Chapter 5 Five Raisins
Penny POV
I wake up at midnight for no reason.
That happens to me sometimes my brain just decides sleep is finished and turns itself on like a light switch with no warning. Usually I lie there and scroll my phone until it turns back off. Tonight my throat is dry enough that I actually need water so I get up, pull my hoodie over my pajamas, and pad out into the hallway in my socks.
The guest room door is at the end of the hall. The kitchen is past the stairs. I know the route by heart now, third step creaks, turn left, do not bump the small table by the wall that Lily calls her "important things table" even though the only things on it are a smooth rock, a broken crayon, and a plastic dinosaur missing one leg.
I turn the corner into the kitchen and stop.
The light is on.
Jake is at the table.
He does not hear me come in, his back is partly toward the door and his head is down and there is something in his hands. A photograph. He is holding it with both hands flat on the table and his shoulders are doing something that takes me one full second to understand.
He is shaking.
Not a lot. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies. The quiet kind. The kind people do when they have been holding something very heavy for a very long time and their arms are finally giving out, and they are trying with everything they have to make sure nobody sees it.
I see it.
I see the photograph. The silver frame from the windowsill is the one nobody touches. He has it face-up and he is looking at it and his jaw is tight and his eyes are wet and he has no idea I am standing in the doorway watching him fall apart.
I should go back to my room.
Every sensible part of my brain says go back to your room, Penny. This is private. This is his. You are the babysitter and this is none of your business and if you walk in there right now you will embarrass him and he will be cold to you for the rest of the month and nothing good comes from this.
I stand there for three more seconds.
Then I walk into the kitchen.
He hears my socks on the floor. His whole body changes in less than a second, shoulders pulling up, hands flipping the photograph face-down on the table, head coming up. He looks at me. His eyes are red at the edges and his jaw is set hard and he is waiting.
For the laugh. For the awkward apology and the retreat. For me to make this worse by trying to make it better with words.
I walk to the counter. I fill the kettle. I turn it on.
I get two mugs from the cabinet, his big blue chipped one and a smaller yellow one for me. I put a teabag in each. I wait for the kettle. The kitchen is completely quiet except for the sound of water heating up and outside, somewhere far away, a car passing.
Jake does not say anything.
I do not say anything.
The kettle clicks off. I pour the water. I carry both mugs to the table and I set the blue one in front of him and I sit down across from him with my yellow one and I wrap both hands around it because the house is cold at night.
He looks at the mug.
He looks at me.
I look at my tea.
We sat there for a long time. Five minutes maybe. Maybe ten. I drink my tea slowly and he drinks his and the photograph stays face-down between us and I do not ask about it and he does not explain it and at no point does either of us say a single word.
It is the least awkward silence I have ever sat in.
Somewhere in the middle of it I look up and find him already looking at me and we both look away at the exact same time and I take a long sip of tea and focus very hard on the window above the sink.
When my mug is empty I stand up. I carry both mugs to the sink. This is empty too and I rinse them and set them on the drying rack. I turn off the tap. I turn toward the hallway.
"Penny."
His voice is quiet. Low. Like he is not sure he actually decided to say anything until it was already out.
I stop. I do not turn around.
A pause. Long enough that I think maybe he changed his mind.
"Lily has a nightmare sometimes," he says. "About the accident. She wakes up crying and she needs to like it when someone sits with her. You do not have to do anything. Just sit there until she goes back to sleep."
I nod at the hallway wall. "Okay."
"She will probably call for me first. But if I am not here practice runs early sometimes I just sit with her."
"I will."
Another pause.
"Okay," he says.
I walk back to my room. I close the door quietly. I get into bed and pull the blanket up to my chin and I lie in the dark and I breathe.
My heart is going fast.
I tell myself it is because I woke up suddenly and my body has not calmed down yet. I tell myself it is the tea, sometimes caffeine does that even in small amounts. I tell myself it is anything at all except the actual reason which is that I sat across from Jake Mercer at midnight and watched him trust me with something without using a single word and my chest has not recovered from it.
He is nobody, I tell myself. An echo of his own words, turned around.
It does not help as much as I need it to.
I eventually fell asleep eventually.
When I wake up it is six forty-eight and the house is quiet and I can hear Lily still asleep down the hall, the soft sounds of a small person breathing. Jake's room is silent. I get up and go to the kitchen to start the coffee and that is when I see it.
A sticky note on the coffee maker.
His handwriting I recognize from the essay, cramped and slightly tilted like he writes fast and does not slow down for neatness.
Lily likes her oatmeal with exactly five raisins. Not four. Not six. Five.
I stare at it.
Then I see the smaller writing underneath. Same pen. Same cramped tilt. Like he wrote the first part and then stood there for a moment before deciding to add more.
Thank you for last night.
Six words.
I read the note once. I read it again. I read it a third time standing in the quiet kitchen in my socks with the early morning light coming through the window, and I look at his big blue chipped mug on the drying rack where I left it, and I look at the silver frame back in its place on the windowsill, the woman in it laughing at something only she can see.
Six words. That is all.
From Jake Mercer, who told someone on the phone I was nobody. Who walked past me in the hallway like furniture. Who has given me nothing in two weeks except exactly the information required to do my job.
Six words and my chest feels like it is doing something genuinely dangerous.
I take the sticky note off the coffee maker very carefully, like it is made of something that could tear. I fold it once. I put it in the pocket of my hoodie.
I start the oatmeal. I count out exactly five raisins.
I tell myself this means absolutely nothing.
I tell myself this every single day for the next week.
It does not work even a little bit.