Chapter Thirty Six

Jules' POV

The first week at the house had a slightly surreal quality that I suspect is common to all major life transitions — the way the new context sits alongside your old self-concept with a slight delay before the two integrate. I kept waking up in the morning and having the particular disoriented half-second of not knowing where I was, and then the light would come through the tall windows in a way it didn't come through my Millhaven windows, and I would remember.

Eli had no such adjustment period. By the second morning he had identified the pool, the lake path, the gardening shed, the library on the second floor, and a cat — actual, real, live cat, who turned out to belong to Adam's groundskeeper and was named Victor — and he had prioritized all of these things with the methodical thoroughness of someone establishing territorial claims. Victor became his particular project. The cat wanted no part of it and communicated this clearly; Eli remained undeterred and patient in the way small children are patient about animals, which is to say indefinitely.

Madeline had requested and received the east-wing guest room, which had its own bathroom and a window seat that she described as spiritually significant, and she had gone approximately three minutes before emerging with her laptop and establishing a working station at the kitchen island with the confidence of a woman who had decided this arrangement suited her.

I was less decisive.

It was Adam's house. I knew that. I was here because of circumstance — the fire, the threat, the necessity of somewhere safe — and we had agreed that I would stay while Cooper's case moved through the DA's office and while Elena's whereabouts were confirmed. We had not discussed what came after. We had said try and we had held hands and he had pulled me into his kitchen and I had said this is where we start and then the practicalities of actually starting had arrived in the form of which bedroom, and I had taken the guest room across the hall from Eli rather than the room next to Adam's, which I suspect both of us had expected and neither of us had addressed directly.

This was the position things were in by day three: we were in the same house, we were something, and the specifics of what something looked like in practice were being arrived at gradually.

It was, actually, working. Or beginning to work. The way things begin — slowly, in small moments, with the incremental accumulation of ordinary hours spent in the same space.

He made coffee in the mornings. Full pot, strong, already done by the time I came downstairs. The first time I mentioned I took mine with a little honey rather than sugar he remembered the next morning without being reminded. Small thing. The kind of small thing that is actually a very large thing if you pay attention to it.

I was paying attention.

He worked from home most days — there was an office on the second floor, and he disappeared into it for four or five hours, and I edited manuscripts at the kitchen island, and we ate lunch together at the table with Eli who provided commentary on Victor's latest maneuvers, and then he went back to the office and I went back to my manuscript. It was domestic without being declared, routine without being planned.

On day four he asked what I was working on.

I turned my laptop so he could read the first page. He sat down at the table and read it the way he read things — fully, without performing attention, his eyes moving through it. He got to the end of the page and looked up.

"This is yours," he said. "This isn't the manuscript you're editing."

"No."

"This is — is this the story?"

I watched his face as it registered what he was reading. The particular quiet that came over it.

"The girl who drove twelve hours," he said.

"Yes."

"To tell someone she was pregnant."

"Yes."

He looked at the page. He looked at me. He looked at the page again.

"Jules." His voice was very quiet.

"I started it three years ago," I said. "I've been writing it since Eli was six months old. I didn't know what it was going to be. I just needed to write through it." I closed the laptop gently. "It's almost done."

He sat across the table from me and said nothing for a moment. When he looked up there was something in his face that he didn't try to manage or contain. "Can I read it?" he said. "When it's done?"

"Yes," I said. "When it's done."

"Okay." He pushed back from the table. He went to the window and looked out at the lake for a moment with his hands in his pockets.

"Adam."

"Yeah."

"It's not a sad story," I said. "I think it was for a long time. But it's not anymore."

He turned. He looked at me across the kitchen with the morning light on the water behind him.

"Good," he said. His voice was rough at the edges. "I'm glad."

Eli came running in from the back door with news about Victor, who had apparently consented to be in the same room as Eli for thirty consecutive seconds, a development Eli was treating as a major diplomatic breakthrough. We both redirected to this. Eli did not notice that both of us had red eyes. Children rarely notice the things that happen in kitchens before they enter them.

This was, I was beginning to understand, one of the minor gifts of being a parent. The requirement to come back to the ordinary. The requirement to redirect from the enormous to the immediate, over and over, until the enormous has been quietly absorbed and become part of the ordinary, and the ordinary is where you actually live.

I came back to the ordinary.

The ordinary was very good.

* * *

That evening, after Eli was in bed, Adam came to find me in the library. I was at the desk, not writing — the manuscript was on screen but I had been sitting with it rather than actively working on it, the way you sit with a finished thing before you release it. He knocked on the open door, which he always did even when the door was open, which was a habit I had noticed and cataloged in the same way I cataloged all his habits now: the coffee, the first ring of my calls that always got answered, the memorized blue juice cup. The particular care of a man who had been careless once and had no intention of repeating it.

"Can I come in?"

"Yes."

He came in and sat in the chair beside the desk, the one that had become his chair in the same organic, unannounced way that Adam's chair at the farm kitchen table had become Adam's chair in week one. He did not look at the manuscript screen. He looked at me.

"The revelation today," he said. "The money. The house. I know I handled it clumsily."

"You handled it honestly," I said.

"I handled it like someone who was afraid of what your reaction would be, which is not the same as handling it honestly."

I looked at him. I thought about four years of him testing and guarding and protecting the fragile thing he'd always suspected people only wanted because of what came with him. I thought about a man who had quit the only job he loved because it connected him to his mother and he couldn't feel anything there anymore after she died.

"Adam," I said. "I want you to hear this: I do not need the house. I do not need any of it. I need the man who sat on my floor for an hour and a half learning about train tracks. That's what I need." I held his gaze. "The rest is a bonus."

He was quiet.

"A significant one," I added.

Something in his face let go. The particular tension of a person who has been braced for a verdict they weren't sure of, released.

"I have a pool," he said.

"You have an excellent pool," I said.

"The lake is pretty good too."

"The lake is exceptional."

He smiled. It was the barn smile, the real one, the one from before everything went wrong.

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

"I'm glad I'm here too," I said. And I meant it completely.