Jack, who had cheated on me.
That was the part I kept glossing over—in the lobby, in the hospital kitchen, at the supermarket, and tonight at his sink. My brain kept trying to file it under "ancient history," as if it were something that had happened to two different people and was no longer relevant.
But it was the only thing that was relevant. It was ground zero for twelve years of distance.
I had come home and found him in an alley with another woman on the night I got my acceptance letter. On the very night I’d wanted nothing more than to hear his voice. I’d packed a bag, left, and never looked back. I had been right to do it. I’d survived residency and built a career without Jack Henley. I didn’t need him. I’d never needed him.
So what exactly was I doing?
I turned the temperature down. I stood in the cold for a few seconds until the water numbed my skin and my head cleared.
Lily needed someone. That was a medical fact. Cassie was gone and Lily needed people around her who gave a damn. I gave a damn. That was a complete and sufficient explanation for why I’d been showing up. The fever. The funeral. The supermarket. Tonight. All of it was explainable. It was all reasonable. None of it required me to examine a single thing beyond the patient’s welfare.
Except.
Except I’d stood at his sink drying his dishes and it had felt like the most natural thing in the world. Except I’d watched him look up at the ceiling toward Lily’s room and felt something shift in my chest that had absolutely nothing to do with professional concern.
Except he’d asked about Tom with that careful, practiced voice, and I’d lied to him. I’d spent the rest of the evening aware of the exact measurement of air between us.
Except he’d stood in the doorway watching me go and I’d turned around and said the thing I’d said. I hadn't planned it, I couldn’t take it back, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I turned the shower off.
I stood in the dying steam with a towel wrapped around me and looked at myself in the mirror.
I’m glad you’re back.
was glad he was back. That was the maddening, inconvenient, inexcusable truth of it. I wasn't glad in a general, human-decency way. I was glad in the way that had been sitting in my chest since the morning in the hospital lobby, since a man I used to know looked up from a chair and my body recognized him before my brain could even find his name.
Twelve years. I’d built a whole life. I’d been so certain that life was enough—that the distance was just distance, and not a shape I’d carved out of myself around an absence.
I brushed my teeth. I turned the light off and got into bed.
Jack Henley had cheated on me. I’d left, and I’d been right to leave. None of that had apparently done a single thing about the fact that I was thirty-five years old and lying in the dark, and the last thing in my head before I closed my eyes was the way he’d said my name at the door.
Night, Maddie.
I closed my eyes.
This was stupid. So damn stupid.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Jack
The caseworker's name was Sandra. She had the energy of someone who had seen every version of this wreckage and was still genuinely rooting for the survivors.
She came on Monday after school pickup. I’d told Lily someone was coming to check in—kept it simple—and Lily had just nodded and gone back to her drawing. To a kid who’d lost everything in a night, a lady with a clipboard was probably the least remarkable thing to happen all month.
Sandra spent ten minutes with Lily first. I stayed in the kitchen and found things to do that weren't listening, though I heard Lily’s voice a few times—brief, matter-of-fact. When Lily came through to get a glass of water, she looked at me and said, "She’s nice," in the tone of a professional restaurant critic, then disappeared back into the living room.
Sandra walked through the house with a different kind of attention than Phelps had shown. She didn’t just look at the smoke detectors; she looked at the drawings taped to the walls and the way Gerald was propped on Lily's pillow. She checked the fridge, then the homework folder on the counter where I’d already signed the permission slip for the zoo trip.
She sat down at the kitchen table and uncapped her pen. "How’s she sleeping?"
"Better than the first week. She still wakes up sometimes. I hear her moving around." I paused. "I check on her."
Sandra nodded. "And eating?"