Chapter Twenty Five

Jules' POV

George Halloran had a good face.

I say that first because it's true and because I want to be fair to him, which he deserved. He was the kind of man who had assembled his life with care and kept it in good order: a graphic designer who worked from home on the floor below us, who knocked on our door once a week with a surplus of something from his vegetable garden and stayed for twenty minutes and never stayed longer, who remembered that Eli was allergic to strawberries after being told once and always checked. He was thirty-six, recently out of a quiet and apparently peaceful marriage that had simply run its course, and he had been looking at me since our second week in the building with an expression I recognized and had been — very gently, very carefully — not acknowledging.

He asked me to dinner on a Thursday.

He came to the door with a recipe he'd been testing — some French thing with a sauce that had taken him three attempts to get right — and we'd been standing in the kitchen doorway talking about it, and Eli was in the bath, and at some point the conversation had made a small natural turn and George had looked at me with a quiet steadiness and said: "I'd like to take you to dinner sometime. If you'd be open to it."

I held the recipe card he'd printed out and I looked at him.

He was good. He was kind. He had dark circles under his eyes that he never mentioned and a small scar on his chin from something he'd laughed about once and a way of listening that made you feel heard without feeling examined. He was everything that the circumstances of my life had taught me to look for in a person: stable and present and uncomplicated, requiring nothing that would cost more than I could give.

"George," I said.

"You don't have to decide now," he said easily. No pressure in it. No rehearsed vulnerability. Just a man who had said an honest thing and was comfortable waiting for an honest answer.

I held the recipe card and I thought about Adam on the floor with the trains. About Adam's laugh, unguarded and sudden. About Cooper's text — she called Sal two days ago, he's in Millhaven — which Adam had told me the morning after, quietly and without drama, sitting at my kitchen table, telling me because I had a right to know, not because he wanted me frightened. I thought about what Madeline had said: is he what you want, or is he what's safe.

The bath sounds stopped. Eli would need toweling in approximately ninety seconds.

"I can't," I said. The words came out gently but without hesitation, which told me the answer had already been decided somewhere below the level of my conscious deliberation. "I'm sorry. There's someone — it's complicated and I'm not sure it's going to work and I would not, honestly, have predicted it six months ago. But there's someone, and while that's true I can't—" I stopped. "I'd be doing you a disservice. And you don't deserve a disservice."

George looked at me for a moment. Something in his face did the quiet thing that genuine good people do when they hear difficult news — absorbed it, settled around it, didn't perform.

"The guy from upstairs," he said. Not a question.

I blinked. "You know?"

"I saw him leaving one morning." He shrugged, a small, uncomplicated shrug. "He has the look of someone who has spent a long time figuring out what he actually wants."

"That's a generous interpretation."

"Maybe." He took the recipe card back gently and tucked it in his pocket. "He better be worth it, Jules."

"He's trying to be," I said. And that was the most honest thing I had said about it yet.

George smiled — a real smile, nothing wounded in it, the smile of a man with a full enough life that one door closing was a door and not a wall. "Good. That's a good sign." He put his hands in his pockets. "I'm going to need the verdict on the sauce when you make it. I've been told my ratios are off."

"Your ratios are probably fine."

"Tell that to the test batches."

He went back downstairs. I heard Eli in the bathroom yelling for a towel.

* * *

I called Madeline into the kitchen after Eli was in bed. I made tea. I told her about the conversation with George.

She stirred her tea and didn't say anything for a moment.

"You turned George down," she said finally.

"Yes."

"For Adam."

"For — I don't know. For the truth. George is good and he deserves someone who isn't standing in the kitchen thinking about someone else."

Madeline looked at her tea. "You know what I'm going to ask."

"Yes."

"And?"

I put my hands around my mug. The kitchen was quiet. Outside, Millhaven was doing its nighttime thing — a distant siren, a car, the faint sound of someone's television on the floor above.

"Yes," I said. "I still love him. I have been trying not to for three years and I am very bad at it, and standing there telling George no was the most honest thing I've done in a while because I had to admit it to say it."

Madeline nodded slowly.

"He's dangerous," I said.

"I know."

"He broke me once."

"I know that too."

"I have a child to think about."

"Jules." She looked at me. "I know all of that. I was there for all of that. I held your hand in the delivery room and I drove you to therapy and I ate a year's worth of consolation pasta with you. I know." She set her mug down. "I'm asking if you're going to do something about it or if you're going to spend another three years being very sensibly miserable."

I said nothing for a long moment.

"He keeps showing up," I said eventually.

"Yes he does."

"He sat on the floor with Eli for an hour and a half and asked serious questions about train tracks."

"I was there."

"He comes every other day with groceries we didn't ask for."

"The blueberries are good by the way."

"Madeline."

"I'm just saying." She picked up her tea again. "You already made your decision, Jules. You made it when you turned George down. You're just waiting to tell Adam that."

I looked at my tea. I thought about the barn. The rain. The quilt. His voice in the dark saying Starlight for the first time like it was something he'd been keeping for the right moment.

"Not yet," I said.

"Okay."

"He has more to prove."

"That's fair."

"A lot more."

"Also fair."

She finished her tea. She got up to rinse the mug. At the doorway she paused. "For what it's worth," she said, "the way you said his name just then? You didn't say it like someone who's undecided."

She went to bed.

I sat in the kitchen for a while longer. Gerald leaned toward the lamplight on the windowsill, steady and patient and unambiguous.

I sat there thinking about the barn and the rain and all the twelve hours of highway between who we were and who we might still become, and I thought: not yet. But maybe.

Maybe not too much longer.