Chapter 2 #2
Tobin Sayer clutched the flowers more upright at once.
“These are for maternity, not drama. Though there is some overlap.” His gaze snagged on Hadley and Ivy, and his tone recalibrated with impressive speed from comic to earnest. “Sorry. Hi. I’m Tobin.
I volunteer at the hospital and for my grandmother’s florist, which is how I know too much and none of it usefully alphabetized. ”
“That seems honest,” Hadley said.
“It saves time.” He tipped his head at Ivy’s drawing. “Excellent fox. Slightly nautical. Bold choice.”
Ivy looked down at the paper, then up again with the reserve of someone not yet convinced by exuberance.
Tobin lowered his voice by instinct. “I approve of a fox with career ambitions.”
Sukhi set a wrapped cookie on a saucer and slid it toward him. “Take the sugar before the decision, and take the flowers where they belong.”
“I was already doing both.” He accepted the cookie, then leaned in half a fraction toward Hadley as if compelled by the gravitational field of withheld information. “Also—”
The door opened again behind him.
Tobin pivoted. “That would be the surprise I was preven—”
He stopped because Cian Mercer had walked in wearing rain on his shoulders and indecision in the set of his mouth.
He looked like he had almost stayed away and then lost the argument with himself. No white coat now. Just a dark sweater under a rain-damp jacket, hair wet at the temples, a small paper bag held too carefully in one hand for it to be incidental.
Hadley’s hand tightened around her teacup.
Cian saw them at once and stopped just inside the door, not crowding the room by so much as another step. Sukhi’s gaze moved from him to Hadley and back, taking the temperature of the situation with admirable discretion.
Tobin, mortified too late by his own timing, blurted, “I’m leaving.”
“No one asked you to narrate it,” Sukhi said mildly.
He winced and made a hasty retreat toward the back hall, flowers aloft like surrender.
Cian approached the table only after Hadley did not tell him not to. The absence of refusal clearly was not enough to relax him.
“I won’t stay long,” he said. His eyes flicked to Ivy, then returned to Hadley, asking permission without saying so. “I was nearby.”
A poor lie. A courteous one.
Hadley set down her tea. “Were you.”
“Yes.” He paused. “Not exactly.”
Ivy looked at him over the rim of her mug.
He held out the paper bag, but not to the child directly. To Hadley first. “I brought these in case they were useful.”
Useful. Lately that seemed to be the most dangerous word in her hearing.
She took the bag because refusing it in front of Ivy would have turned the moment into something sharper than the child deserved.
Inside were a box of age-appropriate coloring pencils—not the waxy kind that snapped under pressure, but the triangular grip set children’s therapists recommended for smaller hands—and a pediatric sleep booklet from the clinic.
Several pages had been marked with neat paper tabs.
Bedtime routine after grief. Night waking.
Transitional objects. Questions children ask at four and five when death had entered a house too early.
For one suspended second Hadley forgot to guard her face.
He had not brought a toy loud enough to look generous.
Not a teddy bear the size of apology. Not sugar as leverage.
He had brought specifics. Quiet ones. Things that suggested he had stood somewhere under fluorescent light reading until he found what might help and then stopped short of presumption.
“That’s for her?” Ivy asked.
Cian’s gaze moved to her at once. “Yes. If you want them.”
Ivy put down the mug carefully. “Mine?”
“Yes.”
She looked at Hadley first. Of course she did.
Hadley managed, “You can say thank you if you’d like to keep them.”
“Thank you,” Ivy said to Cian, and held out both hands.
He gave her the pencils without brushing her fingers unless the exchange required it, which it barely did. He had not come to perform feeling. He had come prepared.
From the back hall, Tobin reappeared exactly long enough to ruin the delicacy of the moment.
“Dr. Mercer’s been researching bedtime routines between appointments,” he announced. “I’ll see myself out.”
“Tobin,” Cian said, with the kind of quiet that carried pure mortification.
Sukhi closed her eyes briefly in prayer or patience. “Child, leave before I assign you dish duty for adolescence.”
Tobin vanished again, this time for real.
A faint flush climbed Cian’s neck. “That was not meant to be public information.”
Ivy opened the pencil box as if the workings of adult embarrassment were secondary to color. “There’s green,” she said, pleased.
“There usually should be,” he said.
Hadley watched him watch the child and looked away too late. Whatever that reaction was, she did not intend to name it.
Sukhi appeared at Cian’s elbow and set down a plain mug of coffee he had not ordered. “Since you’re here,” she said. “You look like a man who has misplaced the entire center of his day.”
He glanced up, surprised. “That obvious?”
“To women who run rooms? Yes.”
Hadley nearly laughed, which felt treacherous.
Cian wrapped his hand around the mug but did not sit until Sukhi dragged a chair from the next table with her foot and left it there in a gesture that could still plausibly be called incidental.
He remained standing anyway.
Smart man, Hadley thought. Or frightened one.
She folded the sleep booklet closed and set it beside her tea. “Thank you,” she said, because manners had been welded into her backbone long before fear took up residence there.
“You’re welcome.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
Again with that. No defense. No argument. Only acceptance of the terms she could bear to state.
Ivy selected a green pencil and began drawing on the spare receipt roll, tongue tucked briefly at the corner of her mouth in concentration. For the first time all day, she looked a little less adrift.
Courtesy could be dismissed. A paper bag stocked with the exact right things could not. Hadley closed the booklet and set it beside her tea with more care than it deserved.
They did not stay long after that. Ivy tired all at once, as children did, her shoulders slumping while she still tried to draw one more fox.
Cian stepped back before Hadley had to ask for space.
He said goodbye to Ivy. He did not ask when he might see her again.
Hadley noticed the omission and resented herself for understanding it as discipline rather than indifference.
Rain followed them back up the hill to Tideview Lodge, fine and persistent.
In their room, Ivy changed into her frog pajamas without protest and climbed into the bed nearest the radiator, the new pencil box held against her chest like an object that had already joined the small nation of belongings making temporary rooms bearable.
Hadley sat on the edge of the mattress until the child’s breathing deepened.
The lamp threw a low circle of gold over quilt and fox and the green pencil Ivy had refused to set back in the box.
Downstairs someone closed a cupboard softly.
The whole house smelled of cedar logs and old rain and soup long since carried away from the stove.
Ivy’s fingers loosened in sleep around the pencils one by one, but never entirely let them go.
Hadley watched that small hand. Risk did not always arrive looking reckless. Sometimes it came in a paper bag. In neatly tabbed pages. In the right shade of green.
And she hated that caution had just become harder to defend.