I stopped. Then I turned and looked him straight in the eye, the question I’d been carrying for weeks finally pushing past my ribs. "What are we doing, Jack? Truly."
He didn't answer right away. We walked past a stall where a woman was shaking the rain off a stack of wool blankets, the rhythmicsnap-snapof the fabric the only sound between us.
"I don't know yet," he said. His voice was low, stripped of the usual grit. "I know I haven't earned the right to—I know there are things I haven't said. Things that need to be out in the open." He kept his eyes on the pavement. "But I don't want to stop. Whatever this is."
He paused, the silence stretching between us.
"I don't want to pretend the last few weeks haven't been—" He stopped, shaking his head as if the words he needed didn't exist in the language he spoke. "I just don't want to stop."
I looked at the street. At Lily a few paces ahead, the spring light catching the dark of her hair as it broke through the clouds.The town was reforming itself after the storm, ordinary and busy.
Jack wasn't asking me for anything. He was just placing the true thing on the table. It was the same quiet, devastating earnestness he brought to school lunch lists and dark bedrooms at 3:00 AM.
"There are things that need to be said," I agreed, my voice finally finding its footing.
"Yeah," he said. "There are."
"Not today," I said.
"No," he agreed. "Not today."
We walked on. Lily stopped to look at something in a window. Jack and I stopped behind her, side by side in the wet afternoon light, close enough that our shoulders were almost touching.
Not quite, but almost.
Lily pressed her face to the glass and made a sound of profound approval at whatever was inside, and Jack looked at me over her head and something passed between us that I didn't have a name for yet.
I thought:there's going to be a conversation. A real one, the kind we've been avoiding since we first met in that hospital lobby. And it's going to be hard, and I don't know what comes out the other side of it.
But I was tired of pretending I didn't want to find out.
Chapter Forty-Three
Jack
Bellows had closed the garage on Tuesday for a boiler inspection. The landlord had been deferring the work for months, and the heating had finally quit over the weekend, leaving the shop floor like an icebox.
"One day," Bellows had said, leaning against the doorframe with a sigh that sounded like retirement. "Maybe two. Don't go far, Jack."
I’d looked at the lift, the bay doors, and the way the morning light hit the tool bench. It was a good shop, but it was tired. It had the bones of a place that could do more than just get by, if someone was willing to put in the work to actually pull it back together.
But the doors were locked and the tools were put away, so I had a Tuesday with nowhere to be.
I made Lily's lunch—cream cheese and cucumber, oat bar, grapes—checked the planner, signed the thing that needed signing, and walked her to school. She pointed at the cat and I nodded. At the gate she gave me the look she'd started giving me recently, the one that meant she was checking something without asking, and then she went in.
I went home and looked at the house.
The guardianship had been formalised three weeks ago. A hearing, some paperwork, a judge who'd asked Lily two questions and then looked at me over his glasses and said something about the importance of stability that I'd taken seriously. Phelps had shaken my hand afterward. Sandra had sent a card. Lily had been told, and then nodded and asked if we could have pizza, so we'd had pizza.
It was done. She was mine and I was hers. Clear Creek was where we lived, and I had a job, a house, and a list that was mostly crossed off now. That still surprised me when I looked at it.
I did the laundry. I'd gotten better at this too—not competent exactly, but I was no longer a man who stared at a washing machine like it was going to do something unexpected. Lily's things first, then mine, sorted by color the way she'd told me you were supposed to. I'd been doing it wrong for the first three weeks, which had resulted in one of her white shirts coming out a faint pink that she'd examined gravely and declared she actually preferred.
I put a wash on and went through the house. Straightened things, wiped down surfaces. Made the beds. Found a sock behind the radiator in Lily's room that had apparently been there for some time. I was getting better at all of it: the rhythms of a house, the things that needed doing without being told, the geography of a shared life. It had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like… just what I did.
I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table.
The coloring book was gone. Lily had finished it a couple of weeks ago and I'd bought her a new one. At some point the old one had moved to the shelf without either of us making a decision about it. I hadn't thrown it away. I wasn't going to.