Page 55 of Never Alone
The hallway had the same plaster smell as the front. There were three doors off it. One led to a small bathroom that had not been touched yet. The other two led to bedrooms.
Both bedrooms were empty. Stripped floors. New paint on the walls. No furniture. No boxes.
I stood in the doorway of the bigger one. The window faced the back of the house. The afternoon sun came in across the floor in a long stripe.
I went back to the kitchen.
Noah and Cole were still at the sanding block. Cole had moved to a second piece of trim. They were working in something close to silence.
"You have three bedrooms here," I said.
Cole looked up. "Yeah."
"What were you going to do with them?"
He looked at me. He took a second.
"I didn't have a plan for them. I figured they were going to be empty for a while."
Then he looked back at Noah and said something quiet about the next pass.
I stayed in the doorway.
A piece of pipe slipped off the counter and dropped into the bucket on the floor. The clatter of metal on metal cracked through the empty house. My body snapped tight before my brain caught up. I held the doorframe and waited for the sound to be over. It took longer than the sound did.
When I looked up, Cole was looking at me.
He didn't say anything. After a second, he turned back to the wood.
I watched him crouched there next to my son. Thirty-four years old. A job he was good at. A crew that would have walked through fire for him. A house going up around him, room by room. He was not bad to look at, either.
A man like that should have had a wife by now. He should have had a kid of his own running through these rooms, somebody waiting at the door at the end of a shift, a life that explained why he had built the place with three bedrooms in it. He had everything a man needed to ask somebody to stay.
He hadn't.
What was he waiting for?
CHAPTER 12
Cole
Noah was an easy kid.
Other people called that a good thing. People who had never been an easy kid called it a good thing. The easy kid knew what easy meant, because somewhere along the line, being anything else had cost too much.
I'd been an easy kid.
I knew it from the inside.
Nicholas had filed his response inside the fourteen-day window. His lawyers had requested an emergency hearing forty-eight hours out and argued in writing that Tessa was a parental kidnapper. They had attached a motion to vacate the protective order, a motion to return Noah to the home state immediately, a brief framing the engagement as a sham reunion—Cole as a Good Man being Tricked—a clean background check on Nicholas, and a packet of character references from his colleagues. Everything they had filed, Miranda had predicted. She'd called us yesterday morning.
I let myself look at Nicholas.
He was at the respondent's table across the aisle. His suit was charcoal, his shirt clean white, his cufflinks small. He sat the waya man sat when he'd been in a lot of courtrooms and had no reason to brace in this one.
Tessa had given me the rough shape.
She was twenty-one when they met. He was thirty-one. A lawyer. On paper, the ideal man.
