I did and I didn't. I wanted to reach out, but I felt like a trespasser in a story that had moved on without me. "In a minute," I said, clutching my tea like a shield.
I waited until the crowd around him had thinned. Then I told Tom I'd be back and crossed the room. The distance felt longer than it was, the linoleum floor making every step feel deliberate.
Jack saw me coming. Something shifted in his face, a subtle tightening at the corners of his eyes.
"Maddie." His voice was rough, a low rasp that sounded like it hadn't been used for anything but necessities all day.
"Jack." I looked at him, really looked at him, seeing the exhaustion etched into the hollows of his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
He nodded once. It was the same nod he’d always had. Brief and functional, the one that meant he’d received the information and was putting it somewhere safe and internal for later. He was a man who processed the world in compartments, and right now, he was built of iron walls.
I crouched down then, getting to Lily's level.
She looked at me with those eyes. She didn't know me—not really, not in daylight. But she didn't look away either.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Maddie. I was your mom's friend."
Lily considered this with a gravity that made me feel like I was being audited. "From before?"
"From before," I said. "A long time ago." I searched for a bridge, something that wasn't a platitude. "Your mom used to laugh really loud. Did you know that? Even when she wasn't supposed to."
Lily's expression changed, just slightly. A spark of genuine recognition. "She got shushed at the cinema once," she whispered. "By a stranger."
"That sounds exactly right," I said, and for a second, the airless weight of the hall felt like it might actually lift. "She never did know how to be quiet when something was funny."
Something moved across Lily's face. Not a smile, but a softening, the closest thing to light I’d seen in her since I’d found her in that hospital bed. She looked down at the rabbit, smoothing its worn ear, then back up at me. For the first time, she didn't look like she was waiting for me to leave.
I stood.
Jack kept his eyes on me, his gaze unreadable. Tom was watching from across the room, hands in his pockets, waiting.
"Thank you for coming," Jack said.
"Of course," I said.
We stood there for a second with nothing left to say and everything left to say.
Then Tom was at my shoulder. He didn’t wait for an invitation; he just moved into the space beside me, his presence announced by the subtle scent of expensive cologne. I introduced them.
Tom reached out and shook Jack’s hand, saying all the right things in a voice perfectly pitched for the occasion. I watched them—Tom’s hand steady and manicured, Jack’s hand rough and scarred at the knuckles—and felt the particular vertigo of two parts of my life standing three feet apart. It was a collision of the life I had chosen and the one I had left behind, and for a moment, I couldn't remember how to breathe in the gap between them.
We left shortly after.
In the car, Tom was quiet for a long time. He didn't speak until we had cleared the town limits and the dark, dormant fields of Clear Creek were blurring past.
"He seems like a good man," Tom said.
I looked out the window. "Yeah," I said. "He is."
Tom didn't say anything else. Neither did I.
Outside, the world moved past in the grey afternoon light, and I thought about Lily's face when I'd mentioned her mom'slaugh, that almost-smile, and held onto it for the rest of the drive home.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jack
The crowd thinned slowly, with people peeling off in twos and threes. A hand on the shoulder, a last word, and then gone. I stood at the edge of it all afternoon and let the world happen around me. I kept Lily close, said what needed to be said, and kept the rest behind my teeth.