Chapter 14: Noah

The car arrived at six fifty five.

I was ready at six thirty and I was not going to tell anyone that either. I had changed four times. Not because I did not know what to wear but because each time I put something on I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and thought about a four year old boy with syrup on his chin and a gap toothed smile and changed again because nothing felt right for meeting a child who already knew my name and whose father had kissed me against my apartment door this morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I settled on a soft cream sweater and dark jeans and flat boots because I was meeting a four year old and four year olds did not care about midnight blue dresses and I wanted to be someone he could actually sit next to without feeling like he was beside a stranger dressed for somewhere else.

Rosa called as the car pulled away from my building.

“The internet has opinions about you,” she said, without preamble.

“I know,” I said.

“Some of them are terrible.”

“I know Rosa.”

“One person called you a social climbing opportunist and I reported the account.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to,” she said. “Are you alright.”

I looked out the window at the city moving past. “I’m going to meet his son tonight.”

Silence on Rosa’s end. A particular quality of silence that contained a great deal of feeling being very carefully compressed.

“Mia,” she said finally.

“I know,” I said.

“That is not dinner. That is something else entirely.”

“I know that too.”

“Are you.” She stopped. Started again. “Is this real. What is happening with you and this man. Is it real.”

I thought about last night. About his heartbeat under my ear and his hand on my back moving slowly in the dark. About the way he said my name like he was allowing himself something. About a gap toothed smile on a phone screen and the message beneath it that had undone me completely.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I think it is very real.”

Rosa exhaled. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Then go. And Mia.”

“Yes.”

“You deserve this. All of it. You hear me.”

I pressed my lips together and looked out at the city and did not trust my voice enough to say anything so I said nothing and Rosa understood because she always understood and she hung up and left me with the city and the moving dark outside the window and my own heartbeat which was behaving in a way I was going to have to simply accept and move through.

The building was the same as before. The doorman nodded. The elevator opened directly into the apartment and this time when the doors parted the first thing I heard was not quiet but the particular productive chaos of a small person who had opinions about where things should be and was expressing those opinions at volume.

“It goes HERE,” a small voice said with great conviction from somewhere in the living room. “Not THERE. HERE.”

“It looks the same from where I’m standing,” said another voice. Male. Young. Not Damien.

I stepped out of the elevator.

The living room had been reorganized since my last visit. Or rather it was in the process of being reorganized by a small dark haired boy who was standing in the center of it in dinosaur pajamas at six fifty five in the evening which told me bedtime was a negotiation in this household, pointing at a tower of cushions with the authority of someone who had very clear architectural standards.

Beside him, cross legged on the floor attempting to follow instructions, was a young man I had not seen before. Early twenties. Dark haired like Damien but lighter somehow, with an easy open face and the comfortable manner of someone who had been in this apartment long enough to sit on the floor without thinking about it.

Neither of them had noticed me yet.

“If you put the big one on top it will fall,” the young man said.

“It will NOT fall,” the small boy said, with absolute certainty.

He put the big cushion on top.

The tower fell.

A beat of profound silence.

“That,” said the young man carefully, “was the tower’s fault.”

“Yes,” said Noah Cole, with the immediate conviction of someone who had decided on this explanation and was fully committed to it. “It was the tower.”

I made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Something smaller that escaped before I could stop it.

They both turned.

Noah looked at me with Damien’s eyes. Dark and direct and taking in information with that same quality of focused attention, that same sense of a person who was genuinely looking and genuinely processing what they saw. He was beautiful the way children were beautiful when they had not yet learned to be anything other than entirely themselves, open and present and fully occupying the moment they were in.

He looked at me for three seconds.

“You’re Mia,” he said. Not a question. A fact, stated with the confidence of someone who had been given information and retained it.

“I am,” I said. “And you’re Noah.”

He considered this confirmation as though checking it against some internal record. Then apparently satisfied he turned back to the fallen cushion tower and began reassembling it.

“Daddy said you make paintings,” he said, to the cushions.

“I do,” I said. I came further into the room and crouched down to his level beside the cushion pile because crouching was what you did when you wanted a small person to understand you were not someone to look up at. “Do you like paintings.”

Noah stopped stacking and looked at me with an expression of genuine consideration. “I like dinosaurs,” he said. “Do you paint dinosaurs.”

“I have not yet,” I said. “But I could.”

This landed well. He looked at me with a new and specific interest that had not been there before and then looked at the young man on the floor beside him. “She could paint dinosaurs,” he said, as though sharing important news.

“Incredible,” the young man said. He looked up at me over Noah’s head with warm amused eyes and mouthed the word sorry in a way that told me he was not sorry at all.

“I’m Caleb,” he said. “I help with Noah on evenings when Damien has things.” He stood up and extended his hand and I shook it. “He’s in his study. He said to tell you he’ll be five minutes and that he is sorry and that Noah should be in bed already.”

“I’m NOT tired,” Noah said, without looking up from the cushions.

“He is absolutely exhausted,” Caleb said quietly to me. “He has been fighting sleep for forty minutes.”

I looked at Noah assembling his cushion tower with the focused determination of a child running entirely on willpower and opposition, and felt something move through my chest that was warm and slightly alarming in its completeness.

“Can I help,” I said to Noah.

He looked at me. Assessed. Then patted the floor beside him.

I sat down on the floor of Damien Cole’s living room in my cream sweater and dark jeans and helped a four year old build a cushion tower and it was the most natural thing I had done in longer than I could remember.

We got the big cushion on top this time.

The tower held.

Noah looked at it with profound satisfaction and then looked at me with an expression so like his father’s in its composed certainty that I felt my heart do something entirely without my permission.

“You’re good at this,” he said.

“I had a good teacher,” I said.

He accepted this as his due, which was also exactly like his father, and then without any preamble or transition he climbed into my lap and leaned his small warm weight back against my chest and looked at the tower.

I went very still.

Not from discomfort. From the opposite of discomfort. From the sudden and complete realness of a small person choosing, without negotiation or agenda, simply to be close to me. His dark hair smelled like something clean and sweet and his weight against me was warm and immediate and entirely trusting and I sat on the floor of Damien’s living room and held a child I had known for eleven minutes and felt something happen in my chest that I understood, with the quiet certainty of things that could not be undone, was permanent.

“That is unprecedented,” Caleb said softly from above us, with an expression that was no longer amused but something more serious and more careful. “He does not do that.”

I looked up at him.

“He doesn’t sit with people,” Caleb said quietly. “He’s friendly. But he doesn’t.” He stopped. “He just doesn’t.”

I looked down at the top of Noah’s dark head.

“Tell me about the dinosaurs,” I said to him softly.

And he told me. At length and with tremendous authority and occasional sound effects, about every dinosaur he considered significant and why, and I sat on the floor and listened with my arms loosely around him and the cushion tower standing victorious beside us and the city quiet outside the tall windows.

That was how Damien found us.

I heard the study door open and felt rather than saw him stop. That particular quality of stillness that was specific to him, the complete focused arrest of a person encountering something they had not prepared for.

I looked up.

He was standing in the doorway of his study in dark trousers and a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his eyes were on me and Noah on the floor and the expression on his face was something I had not seen there before. Not the hunger or the composure or the careful management of things.

Something that had no defenses around it at all.

Something that looked, undeniably and completely, like a man falling.

He looked at me over the top of his son’s head and I looked back at him and the moment stretched between us warm and quiet and full of something neither of us had words for yet and both of us understood completely.

Noah craned his head back to look up at me upside down.

“Daddy makes pancakes on Sundays,” he said seriously. “You should come on Sunday.”

I heard Damien make a sound from the doorway. Something between a cough and a laugh.

“That is Mia’s decision to make buddy,” he said. His voice was not entirely steady.

Noah looked at me upside down and waited with the patience of someone who considered the answer obvious and was simply waiting for the other person to catch up.

“I like pancakes,” I said.

Noah nodded, satisfied, and turned back to his tower.

Damien crossed the room and crouched down beside us and looked at me with those dark eyes that were very close and very unguarded and said nothing for a moment.

Then quietly, just for me. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said back.

And the smile that moved across his face then was not the small controlled almost smile I had catalogued from the restaurant. It was real and unhurried and lit something in his entire face that transformed him so completely that I understood I was seeing something very few people ever got to see.

Damien Cole, unguarded.

Damien Cole, happy.

Caleb appeared above us. “Okay young man. Tower stays. You go.”

Noah made the sounds of a person being deeply wronged but allowed himself to be lifted and carried toward his room, pausing only to look back at me over Caleb’s shoulder with those serious dark eyes.

“Sunday,” he said. Firmly. As though confirming a contract.

“Sunday,” I agreed.

He disappeared down the hall.

Damien was still crouched beside me on the floor and the apartment was quiet now and he was very close and his eyes were doing the thing where they moved across my face like they were reading something written specifically for them.

“He climbed into your lap,” he said quietly.

“He did,” I said.

“He has never done that,” he said. “With anyone.”

“Caleb mentioned.”

Damien was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and pushed my hair back from my face the way he had the night before, slowly, with both hands, and held my face between his palms and looked at me with that completely undefended expression.

“Mia,” he said. Just my name.

“I know,” I said. “I feel it too.”

He kissed me softly. Brief and warm and tasting of something that was becoming, dangerously and irrevocably, like home.

When he pulled back his phone on the kitchen counter lit up.

Neither of us looked at it.

It lit up again. Then again. Then it began to ring, loud and insistent, shattering the quiet of the apartment with the particular urgency of something that would not be ignored.

Damien closed his eyes for one second.

Then he stood and crossed to the counter and looked at the screen.

Something happened to his face.

Not the Marcus expression. Not the controlled fury I had seen before. Something deeper and older and considerably more dangerous.

He picked up the phone.

“How did you get this number,” he said. His voice was completely flat.

I stood up from the floor.

Whatever the person on the other end said made Damien go very still in the way that I had come to understand meant something significant was happening beneath the surface of that composure. His eyes found mine across the kitchen.

He put the call on speaker.

A voice filled the apartment. Male. Smooth and unhurried with the particular confidence of someone who believed they were holding the winning hand.

“Hello Damien,” the voice said. “I think it’s time we talked about what really happened to Noah’s mother. And what you paid her to disappear.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

I looked at Damien.

He was looking back at me with an expression that told me everything and nothing all at once.

The voice on the phone was not Marcus.

It was someone else entirely.

And what they knew about Noah’s mother was not a rumor or a headline or a manufactured narrative.

It was the truth and it was about to change everything.