"Age doesn't bother you?" I ask. "I'm twenty-seven. You're—"
"Forty-three. And I've been through enough to know what matters and what doesn't." His eyes hold mine steadily. "What does is that when I look at you and Jackson, something in me that's been very quiet for a very long time starts making noise again."
That breaks something open in my chest. Something that Derek spent five years trying to bury.
I tell him everything then. We're still connected, his hands warm on my back, and the words come out in a flood I can't stop. Derekat twenty-two, so charming, so attentive. The slow erosion of my friendships. The fights about my parents, the terrible things I said to my mother, the four years of silence that followed. Getting pregnant. Hoping it would fix something that was already beyond fixing. The first time Derek hit me, how shocked I was, how I convinced myself it was a one-time thing.
How it wasn't.
"He told Jackson dinosaurs weren't real," I say, and the words crack in the middle. "My little boy who loves them more than anything. Derek told him they were myths and that he needed to find a better interest. And I just sat there."
Tom's jaw tightens. "You were surviving."
"I should have defended him."
"You are defending him. You got him out. You brought him here." His voice is firm and certain. "That's not nothing, Claire. That's everything."
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. "I need to call my mother."
"Yes."
"I don't know how to start that conversation."
"You say you're sorry and you were wrong and you love her," Tom says. "The rest will follow."
"What if she's too hurt?"
"Then you keep apologizing. But she won't be." He says it with a quiet certainty that makes me want to believe him. "She's your mother. She's been waiting for this call since the day you stopped making them."
I sit with that for a moment, turning it over. Letting myself hope.
"Take a week," Tom continues. "Rest. Get Jackson settled. Start at Murphy's, meet the town, breathe some clean air. Then call her when you're ready." His thumb traces my cheekbone. "And whatever happens, you have people here now. This whole town is going to close ranks around you and that kid, I promise you that."
"That's hard to imagine," I admit. "Having people."
"You'll get used to it."
I look at him. The weathered face and the kind eyes and the scars that map a life of hard choices and survived disasters. A man who came home from war and built something quiet and good in a small town. A man who pulled over when he saw someone struggling with too many bags and never once walked away.
"Tell me about the military," I say. "Tell me something real."
So, he does. He talks about fifteen years of deployments, of leading men through places that broke other people, of the explosion that left those scars across his ribs. About the sergeant who pulled him out of the rubble and died three months later in a different country while Tom was already stateside healing. About the guilt that never fully goes away.
"I moved here thinking it would be simpler," he finishes. "Serve the town. Help people. Come home to a quiet house and some jazz records and a good book." He pauses. "It was simpler. But simple got lonely a lot faster than I expected."
"It won't be lonely anymore," I say. "If you want that."
"I want that." No hesitation. "I want you and Jackson and the chaos and the noise and the dinosaur facts at the breakfast table. I want all of it."
Something warm and terrifying blooms in my chest.
Eventually we clean up and he leads me to his bedroom without fanfare, pulling back the dark blue covers and waiting while I climb in. He takes the other side, and when he opens his arms, I don't hesitate this time. I move into his space and settle against his chest like I've done it a thousand times before.
"Which side of the bed do you like?" he asks.
"This one," I say. "This exact one."
He laughs quietly. I feel it rumble through his chest more than I hear it. We lie there in the dark, his hand moving in slow circles on my back. Down the hall, Jackson sleeps peacefully. Outside, Blackwater Falls is dark but quiet.
