Chapter Twenty Nine

Jules' POV / Adam's POV

Jules' POV

He found it in forty-eight hours, which was testament to either how determined he was or how good Cooper's secondary assistant was at logistics. Either way, on Friday morning Adam texted me a photograph of a house — wood and stone, big windows, surrounded by pine trees, a lake behind it that was flat and silver in the morning light — and said: This weekend, if you're open to it. All three of us. No agenda. Just somewhere different.

I showed the photograph to Eli, who was eating toast at the kitchen table.

He looked at it for approximately three seconds. "Is that a lake?"

"Yes."

"Do you swim in it?"

"I think so."

"We should go," Eli said, and went back to his toast with the decisiveness of a person who had resolved the matter.

* * *

We arrived Friday evening. The drive was two hours north and Eli spent most of it asleep in the back seat in the way he had at the baseball game, so sudden and complete that I had stopped being surprised by it. Adam drove. I sat in the passenger seat with the pine trees moving past the window and the radio on low and the particular feeling of being inside something that was moving toward something else, which I had spent most of my adult life either dreading or craving by turns.

This time I just let it happen.

The house was everything the photograph suggested and slightly more — warm inside, smelling of clean wood and old fireplaces, the kind of house that had been built by someone who understood the purpose of windows. Big ones facing the lake, which was glassy and dark in the evening, and a porch that ran the whole front of the house and had two chairs and a low table and a view that made the chest feel larger than usual.

Eli woke up as the car stopped and looked out the window and went entirely, immediately speechless, which was an experience I had never had with him before and found deeply moving.

"The lake," he said, finally.

"Yes," Adam said.

"It's big."

"It is."

Eli unbuckled himself with hands that were slightly trembling with excitement and got out of the car and stood in the gravel driveway looking at the lake with the expression of someone receiving a gift they had not known was coming. Then he looked at Adam. Then at me.

"This is good," he said, very seriously.

"Good," Adam said. "Let's get inside."

* * *

The first morning Adam made pancakes.

This was not a planned development — there was no warning, no announcement — he was simply up before either of us, and when Eli and I appeared in the kitchen at seven-thirty, Eli still in his pajamas with sleep-curls flattened on one side and Gordon's hat already firmly in place, there was Adam at the stove in a T-shirt he'd apparently slept in, and there was a bowl and a whisk and the concentrated frown of a man who had clearly decided he could do this.

"You can cook?" I said.

"Pancakes," he said. "Specifically. My mother had one recipe she made on Saturdays. I have watched approximately a hundred cooking videos since Tuesday."

I sat at the kitchen table. Eli climbed onto the counter without asking and sat beside the stove so he could monitor the situation directly.

"The bubbles tell you when to flip," Eli said.

"I know about the bubbles."

"Do you? Because you're watching the wrong side."

"I'm watching the—" Adam looked at the pan. He flipped the pancake with an expression that suggested the bubbles had, in fact, surprised him.

"See?" Eli said.

"I see," Adam said.

The first three pancakes were slightly irregular in shape and perfect in every other way. We ate them at the kitchen table with blueberries and maple syrup and the lake out the window going from silver to blue as the sun committed properly to the morning.

Adam's POV

On the second evening, after Eli was in bed, he found Jules on the porch.

She was in one of the low chairs with her knees pulled up and a cup of something hot wrapped in both hands, looking at the lake. The sky above it was doing something extraordinary — the last of the light going slowly through purple and then a deep, ink-shot blue that had the quality of something rare. The kind of sky that felt like a gift from the specific evening and not a general feature of the world.

He took the other chair.

They were quiet for a while. That was something he had noticed — that the silences between them now were different from the silences they used to have. Fewer loaded pauses, fewer things held back. More just two people sitting next to each other in a comfortable dark.

"He called me Dad today," he said.

"I know. I was there."

"Neither of us corrected him."

"No," Jules said.

He looked at the lake. He thought about what he wanted to say and how to say it without it coming out as a defense or a justification or anything that put the conversation somewhere other than where he wanted it to be.

"I told you I never loved you," he said.

She didn't look at him. "I remember."

"I need to say this clearly." He kept his eyes on the lake too. "I was wrong. I was deceived, and I was a coward about the deception, and I said things in that apartment that were not true and that I cannot take back. I know that. I know that a sorry means very little against the weight of what those words cost you." He paused. "I'm not asking for forgiveness. I don't — I don't expect that. I just need you to know that the man who said those things was not the truth of me. He was the worst of me, at the worst possible time, and I have spent three years—"

He stopped.

Jules was very still beside him.

"I have spent three years trying to understand how I let that happen," he said. "How I let someone I trusted — Henry, who I thought was complicated but not dangerous — how I let him rewrite everything I knew about you in forty-eight hours because I was already half-convinced I didn't deserve you."

The last part came out quieter than the rest, and he let it. It was true and the truth of it was the important part.

Jules looked at him.

In the dark her face was soft and careful and she was doing the thing she always did when she was deciding whether to believe something — not guarded exactly, just assessing, her intelligent eyes reading the available evidence.

"You didn't even ask me if it was true," she said.

"No." He held her gaze. "And that is the thing I will never forgive myself for."

Silence.

The lake below them made a small sound — water on stone, gentle and indifferent and beautiful.

Jules looked back at the sky. She breathed out slowly.

Then, in the dark, she reached across the low table and held his hand.

She didn't say anything. He didn't say anything. She just held his hand in both of hers, her thumb over his knuckles, and they sat like that while the sky went all the way to dark and the first stars appeared over the water.

He didn't move. He didn't speak. He sat in the pine-scented dark with her hand over his and felt the specific, enormous, terrifying relief of something that had been very nearly lost and had been, against all reasonable probability, found.

Inside, through the window, the light over Eli's bed was still on — he'd wanted to read a little longer, just one more chapter, please, which Jules had negotiated down to two pages, a compromise Eli had accepted with the air of a diplomat ratifying a treaty. The light over his bed warm and yellow through the glass.

Jules's hand on his in the dark.

The stars.

He thought: this is it. This is exactly it.

He thought: don't ruin it. Don't say anything. Just let it be real.

He didn't say anything.

He just stayed.