Chapter 25 - Jess
I wake up to the sound of water running.
Not the shower—the kitchen tap. The particular rhythm of someone filling a kettle, the tap shutting off, the click of the stove.
Small sounds, domestic sounds, the sounds of a person making space for another person's morning.
I lie on the couch with the cashmere throw pulled to my chin and listen, and the listening itself is a kind of luxury I'm still not used to—waking up in a place where someone else is already awake, already moving, already thinking about what I might need.
The apartment is bright. Morning sun through the east windows, low and amber, painting the white walls with light that makes them look warmer than they are. I stretch—my shoulders ache from yesterday's welding, a deep satisfying pain that tells me I worked well—and sit up.
He's in the kitchen. His back to me, dressed already—dark trousers, a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed to his forearms. He's making tea, not coffee.
Chamomile. I can smell it from here—the faint, dusty sweetness that I associate with my own apartment, my own nightstand, my own ritual of winding down.
He bought chamomile. For me. This man who drinks espresso and scotch and nothing in between went out and bought a box of chamomile tea because I drink it, and the gesture is so small and so specific that it hits me harder than flowers or jewelry or any of the things men are supposed to do.
"Morning," I say.
He turns. The expression that crosses his face when he sees me is the one I've come to think of as the crack—that fraction of a second where the composure parts and something unguarded shows through.
It's brief. It always is. But I catch it, the way I always catch it, and what I see this morning is relief.
Pure, uncomplicated relief that I'm still here.
"How did you sleep?" he asks.
"Like someone hit me with a hammer." I push the throw off and stand, and my body protests in the way that means I need to stretch properly before I do anything else.
I raise my arms above my head, twist at the waist, feel the vertebrae pop.
He watches me from the kitchen—not looking away, not pretending not to look.
Just watching, with that total attention that used to unsettle me and now feels like sunlight.
Warm. Constant. Directed entirely at me.
He brings the tea. I take it with both hands and the warmth seeps into my palms, into the calluses and the dry skin and the crooked finger that aches in the cold.
I drink standing at the window, looking out at Central Park in the morning light, and the view is absurd.
The kind of view that belongs in a movie about someone else's life.
"I need to get to the studio," I say. "The piece is talking again. I don't want to lose the thread."
"I'll walk you to the subway."
"You don't have to—"
"I know."
The exchange has become a pattern. He offers.
I resist. He acknowledges the resistance without withdrawing the offer.
And I accept, because the truth is I like walking with him, like the warmth of his body beside mine on a cold street, like the way his stride shortens to match mine without him seeming to notice he's doing it.
I wash my face in his bathroom, borrow his toothbrush because I still haven't left one here and he hasn't suggested it and neither of us has acknowledged what it would mean if I did.
I look at myself in his mirror—his enormous, spotless, perfectly lit mirror that's the opposite of my cracked bathroom mirror—and I see the same face I always see.
Tired. A little gaunt. The short hair that's growing out unevenly because I can't be bothered to fix it.
But something around the eyes that's new.
Something that looks like a woman who slept well because she wasn't alone.
I pull on my clothes from yesterday—work pants, tank top, the canvas jacket.
The green dress is at home. His jacket is on the chair where I left it last night, and I should stop carrying it back and forth like a talisman, but I pick it up anyway and fold it over my arm.
Habit. Or something more than habit that I'm not examining too closely.
On my way to the front door, I pass the study.
The door is ajar. Not open—cracked, maybe two inches, the way a door settles when it hasn't been pulled fully closed.
I've passed this door before. It's always been shut.
The study is the one room I haven't been in—not because he's told me it's off limits, but because the closed door communicates its own boundary, and I've respected it the way I'd respect a closed door in anyone's home.
But it's not closed this morning. And I'm walking past it, and the crack is there, and my eyes do what my eyes always do—they look.
I see the desk. The laptop, closed, the power light pulsing in sleep mode.
A glass with an inch of amber liquid—scotch, the drink he pours and doesn't finish.
The desk lamp, still on. He was in there last night.
After I fell asleep on the couch, he went to the study and worked, and whatever he was doing kept him up late enough to leave the lamp on and the scotch unfinished and the door improperly closed.
None of this is remarkable. A man works late in his study. It happens.
"Ready?"
His voice from behind me. I turn. He's in the hallway, his jacket on, keys in hand.
His eyes move from my face to the study door and back, and something shifts in his expression—not alarm, not the sharp correction of a man caught out.
Something subtler. A tightening at the corners of his eyes. A recalibration.
"Ready," I say.
He reaches past me and pulls the study door closed.
The motion is smooth, unhurried, folded into the natural choreography of a man leaving his apartment—keys, jacket, doors.
But I noticed the sequence. I noticed that his hand found the study door before it found the front door, and the priority of that tells me something.
We ride the elevator in comfortable silence.
On the street, the November morning is sharp and bright, the kind of cold that makes you grateful for another body beside you.
He walks me to the subway—three blocks, his stride matched to mine, his hand finding the small of my back as we cross an intersection.
The touch is light, brief, the touch of a man who's learned where he's allowed and doesn't overstep.
At the subway entrance, he stops. I stop. The ritual.
"Thank you," I say. "For last night. For the couch. For the—" I hold up the teacup-shaped space between my hands. "For remembering."
"I remember everything about you." He says it simply, without weight, the way you'd say I like this weather or this is a good street. A fact. Unremarkable.
Except it's not unremarkable. It's the most remarkable thing anyone has ever said to me, and the reason it unsettles me is the same reason everything about this man unsettles me—because I believe him.
He does remember everything. The tea, the mug, the way I take things.
The book on my nightstand. The cabinet with the tea.
The cabinet.
The thought surfaces again—the one I've been pushing down for weeks. The morning he made tea in my apartment and opened the right cabinet on the first try. The cabinet I didn't open the night before. The cabinet he shouldn't have known.
I look at him. He's standing in the November light, his face composed, his eyes on mine with that steady attention that I've stopped fighting and started needing. He looks like a man who cares about me. Who pays attention because attention is how he shows care.
But attention has a spectrum. At one end: the man who remembers your tea and walks you to the subway and touches the small of your back at crossings.
At the other end: something I don't want to think about.
Something that would explain the cabinet and the book and the latch and the study door he closed before I could see what was on his desk.
"I remember everything about you," he said. And the question I've been avoiding, the question Tess has been asking, the question my foster-care radar has been pinging on for weeks, sharpens into focus.
How much is everything? And when did it start?
I don't ask. Not today. Today I'm going to the studio. Today the sculpture is talking and my hands are steady and the work is waiting.
But the question follows me down the subway stairs. It sits beside me on the train. It walks with me through Brooklyn to the studio and it's still there when I roll up the cargo door and pull on my gloves and light the torch.
I weld for six hours. The piece grows. The yielding forms bend toward each other, the space between them narrowing.
The work is good—better than good. The beads are clean, the structure is sound, the metal is doing what I ask.
My body falls into the rhythm and the thinking quiets and for hours there is nothing but fire and steel and the honest negotiation of material and intention.
But in the pauses—lifting the mask, checking a join, stretching the ache out of my shoulders—the question is there.
The cabinet. The book. The latch. The study door.
I remember everything about you.
How much? Since when?
I run my finger along a finished weld. Smooth. Right. The metal tells the truth about what's been done to it—every pass of the torch, every degree of heat, every moment of pressure is recorded in the join. You can't hide a bad weld. The evidence is in the surface.
People are the same, if you know how to look.
I've been looking at Damien Cross since the hardware store.
Looking for the seam, the flaw, the place where the surface gives.
I've found warmth and hunger and vulnerability and a grief about his mother that's real—I know it's real, I can feel truth the way I feel a clean weld, in my body, below thought.