Chapter Sixteen – Lila
The afternoon light came in at that particular winter angle that turned everything gold before it disappeared, the last generosity of a January sun that had never quite committed to warmth but at least offered this, a slow amber wash across the worn surface of the card table that made the scratches in the wood look like something intentional. The fire had been burning since noon and had settled into its working state, the low orange core of it, the occasional muffled shift of a log finding a new position. The room smelled of woodsmoke and old coffee and the particular close-lived smell of a house in its winter months, wool and woodwork and the specific warmth of people who had been spending their evenings in the same rooms.
Rhett had been talking for the better part of twenty minutes.
This was not unusual. Rhett talked during cards the way he talked during most things that required some portion of his attention, freely and with great investment in whatever angle he’d decided was funniest. Currently the angle was Cole’s face, specifically the quality of stillness it achieved when Cole was holding a strong hand, which Rhett had apparently decided was his most interesting tell.
“It’s not that you go blank,” Rhett was saying, with the considered air of a man delivering a diagnosis. “It’s that you go too still. Like a dog that’s spotted a squirrel and hasn’t committed yet. There’s a quality of suspended decision to it.” He tapped two fingers on the table. “I’m just saying. I can see the squirrel, Cole.”
Cole did not look up from his cards.
“You’ve been saying that for three hands,” he said, “and you’ve lost two of them.”
“I’m building a case,” Rhett said.
I was looking at my own cards and not reading them.
I knew what was in them. I had looked when Wade dealt, had registered the values without doing anything with the information, and then my eyes had drifted down to the table surface and stayed there while Rhett laid out his squirrel theory and Cole responded to it with the particular economy of a man who had learned to say a great deal with very few syllables. The jack of hearts had been looking up at me for the past four minutes. I had not considered what to do about it.
My thumb was moving along the edge of the cards. I noticed this without meaning to notice it, the repetitive movement of it, back and forth, paper edge against the pad of my thumb, the small tactile loop I’d been running without deciding to. My belly rested against the edge of the table in the way everything rested against everything now, present and requiring its usual small adjustments, and the fire was warm on the right side of my face and Rhett was saying something about pot odds that I caught the end of and not the beginning.
Rhett’s joke landed across the table.
I heard it. There was a half-second where I might have laughed, might have given him the dry response he was angling for, and then the window passed and Cole made the sound instead and I looked down at my jack of hearts and said nothing.
I had been doing this since lunch. Not visibly, or not visibly enough that anyone had said something, but I could feel it, the half-second lag on everything, the way the room kept going at its ordinary pace while something in me sat back and watched it from slightly outside. I knew what it was. I had known since I woke up that morning with the grey pre-dawn light coming through the curtain gap and Hope already awake and movingunder my hands, turning in her slow deliberate way, and the weight of the previous days sitting in my chest without having gone anywhere.
The guilt had a texture now that it hadn’t had a name for before yesterday morning. It was specific. It had specific objects.
Wade set his cards face-down on the table.
Not a fold, not a check, just set them down, and when I glanced up he was looking at me. His dark eyes were level and unhurried, reading my face the way he read faces, which was to say: accurately and without making a performance of it. He had both forearms on the table and his body was still in the way that meant he had already made a decision about something.
“What’s on your mind, Lila?”
His voice was low. Shaped for me and not the room.
Rhett glanced up from his cards. Something moved across his face, the quick, perceptive read he ran on rooms when he stopped talking long enough to perform it, and he leaned back in his chair without a word. Cole went still at the far end of the table, his mug halfway to his mouth and then not moving.
The fire popped once. The log shifted. The amber light moved on the table surface.
My jaw tightened.
I looked down at my cards. Then at Wade.
“I don’t know how to say it without it sounding wrong,” I said.
Wade did not tell me it wasn’t wrong. He did not fill the space with reassurance or offer the easy, smoothing response that would have let me decide not to say it at all. He just looked at me, steady and patient, and he said, “Try anyway.”
The pause that followed was long enough that Rhett shifted slightly in his chair. I felt it more than saw it, the small controlled movement of a man resisting the urge to do something with the quiet.
“I care about you,” I said. The words came out flat and careful, which was the only way I knew how to say things that cost me. “All three of you. In ways I didn’t expect.” I looked at the table. “And it feels wrong.”
Nobody moved.
“Ethan is dead.” I said his name the way I had been learning to say it, directly and without softening, because softening it had started to feel like a kind of untruth. “He’s been dead for five months. And I’m sitting here laughing at dinner and sleeping through the night and,“ My knuckles had found the edge of the table and I felt them there, the pressure of them white against the wood. “I’m letting myself feel things I don’t have any right to feel yet. Maybe ever.”
Rhett opened his mouth.
