Page 96 of Across His Line

“You don’t know—”

“I don’t care about the jacket.”

She looks at him for a long second. Then she lets it go. And I think, that’s how she does it. Something terrible happens, and she counts the jackets. She puts things back where they go. It’s not the way Rafe does it. It’s not the way I do it. And I know the difference.

At the door, she stops. She puts her hand on Rafe’s arm and leans in, and she says it low, but the room is quiet, and I hear it anyway.

“Don’t let your father know you’re upstairs yet.”

Rafe’s jaw tightens.

“I’ll deal with him,” she says. “I’ll tell him you’re not feeling well. Just—stay up here.”

I watch Rafe’s face. It doesn’t do much. But something in his shoulders goes tight and stays there.

And then his mother does something I don’t expect. She reaches up and touches his face. The side that isn’t swollen. Just her fingertips, light, along his jaw.

“You did the right thing,” she says.

He goes very still and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move. He just stands there in the doorway with his mother’s hand on his face, looking at her like she’s speaking another language. Like nobody’s ever said those words to him and meant them.

She takes her hand back and picks up her wine glass. She goes.

Rafe looks at me.

“I’m going to clean up,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

I don’t respond, so he watches me for a second. His eyes stay on mine, and I want to ask him if he’s hurt, but I don’t find the words. He goes.

His mother comes back first. She has a folded stack of clothes in her arms. Soft gray pants with a drawstring. A sweater, cream, cashmere, so soft it looks like it’s made of fog. A pair of thick socks. A package of underwear still in the plastic, which she sets on top of the pile without a word, without looking at me, so I don’t have to look at her when she does it.

She puts it all on the end of the bed. And then she turns, and she looks at me properly. Not soft this time. Not pity. Just looking, the way you’d look at a painting to figure out who painted it.

“You’re Tessa Canten,” she says.

Everything in me goes cold. She knows my name. First and last. Rafe said Mom, come here. He didn’t say this is Tessa.

“Yes,” I answer.

“I thought so.” She tilts her head. “I remember you.”

“From where?” I ask, confused.

“The awards night. Ninth grade. You won the academic award for the whole class.” She says it simply.

I don’t say anything. I can’t. I don’t even remember it very well myself, except the dress, too big in the shoulders, and the silence when they called my name, and how long that floor was.

And Rafe’s mother remembers it. I’m surprised by her memory.

“Rafferty has never been particularly good,” his mother says, “at leaving things alone.”

She says it lightly. She smooths the top of the clothes on the bed with one hand while she says it. And I can’t tell what she means by it. I can’t tell if it’s a warning or an apology or just a fact, the kind of fact mothers say about their sons the way they’d say he never could sit still in church.

I don’t know what she knows. I don’t know what he told her. If he told her anything.

She looks at me for a moment longer. Then she smiles, polite, and it doesn’t go all the way up.

“There’s a guest suite across the hall,” she says. “With its own bath. You’ll be much more comfortable there. Come, I’ll show you.”