“Call me sentimental,” Maude said, setting everything down with a little flourish, “but nothing brings people to the table like something bubbling.” She leaned in and stage-whispered to me, “And butter.”
“Noted,” I said solemnly.
“Where’s our new guest?” she asked Gideon. “Sam, was it?”
“Room six,” he said, wiping his hands on a towel and slinging it over his shoulder like he’d been born to kitchen work. “Said he might sleep through.”
“People always say that,” Maude said, cheerful and knowing, “and then the smell drags them down.” She lifted the lid and the room filled with something that could mend marriages.
As if summoned, a floorboard creaked upstairs. Then slow, deliberate footfalls made their way along the hall. My shoulders tightened without my permission. I didn’t know why at first. It felt like weather changing—a hush before rain.
The staircase groaned. I glanced up out of habit more than interest, smoothing a napkin I’d already smoothed twice.
A man paused at the bend where the banister curves. He was thinner than the outline men usually make. He wore a flannel shirt washed to exhaustion and jeans that sagged at the knee. A cheap backpack looked newer than the rest of him, hands notched white around the straps like someone might take it.
“Evening,” he said, uncertain, voice rasped thin as rope. His eyes flicked from Maude to me to Gideon and settled on the table with an animal’s caution.
“Evening,” Maude said, warm as a kitchen light. “You’re just in time. Sit, honey.”
He hesitated. A small thing—no one else would have noticed it—but Gideon’s weight shifted beside me, a subtle calculation in the bones. He pulled a chair out for me, close enough to his that our knees brushed.
The man stepped into the dining room, and the air changed from butter to something else I couldn’t name. It wasn’t the smell. It was recognition passing through the body of the house, a muscle remembering a wound.
Maude froze first.
Not dramatically. Not with a gasp. Just stopped in the middle of reaching for a spoon like time had mislaid her.
“Sam?” she said, and the way she said the name dripped with history.
He turned his head. Up close, I could see that his face held the ruins of handsome: good bones with the smile weathered off, eyes too pale for comfort. He looked at Maude and then at me, and something passed through his expression.
He smiled. Not happy. A private little turn of the mouth, like a joke at a funeral.
“Haze,” he said, soft, almost tender. “Look at you.”
The room slid sideways.
For a beat, I didn’t place him, because the face I’d memorized had hair that wasn’t gray and cheeks that weren’t cut so sharp. But the eyes had always been wrong for blue. And the mouth had always practiced its words too much.
I was twelve again. Socks wet in the kitchen. Hall light too bright. The sirens too late. The word “accident” used like a bandage that doesn’t stick.
The name moved through me like a current hits: first resistance, then the pull. My own voice came out stranger than anything I’d ever heard it do. “No.”
Gideon’s hand was already at my waist, anchoring me to the chair that had reappeared. He didn’t look at me when he asked, low and level, “Hazel?”
“Sam Jarrow,” Maude said, and the way she pronounced it sent a chill through me. She hadn’t moved much—just enough to plant herself between him and the kitchen like the kitchenneeded guarding. “I never forget a name that made Nora’s voice go cold.”
He spread his hands as if to prove he had nothing to hide. People who’ve hidden much always do that. “Ma’am,” he said. “Long time.”
I couldn’t get my breath down past my collarbone. It stacked there, shallow and sharp.
Gideon’s hand flexed at my hip:here, here, here. “Hazel,” he repeated, not a question this time, more like a place to return to.
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
I hadn’t told him. Hadn’t had time to tell him.
Sam took a step. His voice lowered for me in that way bad men think is intimate when it’s just predatory. “I came to see you.”
