Page 97 of Never Alone
"Know what?"
"That he's that, to you."
I didn't have an answer for that. I'd never told him. I'd assumed for a long time that the people around you knew what they were to you without it being said.
Sitting across a candle from a woman who'd asked me a question I'd never asked myself, I wasn't sure that was true anymore.
"I don't know," I said.
"You should tell him."
"Maybe."
The food came.
The waitress set down Tessa's pasta. My steak. She refilled the wine, asked if I wanted another beer, and went away when I shook my head.
Tessa took a bite of the pasta.
"Oh."
"Good?"
She nodded with her mouth full.
"Worth the walks past?"
"Yeah."
I cut into the steak. Good steak. I wouldn't have noticed it any other night of my life.
We ate. We talked.
I asked her what had gotten her into baking, and she told me. The cleaned-up version—a job she'd needed when she'd come to Havensworth, the only person willing to take her on without experience being Mrs. Thompson, the surprise of finding out she was actually good at it. I knew the long version. The pieces of it I knew, anyway.Needing a jobwas a clean way of saying she'd needed somewhere on this earth to put her hands.
She talked about the dough. About the proof. About the way the kitchen smelled at five in the morning before anyone elsewas in it. There was a thing she said—about making something with her own hands and watching somebody eat it and be happy about it—that I let sit in the air longer than she meant it to.
The first time she'd brought me something she'd made, I'd declined. I'd told her I didn't eat sweets and watched her face do a thing it hadn't done before. It had taken half a second to land and another half to disappear. She'd reset it so fast I'd almost talked myself into thinking I hadn't seen it.
I had.
I wasn't making that mistake again.
She kept talking. Her hands had come out of her lap, moving with the sentences the way they moved at the bakery counter when she was explaining a pastry to someone. She was laughing at small things in her own story that didn't strictly earn a laugh.
She was Natalie tonight.
The girl from when we were sixteen. Chatty. Bright. The kind of girl who could turn a room without meaning to.
She'd come back to her own face.
I lost a few seconds inside that.
My phone buzzed against my thigh.
I didn't pull it out.
It buzzed again.
