.” The word came out sharper than she meant it to, and she pressed her palm flat against her own sternum, an old habit from a hundred nights of practicing exactly this call in her head and never once landing on the right tone for it.
“You don't get to decide it's time. Not over the phone.
Not four years later, out of nowhere, like you've been circling the block waiting for a green light.”
“That's not— I'm not trying to ambush you.”
“Then what are you trying to do.”
The pause on the other end went on long enough that she almost hung up on principle, and when he finally answered, his voice had lost the guarded, rehearsed edge it started with.
“I don't know, Mara. I just don't know how to stop being the guy who left. Thought maybe hearing his voice again would help me figure that out.”
She looked at Eli's back, small and unbothered on the rug, entirely unaware that the last four years of quiet had just cracked down the middle, and felt something old and tired rise up in her that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite grief either — just the old exhaustion of a woman who'd built an entire life around a door she'd thought was finally shut.