Chapter Twenty Three

Jules' POV

He kept showing up.

That was the thing. I had not anticipated the showing up. I had anticipated the legal battle, the lawyers, the cold back-and-forth of a man with resources trying to insert himself into a life he had no part in building. I had anticipated distance and bureaucracy and maybe eventually a court-appointed mediator with a clipboard. I had not anticipated Adam Casey at my door on a Saturday morning with two grocery bags and a cautious expression, saying: "Eli mentioned he likes blueberries. I wasn't sure which brand."

I stared at him.

"He told me at the baseball game," Adam said. "He gave me a full ranking of his top five fruits. Blueberries were second. Mango was first but he said—" he looked at the bag— "it's complicated with mango."

I had not moved from the doorway.

"Jules." He held the bags out slightly. Not pushily. Just presenting them, the way you present evidence to someone who is deciding whether to believe you. "I'm not asking to come in. You can take these and close the door. I just—" He stopped. Reorganized. "I don't know how to do this correctly. I don't know the right approach. But I figured showing up was at least in the right direction. Even if you tell me to leave."

I looked at the groceries. I looked at his face. I thought about the text the night before — clean, short, no drama — the filing is being withdrawn. Cooper has everything. You won't see more papers. I had read it in Eli's doorway after I'd tucked him in, while he was already asleep with his small fist curled under his chin, and I had stood there in the dark hallway for a long time before I'd gone to bed.

I said: "You can put them in the kitchen."

I stood back. He came in.

* * *

He stayed for three hours.

That was not what I had planned. What I had planned was a brief, civil acknowledgment of the groceries, perhaps a coffee to prove I was not unreasonable, and then a polite exit. What happened instead was that Eli came barreling out of his room twenty minutes after Adam arrived — having been told there was a visitor, having been told it was Adam, having apparently been building a case in his mind for several days about the baseball game and the stairs and the general question of whether Adam might like trains — and the rest of the morning happened around me rather than at my direction.

They sat on the living room floor for an hour and a half.

Eli had a train set that took up a frankly unreasonable amount of floor space and required a working knowledge of an organizational system he had invented himself and enforced with a seriousness that bordered on professional. Adam received this system with complete attention — no condescension, no performing interest for my benefit, just genuine, focused attention — and within fifteen minutes he was receiving clarifications about track geometry from a three-year-old with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched.

Don't do this, Jules. My own voice, reasonable and self-protective, from somewhere sensible inside me. Don't stand here watching them and letting your heart make decisions your brain hasn't approved.

Eli held up a blue engine. "This one is Gordon," he said gravely. "Gordon is important."

"Got it. Gordon is important."

"He goes first."

"On the outer track?"

Eli blinked. Like he hadn't expected Adam to know about tracks. Like the fact of Adam knowing about tracks was a fundamentally new piece of information that required reassessment of his entire position. "Yes," he said carefully. "On the outer track."

"Okay," Adam said. And he put Gordon on the outer track. And Eli looked at him for one more long second, then went back to his own section of the layout with something that was not quite a smile but was the expression Eli made immediately before a smile, which I knew, because I had been cataloging his expressions since he was forty seconds old.

I went back to the kitchen.

I made coffee because I needed something to do with my hands.

* * *

Madeline came in from her room around noon, registered Adam on the floor with an armful of wooden trains, registered my expression in the kitchen, and raised both eyebrows at me in a question that required no words.

I shook my head slightly.

She poured herself a coffee, leaned against the counter beside me, and watched for a moment.

"The way that man looks at your son," she said, her voice low, "is not the look of a man who wants to take him from you." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "That's the look of a man who's terrified he's already missed too much."

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not doing anything. I'm stating an observable fact."

"Madeline."

She shrugged. "I'm just saying what your face is already thinking."

I said nothing because she was right and I had no good comeback for right.

Eli appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Mommy. Adam says he doesn't know what mango tastes like. That is very sad. Can we give him some?"

I looked at Eli. I looked at the mango on the counter — Madeline kept them, not me, a rotating tribute to her own childhood — and I thought about the cosmic unfairness of a three-year-old who moved so easily through the world, who had not yet learned to carry the weight of all the ways people could hurt you.

"Sure," I said. "Get him some mango."

Eli retrieved the mango with the gravity of a mission and disappeared back into the living room.

I stayed in the kitchen.

Through the doorway I heard Adam's voice: "This is — okay, that's good."

Eli: "I know. I told you."

"You were right."

"I am usually right," Eli said, with a serenity that would have been infuriating in an adult and was devastatingly charming in a child.

Adam laughed. A real one. The kind he used to do on the farm sometimes when something caught him off guard — warm and sudden and unguarded, the laugh of the man in the barn loft rather than the man in the glass building.

I turned around and looked out the kitchen window at the street below. I pressed my lips together hard.

Do not, I told myself.

But something in my chest, something that had been sealed for three years under all the practical, necessary layers of survival and motherhood and making it work, pressed back.

He came back, it said. He keeps coming back.

I know, I told it.

That's the thing about him. He always did know how to show up too late and still make it feel like exactly the right time.

I stood at the kitchen window and I didn't cry, because I hadn't cried about Adam Casey in three years and I was not going to start today, and also because Eli would come in at any moment needing a juice box.

But it was a near thing.

It was a very near thing.