Chapter 156 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS -39

Chapter 156 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS -39
VIVIENNE

I came downstairs at half eight, Cole followed a couple of minutes later, and if anyone wanted to attach some grand significance to the fact that we'd appeared in that order, they were welcome to do it without my help because, as far as I was concerned, people came downstairs whenever they happened to wake up and that was the beginning and end of the story.

I'd been reminding myself of that ever since I got out of bed.

By the time I reached the kitchen, I'd almost managed to believe it.

Maya was already there.

She was standing at the kettle with her back to me, and I caught the slightest movement in her shoulders when she heard me come in before she turned around. It wasn't much, just enough to make me think she'd taken a second to arrange her expression before I saw it.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning."

She handed me a mug before I'd even made it to the counter.

My tea.

Exactly the way I liked it, and cool enough to drink without having to spend five minutes pretending I wasn't waiting for it to stop trying to burn the roof of my mouth.

Which meant she'd either made it because she'd guessed I'd be down soon or she'd recognised my footsteps and somehow beaten me to it.

I decided I was perfectly happy not figuring out which.

"Sleep well?" she asked.

"I did."

"Good."

"The eggs are nearly done."

"Great."

The back door opened just as she turned back to the stove.

Cole wandered in with a quiet "Morning," aimed at nobody in particular, and Maya barely reacted. She poured him a coffee without missing a beat, passed it across, then carried on cooking with the determined concentration of someone who absolutely wasn't paying attention to anything except the frying pan.

"Morning," I replied, mostly to my tea.

A couple of minutes later Priya came in from the garden with muddy boots and wind-reddened cheeks, looking like she'd already put in a full morning while the rest of us had only just remembered beds weren't permanent residences. She glanced at me, then at Cole, then at the amount of space between us, which wasn't very much because the kitchen was small and we'd somehow drifted into standing beside each other without either of us making an obvious decision to do it.

She reached for a mug, poured herself some coffee, and said absolutely nothing.

Neither did I.

For some reason I found myself looking at the microwave clock instead.

Thirty-two seconds.

Jordan finally appeared just after nine looking suspiciously refreshed, and the first thing he did after walking through the door was look straight at me, then at Cole, before lifting his eyes to the ceiling with the deeply satisfied expression of a man enjoying a joke entirely by himself.

"Morning," he said to the plasterboard.

Then he wandered off in search of bread.

Dev came downstairs last.

"Oh good, everyone's up."

He managed to pack enough enthusiasm into five words that Maya only had to look at him once for him to visibly dial himself down, like someone reaching for the volume knob after realising the music was louder than they'd thought.

Breakfast unfolded the way breakfast usually did when all of us were in the same room.

People talked over each other, somebody laughed at something happening in an entirely different conversation, and Jordan stole the last decent slice of bread just before Marcus got to it, prompting Marcus to announce that he'd like to register a formal complaint.

"First come, first served," Jordan said.

"You'd been down here about thirty seconds before him," Priya replied. "That's not first come, first served. That's an ambush."

"I don't think the law recognises bread ambushes."

"It should."

Marcus looked personally offended by the entire exchange.

At some point I realised my toast had disappeared.

I'd finished it without noticing, and before I'd even thought about getting another slice, half of Cole's landed quietly on my plate.

He didn't look at me, didn't ask if I wanted it, he just slid it across like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I ate it without saying anything.

Across the table Maya's eyes met Priya's for the briefest second before they both became unexpectedly fascinated by their own breakfasts.

Jordan saw the whole thing, calmly shoveled another forkful of eggs into his mouth, and for once decided that silence was probably the funniest contribution he could make.

Dev looked like he was gathering the courage to say something, but Maya rested a hand lightly against his arm before he got the chance, and whatever comment he'd been about to offer died quietly because he closed his mouth again and reached for his coffee instead.

Nobody acknowledged any of it out loud, but the amount of conversation happening without actual words was honestly impressive. Tiny glances kept flying back and forth over jars of jam and glasses of orange juice while Marcus continued arguing his increasingly dramatic case against Jordan's criminal relationship with sliced bread, and at one point Priya lifted her mug in my direction by about half a centimetre before taking another sip, somehow managing to communicate an entire paragraph with a movement so small I might have imagined it if I hadn't been looking straight at her.

I spent the rest of breakfast studying the grain of the table with an intensity that would've suggested I was preparing to write a dissertation on oak.

When everyone started drifting away from the table, Cole caught my eye and tipped his head towards the back door.

I carried my mug over to the sink, rinsed it out, and followed him without either of us saying where we were going. Neither of us really had to. I didn't bother looking back before I stepped outside because I already had a fairly good idea of what the conversation around that table was about to become.

The air outside had that crisp, early morning bite you only really got out in the country. It felt clean enough to wake you up properly with every breath, and the trees had just started turning, streaks of gold and orange creeping through the green. The path behind the house wound between them without much purpose, bending wherever the ground told it to.

We started walking.

For the first minute or so neither of us said anything, and it didn't feel awkward. After everything we'd spent the last few weeks trying to untangle, it was strangely nice not to fill every silence just because it was there.

Cole was the one who broke it.

"So," he said, "I never actually finished telling you about Cierra and the houseplant."

"You definitely didn't."

"I was interrupted."

"You were rambling."

"I was building suspense."

"You were avoiding the point."

"I eventually got to the point."

I smiled despite myself.

"No, you eventually got distracted."

He shook his head like I'd wounded him.

"I can't believe this is the support I get."

Then he told me the whole story.

This time he actually got to the end of it, and by the time he finished I was laughing hard enough that I had to stop walking. He waited a few steps ahead with his hands in his pockets, looking far too pleased with himself, and somehow that only made me laugh more.

When we started walking again, the conversation drifted somewhere else as naturally as breathing.

I told him about the Langston deposition prep and the argument that should have taken five minutes but somehow swallowed half the afternoon instead. I repeated the thing Shola had said about delegating upward, and he laughed the way he always did when something genuinely caught him off guard, his head tipping back just a little, the sound more breath than voice.

I'd missed that laugh. Not because it was particularly rare, but because I'd missed us getting to this version of each other.

We talked about Dev and Maya after that, trying to work out how long they'd been planning the whole thing.

"I'm telling you," Cole said, "it's been happening since the housewarming."

"You really think they've been sitting on it that long?"

"I'd bet money."

I thought about it for a second.

"...Yeah. Actually, I think you're right."

"I usually am."

"You enjoy saying that far too much."

"I enjoy being right."

I rolled my eyes.

"Jordan definitely knew first."

"Oh, without question."

"And that piece of paper from last night?"

He looked at me.

"Completely fake."

"I knew it."

"So did I."

We laughed, then reached exactly the same conclusion without needing much discussion.

Neither of us was ever going to tell Dev we'd figured it out.

He'd put far too much effort into believing he'd been subtle, and ruining that for him would've felt unnecessarily cruel.

The conversation wandered after that, hopping from one thing to another the way it always used to. Marcus's ongoing campaign against Jordan's habit of stealing food somehow turned into work, work became stories about people we both knew, and every now and then we'd fall quiet for a while before one of us remembered something else worth saying.

We just kept walking.

That was all it was, really.

A cold morning, a quiet path through the trees, and a conversation that went wherever it wanted to go without either of us trying to steer it. Somewhere along the way I realised I'd forgotten how easy this could be. I'd been so wrapped up in the complicated version of us that I'd almost convinced myself we'd always been that way.

When the time came to leave the cabin, the drive back happened without either of us suggesting it. We just ended up in the same car, while mine stayed behind for Dev to bring back later. He agreed to it with such cheerful enthusiasm that I had a feeling he'd expected this outcome from the start.

The motorway was quiet.

Cole drove the way he did everything else, unhurried, one hand resting lightly on the wheel while the countryside slowly gave way to the city.

About an hour in I slipped my shoes off, tucked my feet up on the dashboard, and waited for him to tell me off.

He never did.

At some point his hand found mine where it rested on the centre console. His thumb brushed over my knuckles once before settling there, easy and familiar, and I let my fingers lace through his without either of us saying a word.

I watched the road stretching ahead of us.

For once I wasn't replaying old conversations or trying to guess where the next difficult one would lead.

I just sat there beside him, hand in his, feeling more settled than I had in weeks.