Page 12 of Devoured

The kids went. The room emptied. And then it was the two of them and the held-breath quiet of a house with the children sent out of it.

He should have let her go to the office. That was the sane thing, the safe thing, the thing that kept the wall where he needed it.

Instead he followed her down the hall to the office door, and she turned in it, and they were close, closer than the doorway strictly required, and he could see the loose pieces of her hair and the warm color the day had put in her face and the wary set of her mouth, braced for whatever cold thing he'd come to say, because cold was the only thing he'd ever given her.

"Ms. Baxter," he started, and his own voice sounded wrong to him, too careful.

She waited. Steady as a fence post. The way she'd been on the porch.

And what came out of him was not Ms. Baxter, not the careful distance of it, not the wall he'd been holding between them with both hands since the second his hand touched hers in this house last night.

"Lara."

Just that. Her name, the real one, in his mouth for the first time, and it cost him something to say it — it came out low and stripped of all the armor, and he heard it land, heard everything he hadn't meant to put in it, and so did she. Her hand stilled on the doorframe. Something moved across her face, quick, before she could stop it — surprise, and under the surprise something that answered.

For a second neither of them moved. The whole house had gone quiet around them. He was close enough to feel the warmth come off her, close enough that leaning in would have been the easiest thing in the world, and the wanting to was a live thing under his ribs.

She was the one who stepped back.

"I’ll get to the invoices," she said. It came out almost level, almost the office voice, but he’d spent a month learning the inch of difference and the difference was sitting right there in the almost. She didn’t wait for him to find an answer. She turned and went down the hall, and the office door clicked shut behind her, soft and quick, and on the other side of it he heard her stop.

Dean stood in the empty hall with her name still warm in his mouth and both hands hanging off him with nothing to do. He understood it slow and then all at once. For once he wasn’t the one who’d had to walk away. She’d gone first. She’d had to. A man could hold up a whole wall out of always being the one who left, and he had no idea on God’s earth what to do with being the one left standing.

CHAPTER SIX

The text came in at 7:40, and by 7:41 Helen had read it four times, set the phone down, picked it back up, and said something under her breath that she'd have washed Levi's mouth out for.

Then she noticed Lara in the doorway and had the grace to look caught.

"Sorry. You didn't hear that." She set the phone face-down on the counter, done with it. "But honestly. Wendy. The nanny. She's… well. She's not coming back. Ever, it seems. Found something 'less full-on,' she says. With an apology. Two apologies. She put a little sad face on it."

Lara, who had arrived ninety seconds ago intending to spend the day in the office where she belonged, set her bag down slowly. "When you say not coming back⁠—"

"I mean as of this text message." Helen's hands had started doing the thing they did, twisting in front of her, looking for an apron string to worry. "John's still in the hospital. Dean's got the herd and the hospital and a fence down in the north section, Mack told me. The kids have got school in forty minutes and nobody to take them and nobody to be here when they're back, and I’ve got this house and the cooking and John's medications to sort for when he's home and a freezer full of other people's casseroles I can't fit another thing into, and I cannot…" She stopped. Breathed. "I'm sorry. You came to do the books."

"I did," Lara agreed.

"And here I am."

"Here you are."

Somewhere down the hall a small voice with enormous authority informed another, smaller voice that those were not the right socks.

Lara looked at the clock. Looked at Helen, who had been brave for about four days straight and was visibly down to the studs. Looked, internally, at the version of herself who’d crossed two thousand miles of this exact country specifically so she would never again be the woman holding everyone else's morning together, and found that woman, as usual, completely unhelpful in an actual crisis.

"Go deal with the medications," Lara said. "I'll get them to school."

"You can't, the school won't release⁠—"

"Then I'll get them ready and you'll drive, and I'll do the medications, since I can read a chart and I'm not the one who raised them." She was already moving toward the hall. "We can argue about whose job this is later. Preferably never. Where does Levi keep the socks he'll actually wear?"

Levi would wear exactly one pair of socks, which were in the wash, which was the entire problem, and which he explained to her at length while sitting on the floor with the dignity of a small deposed king.

"They're the green ones," he said. "With the line."

"The stripe."

"The line." He was firm on this. "It goes around."