He said the word came out flat the way it did when he was controlling something bigger underneath it. You were just gone. And I spent a long time trying to understand that. A long time. She didn't look away.
That surprised him. He had half expected her to crumble or deflect or give him the kind of non-answer that had always driven him up the wall. Instead, she held his gaze, and there was something in her expression that he had to work to name. Shame. Real shame.
Not the performative kind people put on when they want forgiveness. The kind that lives in the bones. I know, she said for the third time. I'm not here to pretend that didn't happen. I'm not here to ask you to forget it.
I just James, I have nowhere else to go. And I wouldn't be standing here if I did. The baby made another sound. A small questioning sound. The sound of something very new to the world that wasn't sure yet whether the world was safe.
James looked at the baby again. Something shifted in him. He didn't want it to. He actively resisted it. But he was a father and some things you cannot turn off once they've been switched on.
How old? He asked. Sophia exhaled. 8 months. He nodded slowly.
Looked up at the sky for a moment. Dark, heavy with clouds. The kind of November night that promises rain before morning. "Come inside," he said. Sophia sat on his couch like someone who wasn't sure she deserved to be there.
She kept the baby pressed against her chest even after James offered to take him. It was a him. She'd said his name was Noah, and James didn't push. He went to the kitchen, made her a cup of tea because he didn't know what else to do with his hands, and stood at the counter for a moment, listening to the small sounds coming from his living room. He had not invited a woman into this house in 3 years.
The last one had been a woman named Diane, who he'd met at a church function his mother dragged him to, and who was perfectly kind and perfectly decent and perfectly wrong for him, in a way he hadn't been able to explain then and couldn't explain now. They'd gone out four times. He'd ended it gently. Diane had understood, or at least she'd said she understood, and James had gone home that last night and sat in the kitchen for an hour before he admitted to himself in the privacy of his own mind, that the reason it didn't work was not complicated at all. He was still not over Sophia Mitchell.
He had been furious about that. Genuinely privately furious because James Carter was not a man who allowed himself to be weak. And loving someone who had walked out without explanation felt like the weakest thing he'd ever done. So he'd buried it. He'd gone back to work.