Chapter eighteen
Tessa
Margaret's dining table has completely surrendered to the wedding. Fabric swatches cover every inch of it, fanned out between empty wine glasses and scattered brochures, and I pick up a square of ivory silk and hold it against the centerpiece mock-up like I have opinions about this, which I do not.
Eleanor drops back into her chair with the full theatrical weight of a woman who has been staring at linen samples for too long.
"I swear every shade of ivory looks identical after an hour," she says, and shoves the whole pile away from her.
She reaches down beside the chair and resurfaces with a worn photo album, the kind with the sticky pages and the plastic film, edges soft from years of handling.
"Fine. If we're taking a break, I need help choosing childhood photos for the rehearsal dinner slideshow anyway."
She slides it across the table like she's been waiting all evening for exactly this excuse.
We hover over the photo album. Margaret points at a gap-toothed Eleanor in a sundress and declares it mandatory. Someone asks about a black eye. Eleanor waves the question off with the practiced ease of someone who has told that story too many times. But George's photos keep appearing between Eleanor's, tucked in chronologically, and I find myself slowing down at each one without meaning to.
"You have to see him at eight years old," Eleanor says, already laughing before she's even found the page.
Beside me, George goes very still.
The photo is exactly as alarming as her laugh suggested. A small, extremely serious boy in a sweater vest, holding up a hand-labeled binder with the words CHORE TRACKER: ELEANOR printed on the front in careful block letters. I press my lips together hard.
"He built me a spreadsheet," Eleanor says, tapping it. "Then printed it out. Laminated the cover."
"It was a system," George says, with the flatness of a man who stands by his choices. "You kept losing track."
Margaret refills her wine and makes absolutely no attempt to disguise how much she is enjoying this.
I glance sideways at George. He is staring at the ceiling with the focused expression of someone pretending to find the light fixture interesting.
Eleanor turns the page to a school photo. It's George at maybe twelve, a split lip, and an expression of a kid who knows exactly who he is. The contrast takes me a second to process.
"There was this one time, George told a kid twice his size to leave me alone," Eleanor says, and her voice drops the teasing for just a moment, something quieter moving through it.
Something small and warm moves through my chest in answer.
"What happened to the other kid?" I ask.
"Nothing," George says. "I just talked to him."
Eleanor snorts. "George used words that kid had never heard before. Not insults. Just multi-syllable."
I laugh before I can catch it, and George turns to look at me with an expression caught exactly halfway between offended and amused. His eyes stay on my face a half-second too long before he looks away, and I feel the specific weight of that half-second.
Eleanor flips further into the album and I lean in without thinking, close enough to catch the faint smell of cedar from George's jacket. There's a photo of Eleanor at a science fair with a tri-fold board covered in handwriting that looks too neat and tidy to be a child's.
"He rewrote my entire project the night before it was due," Eleanor announces, with the satisfaction of someone who has been saving this one.
"You were going to fail," George says, in the tone of a man who has long made peace with this being held against him.
"It got a B-plus," Eleanor adds, pointing directly at me. "Because his hypothesis was too advanced and the judge got suspicious."
I press my hand over my mouth, shoulders already shaking. George reaches across and turns the page himself, firmly, closing the science fair chapter without ceremony.
His hand brushes the edge of mine on the table. It is barely a touch, incidental. And I feel it all the way up my arm.
Eleanor is still talking, something about a spelling bee, but I've lost the thread. I'm watching George's jaw in my peripheral vision. He is trying not to smile, and he is losing, and I am building some kind of portrait of this man that I did not have before tonight.
