Chapter Thrity Five

Jules' POV

I had told myself, at some point during the drive from the safe house to wherever Adam was taking us, that I would be reasonable about wherever it was we were going.

I had told myself: you are a grown woman who has lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a mid-sized city for three years and raised a child on a freelance editor's income and not once complained about any of it. You will be reasonable. You will accept whatever Adam offers with graciousness and without making a face.

This intention lasted until the car turned through a set of open gates and I saw the house.

It was not, technically speaking, a house. It was a house — the word house the way you use it when the actual word for the thing would be embarrassing to say. Stone and glass and at least three stories of it, set back from a gravel drive lined with trees that had clearly been there longer than Adam had, older and taller than anything that could be planted with intention. Gardens in the front that had the disciplined wildness of something tended by someone who actually knew about plants. A wing to the left that looked like it could be a separate building but connected. A lake — not the rental lake of the weekend trip but an actual lake, still and broad and silver in the early morning light — visible beyond the back of the house through a gap in the trees.

"Adam," I said.

"I know."

"This is not a house."

"It has rooms and a roof. It qualifies."

"Adam."

"I grew up calling it a house," he said, in a voice that was carefully not looking at me. "It's a house."

From the back seat, Eli pressed his face to the window.

"There is a POOL," he announced, at a volume that suggested this was the most significant discovery of his three and a half years on earth.

"There is a pool," Adam confirmed.

Eli turned from the window and looked at me with an expression that communicated, without ambiguity, that whatever reservations I might have about any other aspect of this situation were entirely irrelevant to him personally.

"We should live here," Eli said.

Madeline, on the other side of the back seat, was looking at the house with the expression of someone reassessing a number of things simultaneously. Then she looked at me. Then she looked back at the house. Then she said: "I'm going to need you to tell me more about this man, Jules. Significantly more."

"I didn't know," I said.

"You didn't know he had — this."

"I thought he worked at a museum."

The car stopped. Madeline looked at me with an expression I was going to be hearing about for years.

"He does work at a museum," I said, weakly. "He quit but he started again. It's—"

Eli had already opened his door and was out of the car, running in the direction of the pool with his arms out.

* * *

Adam showed us around with the slightly stiff quality of a man who is aware that something is being revealed about him that he is not entirely comfortable having revealed. He was not apologetic about the house — that would have been absurd — but he was careful, the way he had been careful about all the big things, moving through the rooms with an attention to my face that told me he was watching for the moment when it became too much, when it tipped from impressive into something that created distance between us.

I watched him watch me and I thought about the farm. I thought about the apartment with the crooked floors. I thought about the fact that in all the months since Millhaven, Adam had come to me, every single time — had come to my kitchen, my living room, my orbit — and had sat on my floor with trains and eaten blueberries at my table and never once made me feel like my small, carefully built life was inadequate.

I thought about what that had cost him. The deliberateness of it.

We were in the kitchen — vast and warm and equipped with things I was going to need Madeline to name for me — when I turned to him.

"You kept it hidden," I said. "The money. All of it."

He looked at me. "Yes."

"Why? In Millhaven. After everything — why not tell me?"

He considered this with the honesty he had been applying to everything since Henry's confession. "Because I needed to know if what was happening between us was real," he said. "I needed to know if you were choosing me. Not this." He gestured, a small, slightly rueful gesture at the kitchen, the house, the windows and the lake. "Me. The man who made the worst mistake of his life and was trying to earn his way back. I needed to know that you wanted that man. Not the estate."

I looked at him for a moment.

"You tested me," I said.

"Not tested." He shook his head. "I protected myself. Which I recognize is not a distinction that holds up if you're angry about it."

"I'm not angry," I said. And I found, checking, that I wasn't. I was something more complicated than angry — I was moved, partly, by the admission, by the fact that the most guarded part of Adam Casey had still been guarding itself even after everything. That even in the choosing, he had been afraid. "I understand it. I don't fully love it, but I understand it."

He exhaled. "That's something."

"It's quite a lot, actually," I said. "Given that you have a pool."

He looked at me. The edge of his mouth turned up.

"There's a pool?" he said.

"Eli found it immediately."

"Of course he did."

From somewhere distant, Eli's voice at full volume: "MOM! THERE'S A DIVING BOARD!"

I looked at the window. At the lake. At the gardens with their disciplined wildness. At the man beside me who had spent three months showing up to my crooked-floored apartment with blueberries and pastries and genuine focused attention because he was afraid that if he showed me this, I would choose it instead of him.

"Adam," I said.

"Yeah."

"For the record," I said, "I was already choosing you. I chose you when I told George no. I chose you when I picked up the phone on Sunday evenings. I chose you at the kitchen table when I said I want to try." I held his gaze. "The pool is a bonus. A significant one. But it's a bonus."

He looked at me with the look that undid me every time — not the polished, competent look, not the boardroom look, but the stripped-down one, the barn loft one, the look of the man underneath everything else.

"Come here," he said.

I went.

He pulled me in and held me and I stood in the enormous kitchen with my face against his shoulder and I thought: this is where the story changes. This is where it stops being about survival and starts being about something else.

This is where we start.

* * *

Eli found us still in the kitchen ten minutes later, having completed his first lap of the property and returned with a full report. The pool had a depth marker he found very impressive. There was a bird on the fence that he suspected lived there permanently. Victor the cat had been observed at the edge of the garden regarding something in the grass with professional focus. The gardening shed had a lock but the key was hanging next to it on a nail, which Eli considered poor security practice.

We listened to all of this. Adam asked follow-up questions about Victor's surveillance posture. Eli expanded on the topic at significant length.

I stood in the kitchen of an enormous house with my shoulder against Adam's and my son explaining cat behavior to a billionaire, and I thought: yes. This. Exactly this.

"Can we go in the pool?" Eli said.

"It's November," I said.

"But can we?"

"It's heated," Adam said.

I looked at him.

"What?" he said. "It's heated."

Eli made the triumphant sound. I made the face. Adam made the face of a man who had just realized he had accidentally sided with a four-year-old against the only person in the house whose approval he was seeking, and who was going to need to be clever about the recovery.

He was not clever about the recovery.

We went in the pool. The water was warm and the November air above it was cold and Eli was in absolute heaven and Adam trod water looking at me with an expression that was equal parts sheepish and entirely satisfied with himself.

"This was your plan," I said.

"I genuinely thought it was cold," he said.

"The heated pool."

"I don't usually check the settings personally."

"Adam."

"In retrospect," he said, "this was my plan."

I put my face in the water to hide the smile.