35 | Girl Next Door
TESSA
The walk to my parents’ house felt different with him beside me.
Not nervous exactly. More like aware—of his hand in mine, of the familiar street that suddenly looked like something I was seeing for the first time, of the fact that in about thirty seconds my father was going to open that door and everything was going to be official in the way that parents made
things official.
“You’re quiet,” Theo said.
“I’m preparing.”
“For what?”
“My dad’s face.” I glanced at him. “He’s going to be insufferable.”
“You said he’d be happy.”
“He will be. That’s what makes it insufferable.”
Theo’s mouth curved. He squeezed my hand once and didn’t let go.
My dad opened the door before we knocked.
He looked at us. At our linked hands. At Theo’s face, then mine.
His expression did exactly what I’d predicted—that slow brightening, like someone had turned up a dial somewhere behind his eyes—and he stepped back to let us in without saying a word, which somehow made it worse.
My mom appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and read the room in approximately one second.
“Well,” she said. And smiled. “It didn’t take long.”
Theo cleared his throat. “We wanted to tell you in person. Tessa and I—we’re together.” He paused.
My dad looked at him for a long moment.
Then he extended his hand.
Theo shook it, and my dad held on a beat longer than necessary, and something passed between them that I couldn’t quite read but recognized anyway—the quiet language of two people who had understood each other for years and were now making it official in their own quiet way.
My mom pulled me into a hug that lasted longer than I expected.
“Mom—”
“Come help me in the kitchen.” She released me and headed back the way she’d come, already talking about dinner. “Mark, take him to the living room.”
My dad was already gesturing toward the chess set.
I could hear them through the wall.
Not the words—just the rhythm of it. The cadence of two people talking about something real underneath the pretense of a game. My dad’s voice lower than usual. Theo’s even and steady in return.
I turned back to the carrots I was supposed to be chopping.
When they came back to the kitchen, my dad’s expression had settled into something quieter than before. He clapped Theo on the shoulder once—brief, solid—and that was all. But Theo caught my eye across the kitchen and something in his face had shifted too.
Something that looked like relief.
Dinner was easy in the way that things were easy when everyone at the table already knew each other and had stopped pretending otherwise.
My parents asked questions and laughed at Theo’s answers and my dad told the story about the time Theo helped him fix the gutters three years ago and somehow ended up staying for dinner—“I kept waiting for him to leave and he just didn’t”—and Theo looked slightly embarrassed and my mom laughed and
I sat there watching all of it and thought about how this has been happening for years and I didn’t know.
“Dessert?” my mom asked, when the plates were mostly empty.
“We should actually—” Theo glanced at me. “I told my mom we’d stop by. She doesn’t know yet.”
My parents exchanged a look.
“Of course,” my dad said. “Go.”
My mom was already standing to clear plates. She caught my eye as I got up, and the look she gave me was the same one from the doorway—quiet and certain and a little bit like finally.
Theo’s mom opened the door after one knock.
She looked at us. At our hands.
“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that you finally asked her on a proper date.”
“Mom—”
“How long?” She was already stepping back to let us in, already smiling. “How long have you been—”
“A few weeks. Officially.”
“Officially.” She repeated the word like it meant something. “Come in. I have a cake.”
We sat at her kitchen table with tea and slightly underdone chocolate cake, and she asked about work and the clinic and didn’t mention the obvious thing at all, just let it sit there warmly in the room between all the other things.
At some point she laughed at something Theo said and shook her head and looked at me with the expression that told me she had been waiting a long time for this and was trying not to show how much.
“You know,” she said, “he told me when he was five that he was going to marry you.”
Theo went very still.
“Mom—”
“You’d just moved in next door.” She was smiling, unbothered by his expression. “He came home from the garden and said ‘the girl next door is going to be my wife.’ Just like that. Very matter-of-fact.” She took a sip of tea. “I told him he should probably introduce himself first.”
“That’s—” Theo started.
“Accurate,” she said pleasantly.
I looked at him. His ears were slightly pink.
“You were five,” I said.
“I had good instincts,” he said. “Even then.”
His mother laughed. He looked at the ceiling.
“I need a drink”.
Theo got and went to the kitchen.
His mother waited until his footsteps had faded down the hall. Then she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and set a small box on the table between us.
I looked at it. Looked at her.
“Open it,” she said.
Inside were earrings. Small, gold, a little worn at the edges in the way of things that had been worn regularly and loved. The kind of jewelry that carried weight without looking like it did.
“They were my mother’s,” she said. “I’ve been keeping them for—” She stopped.
Started again. “I don’t have a daughter. But Tessa.”
She looked at me directly. “You’ve been family for a very long time. Long before this.”
She gestured vaguely between me and the hallway where Theo had disappeared. “I just want you to have them.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand, then stood up.
“More tea?” she said, already moving to the kettle.
Theo came back to find me sitting very still at the table with a small box in my hands and his mother humming at the stove.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He sat back down without asking, and his hand found mine under the table, and we finished the cake and the tea and stayed longer than we’d planned.
He walked me back to my parents’ house at ten.
The street was quiet, the particular stillness of a Sunday night in a neighborhood where people went to bed at reasonable hours. Our footsteps on the pavement. The warmth of his hand.
At my door he stopped and turned to face me.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night.”
He kissed me—slow, unhurried, his hand cupping my jaw. When he pulled back he stayed close for a moment, his forehead almost against mine.
Then he stepped back.
“Go inside,” he said quietly. “Before I change my mind about leaving.”
I went.
My childhood bedroom was exactly as I’d left it the last time I’d stayed—books I’d read at sixteen, a lamp that was too dim, a window that faced the street.
I changed into pajamas. Got into bed. Looked at the ceiling.
The light came through the window before I’d closed my eyes.
Short and long and short. Short and long and short.
Our signal. From when we were nine and had decided we needed a way to communicate after bedtime without waking our parents. We’d used it for years—for are you awake and come outside and once, memorably, for I think I broke my arm but I don’t want to wake anyone up.
I stared at it for a moment.
Then I picked up my phone.
Me: you’re an idiot
The reply came in under ten seconds.
Theo: I love you
I read it once. Twice.
I love you too.
The thought arrived simply, the way true things sometimes did—not as a revelation but as a recognition of something that had been true for longer than I’d been willing to admit.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.
Closed my eyes.
Slept.