Page 41 of Never Alone
"Noah, why don't you go play in your room for a few minutes? I just need to talk to Cole."
Noah looked at me, then at Cole, then back at me. He wasn't going to leave me with a man he didn't know. I gave him the nod I always gave him when something was scaring him, and I needed him to believe me anyway. He held on for one more beat. Then he let go and walked down the hall to his room.
I led Cole to the dining table. He sat across from me, put his forearms on the table, looked at his hands for a second, and looked up.
"I've been thinking about what you asked me."
My stomach went tight.
He doesn't have to say yes,I told myself.He doesn't owe you anything. You asked him for something big. You knew it might be this one.
"Before I give you my answer," he said, "I want to ask you a question first."
"Okay?"
"Is your real name Tessa Marin?"
I looked down at the table. I'd been bracing for this question for two days, and I'd practiced what I'd say a dozen times in thekitchen, and now that he was asking, none of those answers was in my head.
"No."
He let thenosit for a beat before he said the next thing, and I knew what it was going to be.
"Your real name is Natalie Shaw."
I'd been dreading the moment he said my real name out loud since the morning I'd found out his.
"Cole. I'm sorry."
"Why didn't you tell me? You knew who I was."
I heard what was underneath the question. Hurt. Betrayal.
"I tried to tell you. At the firehouse. I tried, I—I couldn't."
He nodded once. Small. Like something had quietly rearranged itself in his head, and he was still catching up to it.
"And after that, I didn't know how to bring it up again. Every time I was going to—" I stopped. Took a breath. "I knew you'd have to find out eventually. If you said yes. My legal name is on the filing. I just—I didn't know how to tell you sooner."
He looked at me for a long beat, reading me, and I let him.
"You didn't just change how you look. You had to change your name, too."
I didn't answer. There wasn't a clean way to answer that.
"The husband situation is that bad."
I nodded.
He looked away from me—out the kitchen window, back at his hands—and then at me again.
"So you've gotten yourself into another messed-up situation."
The heat came up before I could stop it.
I knew, even as it was coming up, that it was the firefighter in him talking. The man who'd seen people make bad calls and had to live with them. The man who'd reported my boyfriend atsixteen because he hadn't known another way to make it stop. He hadn't said it cruelly. He hadn't said it to hurt me.
It hurt anyway.
