The Cold Coffee
A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Jessie Clark
Set during the week after The Cold Hour. Ethan Ward’s point of view. ~1,450 words. Newsletter reader magnet.
Ward had made her a promise about a week, and he was three days into keeping it and learning, the way he learned everything about Cass, slowly and by watching, that the hardest part of giving a woman like her a week was that she did not know how to receive one.
The town was called Harnett, four hours north, where the harbor gave way to a colder, cleaner water that had never in its life smelled of diesel. He’d rented a house at the end of a lane, gray-shingled, a wood stove, a window over the bay. No television, on purpose. No case files, on purpose. He’d left his phone in a drawer the first morning and watched her not comment on it, which from Cass was a concession the size of a cathedral.
He got up before her every morning, which almost never happened at home, and it took him until the third day to understand why he could do it here: because there was nothing for her mind to run at in the dark, so she actually slept, and a sleeping Cass was a thing he had seen maybe a dozen times in two years and did not intend to waste by sleeping through it himself.
The third morning he stood at the window with his coffee and watched the light come up over the bay, gray and then pewter and then, for about ninety seconds, a hard clean gold, and he let it go cold in his hand because moving to drink it felt like it would cost him the gold. He didn’t hear her get up. He never did; she moved through a house the way she moved through everything, filed and silent. But he felt her come and stand beside him, and neither of them said anything, because they’d learned that some silences were a room you sat in together rather than a thing to fill.
“You’ve been at this window fourteen minutes,” she said, finally.
“You’re counting.”
“I’m always counting. It’s the whole tragedy of me.” But she said it lightly, and leaned into his shoulder, and he understood that she was giving him something by admitting it out loud, the way she gave him everything now, in the open, where it could be seen. “Nine minutes the first day. Eleven yesterday. Fourteen today. You’re getting worse.”
“I’m getting better,” Ward said. “At the window. It’s the one thing I’ve ever been able to do here that isn’t for anybody. You should try it.”
“I don’t know how.” She said it plainly, not as a complaint, a woman reporting a fact about a country she’d never been to. “That’s the part I didn’t tell you when I asked for the week. I didn’t know if I could actually take one. I’ve spent twenty years being the person who can’t afford to stop looking, because if I stop looking somebody I could have saved slips past me and lives in my head forever with everyone else I couldn’t save. So I don’t know how to stand at a window and let the light just — happen. Without counting it. Without keeping it.” She was quiet a moment. “I counted the gold this morning, Ethan. Ninety-one seconds. I couldn’t help it. I’ll have that sunrise for the rest of my life whether I want it or not, ninety-one seconds of it, exact.”
Ward turned from the window and looked at her, this impossible woman who could not put anything down, who carried every grief she’d ever failed at in perfect order and had somehow decided to carry him too, and he thought about Danny, the way he still did more than he used to since the last case had pried that door open — Danny, who he could not remember as clearly as he wanted to, whose face had softened and blurred in the fourteen years since the funeral the way the dead are supposed to, mercifully, blur. Ward would have given a great deal, some nights, to have Cass’s curse for one hour, to get his brother back in the kind of detail she got everyone back in.
“You keep the ninety-one seconds,” he said. “That’s not the curse. That’s the part I’d trade you for.”
She looked at him.
“I can’t get Danny’s face right anymore,” Ward said, and it came out easier than he expected, here, in the gold light, with the coffee cold in his hand. “Fourteen years. He’s going soft in my head, like a photograph left in the sun. And everyone tells me that’s healthy, that’s healing, you’re supposed to let them fade. And I hate it, Cass. I would keep every terrible perfect second of him if I could, the way you keep the people you couldn’t save. You think the not-forgetting is the sentence. From where I stand some mornings it looks like the only mercy there is.”
Cass was quiet for a long time. The gold went out of the water and the day came up ordinary and bright and cold.
“That’s the first time anyone’s ever wanted it,” she said, at last. “The memory. In forty years, you’re the first person who ever looked at what I carry and said they’d trade for it instead of trying to talk me into believing it’s an illness.” She took the cold coffee out of his hand and set it on the sill, and took his hand instead, the gesture with no protocol, the one they never had to explain. “I’ll make you a deal. A different one than the week. When you can’t get Danny’s face, you ask me to describe a room he was in — a real one, one I was in too, the funeral, that diner, the day at the lake with his kid. I was there for more of them than you think, standing in doorways, the way I’m always standing in doorways. And I’ll give him back to you. Every terrible perfect second. As often as you want. For the rest of your life.”
Ward looked at her, and the thing that had been sitting under his ribs for fourteen years, the slow guilty grief of a brother whose face was blurring, eased by some fraction he hadn’t known could ease.
“That’s the best thing anyone’s ever offered me,” he said.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got that’s worth anything,” Cass said. “It’s the whole point of me. I finally found the one person who wanted it.” She almost smiled. “Now drink your cold coffee. You’ve earned it. You gave me a week, and I only counted most of it.”
He drank the cold coffee. It was terrible. He’d let it go cold on purpose and now it was just cold, no gold in it, and he drank it anyway because she’d told him to and because a man should let the woman he loves win the small ones.
Four days left of the week. Somewhere south, in a city that forgot, a gray unremarkable man moved money through rooms without a face, one dissolved holding company from a name Cass had already filed and would hold, patient and exact, until the week was over and it was time.
But that was a next-week problem.
This was still the week.
— end —
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