Page 67 of The Murder Between Us
She groaned. “More pre-calc due at the end of the week. Why so much math?”
“Well, it is summer school for the pre-calc class you failed.”
She made a face and crossed her arms. “Can I just wait for Dr. Kennedy to help me tomorrow? He was way better than you.”
“Thanks, K-Bear. I appreciate that.” He smiled at her reflection as she blew him a kiss. “Why do you think you’ll see him tomorrow?”
She stared, her hands spreading wide, gesturing first to Noah, then the empty passenger seat as her stare called him an idiot in a thousand different dialects of sixteen. “Dad, really?”
“We’ll see what we can do tonight, okay? If we can’t figure it out, we’ll call in reinforcements. How’s that?”
“When’s he coming over tomorrow?”
* * *
Homework was a disaster.Katie was too hyper, too unfocused, bouncing from math problems to suddenly talking about Cole and one of the stories he’d shared at dinner. She pulled up the cases he’d mentioned on her phone, reading news headlines from the investigations, the arrests, and the trials as Noah tried to work through the third pre-calc problem.
“Look! He testified!” Katie shoved her phone between Noah’s face and the textbook, waggling it until his eyes refocused on the picture of Cole walking into the courtroom with FBI agents from the Boston office. Noah closed his eyes as she pulled her phone back and quoted from the article.
He’d never admit it to Katie, but he hated math, too. It was one of the benefits of being an adult, he’d thought. No more homework. No more worrying about grades. Sighing, he drifted as Katie gushed over Cole, his testimony, and the gruesome facts of the Boston Ripper case two years before, declaring the case disgusting and Cole’s testimony awesome in the same sentence.
Two years ago, he’d been living out of a suitcase in a one-bedroom apartment, trying to figure out life after divorce. Katie visited him every other weekend, and he’d give her the bedroom and sleep on the couch. They ate a lot of microwave dinners and Kraft mac and cheese that year. And Cole had been catching the Boston Ripper, appearing on CNN and testifying in court.
Katie had had a million questions when they got home, everything from how old Cole was to what would happen next. When was Noah going to tell everyone he was gay? Would Cole be at the games with him when school started in the fall? If she was on the homecoming court, would both of them escort her out on the football field? Was Cole going to move in with them? If they got married, would Cole take his name, become Dr. Cole Downing? They could all have the same name if he did. They could be a family, she said.
He’d tried to distract her, had begged her to focus on her homework. He didn’t have answers for her, not a single one. She didn’t seem to mind, breezing from one question to the next, never waiting for his reply. No, she moved happily to cyberstalking Cole, searching for his cases, his Facebook—He won’t have one, K-Bear. You never know, Dad!—his Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, and anything and everything else.
It was useless to persist in this pretense of homework. He had been the only one working for the past half hour. He tossed the pencil in the textbook and scrubbed his hands over his face.
God, what if she found a picture of him with another man? What if she found his Snapchat and it was inappropriate? What if she found his Instagram and there were lots and lots of men? Cole had become so huge in her mind so quickly, almost as large as he’d become in Noah’s mind. There was something about apples and trees in that thought, wasn’t there?
Katie’s excitement tempered him, cautioned him, in a way his own fantasies hadn’t. It was one thing for him to daydream and imagine, but it was entirely another to build up Katie’s hopes and dreams. If Noah broke his own heart with his exuberance, his desire to risk it all on Cole and hope for the best, that was his choice.
Breaking Katie’s heart was unacceptable.
He was her father. Wasn’t he supposed to set a better example than this? Show her temperance and caution and wise decision-making? Show her how to navigate the white waters of wanting and hoping, and how, oh-so-rarely, everything coalesced into one perfect thread of emotion and intention. How to navigate dreams that came true, and even dreams that didn’t come true.
Snippets of the evening roared back, of Katie and Cole with their heads together at dinner, laughing, talking a mile a minute while Cole’s fingers remained laced with his own beneath the table. How did he bring two people who shared his life together?
Did Cole share his life? No, not really. Not at all like Katie did. Shewashis life, an inextricable part of his existence, his past and his future and his days and his nights forever. Cole could join their life, could become part of their existence… if he wanted to.
But… how? Katie’s questions thundered through him, each one a drumbeat building a migraine inside his skull. What did happen from here?
Cole lived in D.C. He lived in Des Moines. He wasn’t going to move, not with Katie in high school, on the cheer squad and with her friends. He wasn’t going to take her away from all that.
Did he even know what Cole wanted? They’d had one conversation yesterday at lunch, fumbling through Noah’s aborted text and his fantasies of seeing Cole at little gay rendezvous in the Midwest. It was one thing to meet Cole in Chicago and pretend to be out. It was one thing to give Jacob enough clues to put the pieces together.
It was something else entirely to commit to a relationship—long distance, in person, or something in between—with a man.
What would he tell Lilly? How would she react to this? Jesus, how would she react to him taking Katie to dinner with Cole? He could hear her now, her fine-tuned legal brain ready to shred him.You took our daughter to meet your one-night stand, Noah? How is that in her best interests? In four years, I’ve never introduced Katie to any man I have dated, casually or seriously.
“Dad, are you listening?” Katie waved her phone in his face again. There was Cole, this time posing for what looked like his official FBI photo. She’d pulled up his doctoral research paper somehow and was flicking through the table of contents, reading each chapter heading aloud to him.
How would Lilly react to him coming out?Well, that answers a few questions I always had about our marriage, Noah.
Do you really think it’s appropriate to be dating men while Katie lives with you?
Lilly, or her voice in his head, wasn’t wrong. What if Cole didn’t want anything more than whatever this was? A fling in Des Moines, a few nights a year meeting up in hotel rooms. How would Katie take that? How did he begin to explain whateverthatwas?We’re not really dating, and no, he won’t be coming to your games, and no, he won’t be changing his name to match ours. He just fucks me once a quarter when he’s nearby.
