Page 142 of Never Alone
He looked at the floor for a beat. Then he looked at me.
"Your son needs his mother."
It was the surface answer. It came out plain. The flat register doing the flat thing it did.
"Cole—"
"No. Let me say it."
I closed my mouth.
"I waited by the window when I was Noah's age. My mom used to leave for days. Then weeks. I'd sit by the window and wait for her car. Sometimes, she came back. Most of the time, she didn't. The waiting taught me what kind of woman she was, and it taught me what kind of man I was going to have to become to make up for it."
He didn't look away from me.
"I'm not letting Noah become that kid. Not for any reason. You don't get to make him that kid."
I started crying harder. I made my hands stay in my lap. I made them.
"I know you think leaving is the brave thing, Tessa. It isn't. I know that because I spent thirty-four years thinking the same thing about not letting anyone in. I had a list of reasons. They were good reasons. They were the kind of reasons that hold up as long as nobody pushes on them."
He stopped.
"The brave thing is staying. The brave thing is letting people help you."
The departure board updated.
I didn't look at it.
The thing in my chest that I had been holding since the hospital—since the bakery before that—since the goodbye in the gray suit before that—let go.
I bent forward. My elbows on my knees. My face in my hands. I was crying the way I had not let myself cry in eight months. The way I had not let myself cry in ten years before that. The crying was not coming from one place. It was coming out of every year I had ever held it in.
Cole's good arm came around my shoulders.
He pulled me against his side. The sling was between us. He couldn't get both arms around me. He used the one he had.
I got my face into his shoulder, the side that wasn't broken, and I broke.
"I don't know how to do this."
It came out into the fabric of his shirt.
"I don't know how to stop running."
"You don't have to know."
His voice was in my ear.
"You just have to come home."
I cried into him.
He held me there with the one arm he had.
Some time went by.
I didn’t know how much.
