Page 101 of Never Alone
"Yeah?"
"Nicholas wants a gag order."
He looked over.
"Both parties. No press. No social media." I watched the side of his face. "She said he's losing the narrative. The kiss photos and King Street made the rounds again. The internet hasn't forgotten the girl who kissed the firefighter who saved her."
He drove a block before he answered. "Good."
"Good?"
"He's reaching."
"That's what Miranda said."
He nodded once and didn't say anything else. I watched his hands on the wheel for a second longer than I needed to and turned back to the windshield.
The crew wanted to see the house.
That was how Cole had put it—not asked us, not made a thing of it, just mentioned over coffee that the boys at the station had been ribbing him about the project for months and he'd finally told them they could come look at it. He'd be grilling. We'd be hosting.Tessa, you've been working too hard. I'm doing the food.
I had not corrected him on thewe.
Ashford Street wasn't done. The porch was painted now, and the front door, and the front room had real walls instead of stripped studs, and the kitchen had a stove that worked. There was a sofa. There was a dining table Cole had found at an estate sale and refinished in two weekends. The bedrooms upstairs were still mostly empty. We hadn't moved any furniture in.
But the kitchen worked, and that was all the barbecue needed.
I'd come over with Cole and Noah at eight in the morning. I'd brought trays of food from the bakery—sandwiches, three kindsof cookies, a peach pie in a foil pan. Cole had set up the grill on the back patio. Noah had taken his beginner toolbox out of the truck and disappeared into the front room with the seriousness of a man going to work.
By eleven, the spread was done. The drinks were on ice. The platters were on the table on the porch under cling wrap. I'd checked everything twice. There was nothing left for me to do until the first car pulled into the driveway.
Cole and Noah were downstairs. I could hear them. Cole's voice was low, Noah's questions in the particular pitch he used when he was concentrating. I didn't need to be in the room to know what they were doing.
I went upstairs.
The hallway smelled like fresh paint. Three doors. I'd been in this hallway twice before—once when Cole had first shown us the house, once when I'd come over to drop off coffee one morning while Cole was working—and both times, I'd stayed in the doorway of the bigger bedroom and looked at the long stripe of afternoon sun on the floor and not gone in.
Today, I went in.
The bigger room had been painted a soft white, almost cream, the kind of color that took the sun and held it. The window had been replaced—newer glass, the seal tight. The floor had been refinished. There was no furniture. The room was waiting.
I walked back into the hallway and opened the next door.
This was the smaller of the two bedrooms. The one with the window over the side yard. Cole had been working on it for weeks. I knew, because Noah had told the woman from the state, in a voice I'd overheard from the hallway, that Cole was building him a room.
I had not asked Cole about it. I had not known how to.
The room was finished.
There was a bed frame already in it—wooden, low, sized for a nine-year-old. A small bookshelf on the wall by the window. A lamp on the floor, still in its box. The walls were a soft blue. Not babyish—the blue of a real boy's room.
He hadn't told me he'd finished it.
I stood in the doorway, held the doorframe, and felt the thing in my chest do what it did when Cole made a thing without telling me. The slow gather. The small hot spot behind the sternum. The decision, every time, not to cry about it.
He had told Noah he was building him a room. He had said it once, to Noah, in the way Cole said most important things—once, plainly, and then never again. And Noah had believed him. Noah had carried it through the visit with the woman from the state and used it as an example of whatsafemeant. Noah had been right. The room was here. With a bed. With a bookshelf. With a lamp Cole had not yet had time to put on a table.
I let go of the doorframe.
