Page 13 of Never Alone
I nodded. I was holding the arm of the chair harder than I needed to.
"And if the answer is yes, when you call, we'll be ready. I want you in the strongest possible position before we put you in front of him."
I stood. The world, after sitting that still for that long, felt slightly tilted. She walked me to the door of her office.
"My receptionist will give you my direct line. If anything changes between now and your decision—anything—call me. Day, night, weekend. I mean it."
"Thank you."
The receptionist gave me Miranda's direct line on a slip of paper. I went down the stairs of the building, out into the noon sun, and stood on the sidewalk for a minute. The traffic was running on Meeting Street the way it always ran. The pigeons on the church steps across the way were doing what pigeons did. The world had not changed. I had.
I had a lawyer who was prepared to fight. I had a strategy. I had a foundation. For the first time in seven months, the ground felt steady.
The fight, Miranda had said, would be helped by a male role model in Noah's life.
Who would want a thirty-four-year-old single mother in hiding?
Our place was a converted old house a few blocks from the bakery. Three bedrooms upstairs, two downstairs. Noah and I had the master, which was big enough for two beds and had its own bathroom. The landlord had been planning to rent the room to two strangers when I came to look at it. I'd offered to take both beds and pay for both, and he'd said yes.
The other four rooms were rented out—two college students and two young adults in their early twenties just starting out. The kitchen downstairs was shared, but each room had its ownfridge. I'd set up a folding table by the door of our room and called it a mini bar.
I prepped meals on Sundays and kept them in the freezer. In the morning, I'd pull out what we needed for dinner and set it in a plastic basin on the folding table to defrost. By the time we got home from the bakery, all that was left to do was cook it.
"Hey, Tessa. Hey, Noah."
We came home from the bakery around six. Gregory was on his laptop in the living room when we walked in.
"How'd your midterm go?" I asked.
"Turned it in this morning."
"Good for you."
He nodded and went back to his laptop.
The other tenants were not bad. They were just twenty-two. They ate at midnight. They left dishes in the sink. They came home from their shifts and forgot the burner they'd turned on for coffee.
I had woken up twice now to the smell of gas in the morning. I went downstairs, turned off the burner, and didn't make a thing of it. I asked them, the second time, to be more careful. They were embarrassed and apologetic. I believed them.
I was twenty-two once. I was worse than they were. There was a joke in there somewhere about karma.
We ate at the small kitchen table downstairs. Noah cleared his plate when he was done. I did the dishes while he brushed his teeth, and by the time I came up, he was already in bed.
I checked the kitchen on my way through. The counter was wiped, the stove was off. I got into bed not long after him and lay in the dark, listening to him breathe across the room.
I thought about the afternoon. I picked Noah up the way I usually did. He came down the sidewalk with his backpack and waved at a girl with brown braids on the bench. Probably Penny. We drove back to the bakery for closing. Noah sat in his cornerdoing homework while Mrs. Thompson set down a glass of warm milk and a cookie beside him. As I counted the till at the front, I saw Benjie cross over to Noah's table twice: once to help Noah with a homework question, once just to check.
When everything was done, we said goodnight to Mrs. Thompson in the alley.
It hit me when she pulled the back door shut behind us that Havensworth wasn't a place we were hiding in anymore. Somewhere along the way, without my catching it happening, it had turned into the place we lived.
Noah was calmer. He read at the breakfast table. He helped with small jobs at the bakery. He had Mrs. Thompson and Benjie. He had a friend named Penny he was willing to throw a punch for.
You can't keep running for the rest of his childhood.
Noah had a home now. The thought of going back to Nicholas was not something I could stomach.
The decision was made. I knew that.
