15. Tony
TONY
Since the night at the cottage, we'd settled into a rhythm that should have scared me. It didn't.
Morning coffee together. Avery's bedtime routine. The sound of Mia typing in the library while I painted three rooms away.
I could hear her from the studio. The tap of keys. The pause when she stopped to read a passage in Dad's journals that caught her.
I'd started listening for those pauses. That was trouble.
Tonight we were cooking. Mia had insisted on making pasta. She was terrible at it. The noodles stuck together in a clump and she stared at them like they'd betrayed her.
"This is sabotage." She jabbed the spoon at the pot.
"You put them in before the water boiled."
"I did not." She looked at the pot. "Okay, I might have."
Avery sat at the kitchen counter with her coloring book, narrating the disaster. "Mimi, those noodles look like a brain."
"Thank you, Pickle. Very helpful."
"You're welcome." Avery returned to her coloring. She was filling in a horse with six legs and what appeared to be a horn made of fire. She'd told me earlier that this was a normal horse, and I hadn't argued.
Mia stirred the pasta with the concentration of a surgeon. She'd rolled up her sleeves and her hair was escaping from its knot. A strand hung across her cheek and she blew it out of her face.
I should have looked away. I didn't.
I reached around Mia to grab the olive oil from the shelf behind her. My hand landed on her lower back. Light. Casual.
She flinched.
Not a small thing. Her whole body jerked. She knocked the wooden spoon off the counter and it clattered to the floor.
She laughed. Too fast.
"Cold spot." She shrugged one shoulder. "Old house."
I stepped back. Picked up the spoon. Handed it to her.
"Thanks." She turned to the stove. Her shoulders were tight.
Cold spot.
My hand had been on her lower back. Right side. Just above her hip.
I'd touched her there before. In the studio. In the cottage. She'd never flinched. Not once.
Tonight she flinched like I'd pressed on a wound.
I didn't say anything. I drizzled olive oil over the pasta and separated the noodles with a fork.
Avery informed us that brain noodles were her new favorite food. Mia laughed and it sounded right. Normal.
It wasn't.
The spot where my hand had been. I hadn't seen a scar. But her whole body had recoiled, and that reaction didn't come from a cold draft. That came from pain. Or memory.
I filed it away. The way I filed away every detail about her that didn't add up.
The locks she checked twice before bed. The way she startled when a car door slammed. Her eyes sweeping a room when she entered, scanning for exits.
I didn't push. I was good at not pushing. Years of practice.
We ate dinner. The pasta was overcooked and undersalted and Avery declared it the best dinner she'd ever had. Mia beamed. I added salt when neither of them was looking.
Avery talked about a caterpillar she'd found on the cottage porch. She'd named it Gerald. Gerald had very specific dietary requirements, according to Avery.
"He only eats the green leaves. Not the brown ones."
"How do you know that?" Mia asked.
"I watched him."
"For how long?"
"A long time." Avery thought about it. "Maybe a hundred hours."
"A hundred hours," I said.
"At least."
Mia caught my eye across the table. The corner of her mouth twitched. I turned to the sink before she could see what was happening to my face.
This. Right here. Pasta that stuck together and a caterpillar named Gerald and the woman across the table who had no idea what she'd done to my life.
I cleared the plates. Mia gave Avery a bath. I could hear them down the hall. Avery singing off-key. Mia's voice underneath, warm and steady.
"Mimi, do caterpillars take baths?"
"I don't think so, Pickle."
"That's sad. Baths are the best part."
At the kitchen sink, washing dishes, I listened to them. The splash of water. The giggling. Two voices tangled together in a way that made the house feel like a house again instead of a building where I happened to live.
Avery fell asleep during her bedtime story. She'd requested the one about the bear who couldn't find his hat. Halfway through, her eyes closed.
Her breathing went deep and even. One small hand tucked under her chin. The nightlight cast everything in soft orange.
I stood in her doorway. The dark curls on the pillow. Charlotte's nose. My jaw, already, at five years old.
Mia slipped past me. Her arm brushed mine.
She smelled like Avery's bubble bath and underneath that, her own scent. Vanilla. Clean skin.
"Night," she whispered.
"Night."
She walked down the hall toward the front door. Toward the cottage. I watched her go.
I couldn't sleep.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. I got up, pulled on a T-shirt, and went downstairs. Poured a glass of water. Stood at the kitchen window.
The cottage light was on.
It was late. Well past midnight. Mia should have been asleep hours ago.
I put on boots and walked down the path. The grass was wet. The moon sat low over the ridgeline. No wind.
The windows glowed amber. I could see her shadow moving inside.
I heard her before I reached the door.
Crying. Not the polite version. Deep, wrenching sobs that came from somewhere low in the body.
The door was open. Not all the way. A few inches. Enough for the night air to reach her.
I pushed it open.
She was on the living room carpet. Leaning against the couch. Her knees pulled up. In her hands, a photo.
She didn't hear me. Or she did and couldn't stop.
I sat down beside her. Didn't touch her. Didn't speak. Just lowered myself onto the cold ground and waited.
The crying slowed. Not because it stopped but because she ran out of air. She pressed her forehead to her knees.
I waited.
After a long time, she raised her head. Wrecked. Swollen eyes, wet cheeks, that raw look people get when they've been crying hard enough to forget themselves.
"You should go," she said. Her voice was scraped thin.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She glanced down at what she was holding. Then she turned it toward me.
A man. Young. Dark brown eyes and a wide, open smile. The kind of face that looked like it was mid-laugh even in a still image.
"His name was Cory." Her voice broke on the second syllable.
I studied him. Then her.
"He was my boyfriend. Before I came here." Raw. Stripped of everything except the truth. Or whatever portion of the truth she was willing to give me.
"What happened?"
She pressed the photo against her chest. "He died."
Two words. The weight of a life inside them.
"It was sudden. And violent. And I was there and I couldn't stop it and I wasn't the same after." She said it fast. Like ripping off a bandage.
I didn't ask how. I didn't ask what "violent" meant. I didn't ask why she was on the floor of a cottage in Colorado at one in the morning, holding a dead man's picture.
I put my arm around her.
She collapsed against me. Her face buried in my shoulder. The photo trapped between her chest and mine. She cried again. Quieter this time.
Her body shook against mine. She was small. I forgot that sometimes. She filled up a room so full that I forgot how small she was until she was close enough to hold.
I held her.
The flinch in the kitchen. The spot on her lower back. A dead boyfriend she'd never mentioned until tonight. The checked locks. The scanning eyes. The burner phone she thought I hadn't noticed.
She had secrets. I had mine.
"He was lucky," I said.
She lifted her head enough to look at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed and raw.
"To have you," I said. "He was lucky to have you."
Something cracked in her expression. Fresh tears. She dropped her head against my jaw and cried harder than before.
Because the words were right. And wrong. And more complicated than I would ever know.
I held her until the crying stopped. Until her breathing evened out and her body went still against me.
She fell asleep like that. Her head on my shoulder.
My legs were numb. My spine ached against the couch. I didn't move.
I sat there and thought about the man in the photograph. Dark eyes. Huge smile. Cory. A boyfriend who died. Sudden and violent. A woman who flinched when I touched her lower back.
She'd given me the shape of the story but not the details. Not the why or the who or the how. Wide gaps. The kind you could drive a truck through.
I didn't need the details. Not tonight. Not yet.
But I was going to wait. Right here. Steady and patient. For as long as she needed.
I carried her to the bedroom. She weighed nothing. She didn't wake up.
I put her in the bed and pulled the blanket over her. Left the photo in her hand.
The nightstand drawer was open. Just an inch. Inside, a jacket with the lining pulled loose. The hiding place.
She'd kept him in a jacket lining. Close to her body. Hidden from the world.
I closed the drawer. The dark bedroom. The woman in the bed. Brown hair on the white pillow. Tear tracks drying on her cheeks. One hand still holding on to Cory.
The path back to the house was cold. The stars were bright and close.
The main house rose dark against the ridge. No lights in the kitchen. No glow from Dad's reading lamp. Just glass and shadow and the mountains behind it all.
In the studio, I stood in front of the covered canvas. The one with Mia and Avery on the porch. Two figures in late afternoon light. The painting I couldn't show anyone because it said too much.
Her flinch. The scar I hadn't seen but knew was there. A dead boyfriend with a smile that didn't know what was coming. The way she'd said "violent" like the word tasted like blood.
Everyone has a locked room.
I wasn't going to force hers open. But I was going to be there. Steady. Patient. Ready.
What I didn't know was what waited inside hers. Not just grief. Not just a dead man's memory.
A danger that was getting closer.