CHAPTER 7
Mara asked him to dinner the way people asked for things they'd half convinced themselves they didn't actually want — fast, over her shoulder, already turning away before he could see her face while she said it.
“It's just spaghetti. It's not a thing. You spent two hours calming down a terrified sixteen-year-old and I never actually said thank you properly, so. Thursday. If you want.”
Cole had said yes before he'd finished deciding whether saying yes was a good idea, which was becoming an uncomfortable pattern where this woman was concerned.
Her apartment was smaller than his house and warmer in every way that mattered — a kitchen table with a wobbly leg fixed with a folded napkin, crayon drawings taped to the refrigerator at exactly the height a six-year-old could reach, the low hum of a cartoon playing to nobody in the next room because Eli had wandered off from it twice already to reassess whether Cole was still there and still interesting.
She'd changed out of scrubs into jeans and an old sweatshirt with a cracked university logo across the chest, hair still damp from a shower she'd clearly rushed, and something about the ordinariness of it — no makeup, no performance, just a tired woman making spaghetti in her own kitchen — hit him harder than anything more deliberate could have.
“You can sit,” Mara said, sliding a plate in front of him. “He'll come back when he's decided you're not going anywhere.”
“How's he decide that?”
“Usually by asking you forty questions and grading your answers on a scale only he understands.”
She wasn't wrong. Eli reappeared somewhere around the second helping, dragging a kitchen chair closer than the available space strictly allowed, and got straight to it. “Do you have a motorcycle or just the truck?”
“Motorcycle. Truck's for hauling stuff the bike can't.”
“What color?”
“Black, mostly. Chrome where it isn't.”
Eli absorbed that with the gravity he gave everything, then pivoted without warning, the way six-year-olds did, straight into the question that mattered more than the color of anyone's bike. “Did your dad teach you how to ride it?”
The table went quiet the way rooms went quiet when a kid asked the question every adult in the room had been avoiding by unspoken agreement.
Mara's fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
Cole felt the old, worn edges of an answer he'd given exactly nobody in eight years, and found, to his own surprise, that he didn't want to hand this kid the soft version.
“I didn't have a dad around to teach me anything,” he said. “Grew up in foster care. Learned most things because I had to, not because somebody showed me.”
“That sounds hard.”
“It was, some of it.” He didn't reach for anything softer than that, and didn't offer more than the kid had asked for either. “I had a brother for a while. He was the one thing that made most of it easier.”
“Where's he now?”
“Not around anymore.” Cole kept his voice level, the same flat, careful register he'd built a long time ago for exactly this kind of question, and watched Eli decide, with the swift mercy kids sometimes had that adults forgot how to access, not to push further.
“That's sad,” Eli said simply, and went back to his spaghetti, and that was the whole of it — no follow-up, no performance of sympathy, just a fact absorbed and set down gently, the way he seemed to set most hard things down once he'd turned them over enough times to know their shape.
Mara caught Cole's eye across the table, and whatever she saw there, she didn't try to name it out loud. She just refilled his glass, and let the quiet do the rest of the work.
~ ~ ~
Eli disappeared after dinner and came back holding something with both hands, measured the way kids were careful with things that had already survived one round of breaking.
A toy motorcycle, die-cast, paint worn pale at the tank where small hands had loved it too hard, one wheel hanging by a thread of plastic axle that had snapped clean through.
“It's been broken since my birthday. Mom said we'd get glue but we didn't.” He held it out, not quite offering it, more testing whether offering it was even a reasonable thing to try. “You said you fix stuff. Can you fix this?”
Cole looked at the toy, and then at the kid holding it like it mattered more than anything else in the apartment, and felt something in his chest do a slow, unfamiliar thing he didn't have a name ready for.
He'd spent eight years making sure nothing got to matter enough that losing it would cost him anything.
A six-year-old was holding out a broken toy motorcycle like it was the most natural request in the world, and every deliberate wall Cole had built said the smart answer was some version of maybe, or we'll see, or ask your mom — something soft enough to walk back later if he needed to.
“Yeah,” he said instead, before he'd finished deciding to say it at all. “I can fix that.”
Eli's whole face changed, fast and unguarded, the way only a kid's face could. “Really?”
“Really. Bring it here.”
He turned the little bike over in his hands, testing the axle, already running through what he'd need — a pin, maybe some epoxy, ten minutes of actual work — and looked up to find Mara watching him from the kitchen doorway with an expression he didn't have a clean read on yet, something caught between wary and something a lot warmer than wary.
“You don't have to,” she said quietly, once Eli had wandered off again, satisfied, already telling Biscuit the good news in a voice pitched for nobody but himself. “He attaches fast. It's not always fair to whoever he attaches to.”
“I know how fast a kid can attach.” Cole set the broken motorcycle down deliberately on the table between them, like it was worth more than its size suggested, which, at this point, it probably was. “I'm not planning on being someone he has to unattach from.”
He heard the promise in his own voice a half second after he made it, and didn't take it back, even though every instinct he'd spent eight years building told him taking it back was the only safe move left on the board.
~ ~ ~
Eli went down for bed easier than usual, worn out from the good kind of excitement instead of the tired that came from holding himself together all day, and Mara walked Cole out onto the small concrete landing outside her door instead of saying goodnight in the hallway, which felt, without either of them saying so, like a decision.
“He's going to ask about you every day now,” she said, arms crossed against the evening chill, not quite looking at him. “You know that.”
“I'm counting on it.”
“That's a big thing to be counting on. You've known him three weeks.”
“I've known plenty of people three years I trusted less than I trust that kid's read on somebody.” Cole leaned against the railing, close enough that she had to decide, again, whether to close the last foot of distance or hold it.
“He asked me if my dad taught me to ride.
Wasn't trying to be cruel. Kids don't know how to be cruel about the right things yet, they just ask the true question and let the grown-up figure out what to do with it.”
“And what'd you do with it?”
“Gave him the true answer. Figured he'd earned it, asking it straight like that.” Cole looked out at the parking lot, the sodium light turning everything the same toneless orange, and let himself say the next part slower than he usually let himself say anything.
“I don't tell people about Mikey. Not the club, not the guys I've known ten years.
You and your kid have more of it after three weeks than anybody's gotten in eight years, and I don't fully understand why that is yet.”
“Maybe you don't need to understand it tonight.”
“Maybe.” He looked at her then, really looked, in the unhurried way that made her feel like the only thing in a parking lot that mattered. “I should go before I say something else I haven't earned the right to say yet.”
She almost told him he already had the right.
She didn't, because saying it out loud felt like handing over more of the wall than she was ready to lose in one night, but she thought it, clear and unmistakable, and suspected from the way he held her eye a beat too long before he turned for the stairs that he'd heard it anyway.