Coda Books 06 - Fear, Hope, and Bread Pudding (MM)

expect anybody else to be up so early.” She pulled the collar of her robe closed, even though she’d been completely covered to begin with, and began to stand. “I should get dressed—”
    “Don’t be silly. Sit.”
    She settled nervously back into her seat. I crossed the small kitchen and watched her out of the corner of my eye as I took a mug out of the cabinet and poured steaming coffee into it. She was trying to smooth her hair down.
    “I must look a mess,” she said when I turned to face her.
    “You don’t.” In truth, I thought she was beautiful. Far more so than when she had her hair done and her makeup on, but then again, maybe it was only my loneliness that made me think so. Maybe it was nothing more than wanting to reclaim those mornings with my wife, contentedly passing the paper and an erasable pen across the table.
    “Are the boys still sleeping?”
    “They’re on their way back home, actually. They left early this morning.”
    Her expression of dismay was genuine, not feigned. “Oh no! Because of yesterday?”
    “No. Not that.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her the truth of their return trip though. Not yet. I sat down across from her. “Do you have the crossword?”
    She picked up the paper and handed it across to me. It was in French. “I can’t read a word of it. We’re in Germany, and he has a French paper delivered. It’s just like him.”
    “I think he worries his French will get rusty.”
    “As if it could. He’s been speaking it since he was old enough to talk. I think English came second, to tell you the truth. He and his father would have whole conversations in front of me. It never seemed to occur to them that I couldn’t understand.”
    “When was this? How old was he?”
    “He was only a boy.” She turned away from me to stare out the window, flipping her hair with practiced ease out of her face. It was a gesture I’d noticed her make the day before, but with her hair back in its tight twist, I hadn’t recognized it for what it was. I found myself smiling because it was a gesture I’d become intimately familiar with. It was exactly what Cole did whenever he got his hackles on end.
    “You’re a lot alike, you know.”
    When she met my gaze, it was with her head back, cocked challengingly to one side. It was another of Cole’s gestures, the one Jon said was Cole’s way of looking down his nose at people, even if they were taller than him. “Who?”
    “You and Cole.”
    Her bravado failed and her eyes turned sad. She dropped her gaze to the empty coffee cup in front of her. “I feel like we couldn’t be more different.”
    “He’s your son.”
    She shook her head. “No. Not for a long time. He was his father’s son.”
    “Is that why you’re afraid of him?”
    She clenched her hands around the mug and glanced up at me. I wasn’t sure if she was angry or ashamed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    I wondered for a moment if she was lying, but then I thought back over what I’d seen, the way they pushed back and forth, both of them begging for approval and then lashing out when they didn’t get it. The way they both pretended the things that hurt them most didn’t matter at all. Cole used his flamboyance to keep her at bay. She used her pretentious nonchalance to do the same to him. And yet neither of them seemed to realize how much they both wanted the same thing. Jon certainly couldn’t see it. He’d never been all that perceptive when it came to other people, and he was far too close to Cole to see the situation clearly. He’d never given Grace a chance. He’d hated her before he ever met her, and now, he was seated squarely in Cole’s corner, ready to defend his lover—no, his husband —against any onslaught. I couldn’t blame him for it, but I had sympathy for Grace too. She and Cole were too much alike, both of them stubborn and proud to a fault, both of them struggling to reconcile their own hurt feelings with their desperate need to love and to be loved. They were two sides of the same coin, and it was never more obvious than at that moment, when she’d thrown Cole’s affectation at me.
    No. That wasn’t right. Undoubtedly it had been her affectation first, and her son had adopted it without ever realizing.
    It was so karmically, cosmically tragic.
    I sat for a minute, debating the possibilities. Here I was, stuck in a foreign country with a woman I knew almost nothing of. A woman I’d never planned to