Page 57 of Never Alone
"Your Honor, what we have here is not an eighteen-year lesson. What we have is a woman who took her son across state lines without notice. A woman who has built an engagement story around a man she hadn't seen in seventeen years. A woman whose unsubstantiated allegations are being asked to stand in for proof."
He used the wordconcerned. He used the wordconfused. He used the wordstable. He used Nicholas's name three times.
I watched Nicholas while the lawyer spoke. His face was the face he'd brought into the room—composed, level. The corners of his eyes had tightened for a half a second when Miranda had saideighteen-year lesson, and they'd stayed tight a half a second longer than the rest of his face before they'd unlocked and the practiced calm had come back over him.
His eyes were on Tessa. He hadn't moved them once since his lawyer had started speaking.
I felt her register him. Her shoulders climbed. Her breath went shallow. The fist on her thigh tightened.
My hand was under the table before I'd told it to move.
I covered her fist. I didn't squeeze, just kept my palm there. Her fist loosened, she turned her palm up, and her fingers laced through mine.
She held on. She looked up at me, and I looked back.
I didn't know why I'd reached. I just had.
The lawyer was still talking, but I kept my eyes on the judge and my face where it was. Her hand stayed in mine under the table.
The lawyer sat. The judge ruled.
He didn't make a speech.
"Jurisdiction shall remain in South Carolina pending the conclusion of the forensic audit, which is hereby ordered. A Guardian ad Litem will be appointed within seven days. The protective order is upheld, modified to permit supervised visitation only—four hours every other Saturday, court-monitored facility, in Havensworth. The parties are ordered to maintain the status quo. Neither party will engage the press. Final custody hearing to be set following the audit and the GAL report."
He brought the gavel down.
"Adjourned."
The room rose around us. Her hand stayed in mine a beat longer than it had to. Then she squeezed once and let go.
CHAPTER 13
Tessa
The Nicholas I'd loved had been gone for years before I'd put a state line between us.
I had been mourning him longer than I had known him, though I hadn't named it as mourning until much later. For most of the years he was disappearing, I called it stress. I called it the demands of his job. I called it our marriage going through a hard patch. I called it everything I could call it that wasn't the truth—that the man I had married was a temporary thing, and the man underneath was the only permanent one.
I was at the bakery taking inventory when I started to think about him. Mrs. Thompson was in the back kitchen pulling proofing trays. Benjie was out for his lunch break. I'd been alone in the front for an hour. The bell over the door hadn't rung in twenty minutes. The morning had given me too much room to think.
I met Nicholas the summer I was twenty-one.
I was working a sales counter at a department store in Tyson's—the men's gifts section, which mostly meant cufflinks, wallets, and ties for Father's Day or for wives who didn't know what their husbands wanted. I'd been there a year and a half. I was good at it. The pay was bad, and my feet hurt by the end ofevery shift, but I knew what I was doing. I knew which customers needed time and which ones needed me to be quick. I knew how to ask the questions that would tell me what they were looking for without making them say the obvious things out loud. Mrs. Halberg, my manager, told me at my one-year review that I had a knack for retail. That was the closest thing to a compliment I'd ever gotten on the job.
He came in at three pm on a Saturday, wearing a suit he hadn't bothered to take off coming from work. He was older than the men who usually came to my counter—early thirties, maybe—with dark hair already going gray at the temples and the kind of bearing that didn't ask. He needed a gift for his mother's birthday. He didn't know what she liked. Could I help him.
I helped him. I took him to the ladies section and had him out of the store inside twenty minutes with a silk scarf and a card, both wrapped, both paid for. He thanked me, looked at the name tag on my chest, and said,Thank you, Natalie.He left.
He came back the next Saturday. He needed another gift, this one for his secretary's retirement. He asked for me by name.
By the third Saturday, the gift was for me.
He gave me a small box with a bracelet in it. It was nicer than what he'd had me wrap for his mother or his secretary. He set it on the counter the way he set everything else on the counter—easy, certain, like a man who wasn't going to be embarrassed by a no. He asked if I'd let him take me to dinner. He said he understood if I didn't want to. I said I did want to.
That was the version of him I loved.
I told my parents about him before our second date because lying was harder than the truth, and my parents had ways of knowing things they had no right to know. I told them his age. I told them his profession. I watched my mother's face do the small calculation. I watched my father's face do a different one. I was twenty-one, working retail, no degree, five years pastthe relationship they didn't know the details of and had never wanted to know.
