Page 106 of Never Alone
She took Will's hand and pulled him toward the back door. He waved at me on the way out.
The kitchen went quiet.
I stood at the counter with my hand on a glass I had picked up for no reason and could not now remember setting down. The screen door swung shut behind them. From the patio, I could hear Sam laughing at something Tyler was saying. Noah's voice, somewhere in the front room, telling Jack he was wrong about something with the kind of confidence I had not heard out of my son in eight months.
You're good for him.
I felt it land somewhere I didn't have a word for.
I wasnotgood for him.
I was the girl from the parking lot. I was the reason he had hesitated with Shelby. I was the hand that had pulled the first thread loose in his life eighteen years ago, and the woman he had now picked up and carried through every door of mine.
He had said yes to me at the firehouse, knowing.
He had walked into Miranda's office, knowing.
He had saidI'm doing it because it's the right thing to do. Not because I want to—and I had thought he meant the case was hard. He had meant me. He had not been able to want to. How could he have? I was the woman whose sixteen-year-old self had stood in a parking lot and screamed at him for trying to do the right thing, and a year later, his sister had told him she was leaving her husband, and Cole had hesitated because of me, and Shelby was dead.
Shelby was dead because of me.
I set the glass down. I put both hands flat on the counter. I dropped my head and shut my eyes.
Shelby. Who had cooked in a kitchen on Marlboro Street. Who had raised the boy who had grown up to put a lock on my door, a smoke detector on my ceiling, and a bed in a room for my son. Who had died waiting for her brother to be ready. Who was not here because I had taught him to wait.
A sound came out of me. I put my hand over my mouth.
He had said yes anyway.
He had said yes after the night I walked into the firehouse and asked him. He had walked into a lawyer's office two days later and put his worst memory on her desk for me. He had picked Noah up from school. He had paid the early-termination fee on his lease without making a thing of it. He had bought a tea I had mentioned liking once. He had taken me to dinner on King Street and walked me back to the truck with his hand at the small of my back. He had bent his head over mine in the green room two hours ago and almost—almost?—
He had almost kissed me.
He had almost kissed the girl from the parking lot.
A man who had been doing the right thing for eighteen years had been doing the right thing again, with his body, with his house, with his hands, with his mouth, and I had stood in the doorway of a room he had painted in the color of my eyes and tilted my chin up and let him.
I had let myself want him.
I had been carrying a warmth around for two days and telling myself it was relief. It had not been relief. It had been the start of a thing I now knew I didn't get to have. I had been telling myself, since the dinner, that we were becoming something. We had not been becoming anything. He had been carrying me. He had not been falling for me. There was no version of this where the man whose sister had died because of me looked at me and let himself want me back.
The almost-kiss had not been a man losing control. It had been a man caught in a doorway with the woman he was performing a relationship with. He had pulled back. He had been glad when Noah came up the stairs. He had walked down to the barbecue and not looked at me again.
The case would end. The custody order would issue. The petition would close. And Cole would walk out of this apartment and out of this house and out of my and Noah's life, and he would do it cleanly, the way Cole did everything, and he would not look back.
I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known I was standing on a thing I was going to lose.
The go-bag was in the closet in the apartment. I knew where it was. I knew what was in it.
I didn't move toward the door.
I straightened, slowly. I wiped under both my eyes with the heel of my hand. I picked the glass back up and put it in the sink. I ran water over my fingers and dried them on the towel.
I would not make him carry me any more than he already had. I would not let him catch me looking at him. I would not smile when he looked at me. I would not stand in a doorway with my chin tilted up and ask him for a thing he could not give me without it costing him his sister all over again.
I would make myself easy to leave.
When the case was over, he would go. I would not make him say it.
