Page 158 of Never Alone
I hadn't realized I was crying.
I didn't stop.
He held me there on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Sterling. The detective stood a respectful distance back. The wire was still at my sternum, and the wire would be off in twenty minutes, and I would never wear one again in my life.
Nicholas was in a car somewhere, being driven to a station I had never been to.
He wasn't coming back.
And standing there in Cole's arms, I finally felt the relief I'd thought would come the day I won the trial. Not relief in my head. Relief in my body. The kind that loosened something deep inside me all at once.
CHAPTER 29
Cole
I let myself into the house on Ashford at four in the afternoon.
The light was the light of a late winter day going early toward evening. Gold at the edges. The kind of light that lined the floor in a long stripe down the front hall, caught on the cabinets in the kitchen, and turned everything the color of something I had been working toward without knowing.
The house was done.
I walked through it.
The front room—the one I’d stripped to the studs the morning I’d picked up the cake at Mrs. Thompson's, the morning before any of this had been the thing it became—was finished. New floor. New paint. The couch I’d brought over from the apartment was against the long wall. A model on the shelf above it. The Spitfire. Noah and I had finished it together on a Sunday afternoon in November.
I went up the stairs.
Noah's room was the small one on the right. The blue one. The bed I’d built him a frame for. The bookshelf I’d leveled with cardboard. The lamp he had named Gerald.
The middle bedroom was the master.
The one at the end was the green one.
I went in.
The light through the window caught on the wall. The green I’d painted the morning Tessa had stood in the doorway and asked me why I was building a room for her. The green of her eyes.
There was furniture in it now. A small writing desk against the window. A chair by the desk. A shelf I’d built for her along the wall with the kind of careful brackets her cookbooks would sit on. A lamp.
There was no bed.
The room had not been about sleeping. The room had been about her—a place she could go into when she needed something that was hers in a house full of the rest of us.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
I’d been telling myself for a year that I was rebuilding a house because the math made sense. A man who had just made lieutenant and had no plans to live anywhere else should put his money into a fixer-upper. That was the reason. That was the version I gave people. That was the version I gave myself.
The house had three bedrooms.
I’d bought it because it had three bedrooms.
I hadn’t let myself think about why I’d bought a house with three bedrooms when I was a man who had been alone for thirty-four years.
I hadn’t been building this for myself.
I’d been building it for them.
I hadn’t known their names yet. I hadn’t known their faces. But I’d been building it for them.
