Chapter Six: Setting The Table

I had just closed the file when I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

I closed it the way you close something you are done with, slid it to the edge of the table, and by the time Evan appeared in the kitchen doorway I had my coffee cup in my hand and what I hoped was a reasonable expression on my face.

He stopped in the doorway and looked at me.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." I smiled. Easy. Practiced.

He did not move. He stood there with his hands in his pockets and looked at me the way he always looked at me — like he was reading past the first sentence and going straight for the paragraph underneath. The smile did not work on him. I had a feeling very few things I performed worked on him.

"Dinner isn't for another forty-five minutes," I said, because somebody needed to say something.

"I know." He pushed off the doorframe. "I came to help set the table."

I looked at him. He looked back.

I had exactly two options — tell him I didn't need help and spend the next forty-five minutes alone in a kitchen that suddenly felt smaller than it had this morning, or let him do something kind without turning it into a negotiation.

"Plates are in the cabinet above the stove," I said. "The good ones. Not the everyday stack."

He found them on the first try.

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We set the table the way two people do when they are both pretending it is a perfectly ordinary thing — passing things without fumbling, finding a rhythm without discussing it. He laid the placemats straight. I followed with glasses. He set the cutlery without asking where it lived, which meant he had been paying attention since the day he arrived.

I noticed that and said nothing about it.

The kitchen felt different with him in it. Easier. Like the air had more room than it usually did. I was still trying to decide what to do with that observation when the front door opened.

---

Rhett walked in and stopped.

The stop was small — barely half a second — but I had six years of reading that man and I caught it. He had not expected to walk in and find the table already set, the kitchen warm, and his wife standing next to someone who looked completely comfortable being there.

He recovered fast. He always did.

"Didn't know we were expecting company." His eyes moved to Evan with the slow weight of a man taking a measure.

"Evan lives here," I said. "He's not company."

Rhett set his bag down. Looked at Evan directly. "You sorted out accommodation then. Permanently?"

It was aimed at Evan. Deliberate. The kind of question designed to make a person feel like a guest being asked to justify their presence.

I answered before Evan could open his mouth.

"Evan is welcome here for as long as he needs." I said it the way I used to say things in courtrooms — level, clear, no room for a rebuttal. "I have the room. He has a place. That is settled."

The kitchen went quiet.

Rhett looked at me. Something moved behind his eyes — slow and cold, the way water moves just before it freezes over. Then he smiled. Not the charming one he saved for other people. The other one. The one I had learned, three years into this marriage, to be more careful around than his anger.

"Of course," he said softly. "Whatever you say, Nicole."

He pulled out a chair and sat at the head of the table like he had always planned to. Like nothing had happened. Like that smile meant absolutely nothing at all.

And that was exactly what frightened me.