Chapter 3: Your back in town
Joseph headed downstairs, running his hands through his wet hair. The house was quiet, the only sound the soft patter of residual rain on the roof. He was in a black tank top and grey track pants, his feet bare on the cool hardwood. The events of the evening—the white-tiled bathroom, the onesie, the ultrasound photo—cycled behind his eyes, a silent film on a loop.
A knock. Two soft taps at the door.
He walked over, the floorboards familiar and creaking under his weight. He opened it.
The porch light was off, leaving the figure on his step in the hazy gloom of the streetlamp’s glow. She was a silhouette at first, then the light caught the curve of her cheek, the fall of brown hair over her shoulder.
“Hey.” A voice said quietly.
He looked at her. He knew that voice even after twelve years. It was lower now, touched with a soft huskiness that hadn’t been there in their twenties, but the melody of it was etched into a part of his memory he kept locked.
“Bella.” He said.
She looked at him, a soft smile tentative on her lips. She was clutching the strap of a leather bag slung across her chest, her knuckles white. She looked exactly like herself, and completely different. The girl was gone, replaced by a woman with gentle green eyes that held a quiet history of her own.
“You’re back in town.” He said. It wasn’t a question. The statement hung in the damp air between them.
She nodded, a slight movement. “Yeah. I moved back two days ago. I wanted to stop by, see if you were still here.”
“Yeah. I’m still here.” He said. The words felt inadequate. He hadn’t moved. The world had shifted around him, had shattered and reformed, but this house, this anchor, remained.
A beat of silence stretched, filled with the distant swish of a car on the wet street. He became acutely aware of his state of undress, the damp hair cooling on his neck.
“Did you want to come in?” he asked.
“If it’s okay. I don’t want to intrude.” Bella said, shifting her weight.
“Not at all. Come in.” He stepped back, holding the door wider.
She crossed the threshold, bringing the cool, rain-fresh air in with her. She unbuttoned her trench coat, revealing a simple knit dress underneath. He closed the door, the click echoing in the hall. The space felt suddenly smaller, charged with the ghost of shared pasts.
“Can I take your coat?”
“Thanks.” She slipped it off, handing it to him. His fingers brushed hers, a fleeting contact. He hung it on the old stand by the door.
The hallway felt narrower with her presence, the air warmer. He gestured loosely toward the interior of the house
They walked into the living room through to the kitchen. The overhead pendant light cast a warm, buttery glow over the worn surfaces. He stood behind the kitchen island, his elbows rested on the countertop, putting the solid slab of wood between them.
She sat down on a stool, her hands folding on the granite. The quiet hum of the refrigerator filled the space.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“I’ve been good. Busy with work,” he said. The understatement of it almost made him smile, a bitter twist in his gut. “How have you been?”
“Good, good. I missed home, so I came back. Got a job at the college,” she said, her gaze drifting over his shoulder to the window and the dark yard beyond. “Administration. It’s quiet.”
“That’s great.” He needed to move, to do something with his hands. “Did you want a drink?”
She nodded. “Please. Whatever you’re having.”
He poured two glasses of red wine from a half-finished bottle on the counter. The glug of the liquid was loud in the quiet kitchen.
Bella looked around the kitchen, her eyes scanning the clutter of a lived-in life. They caught on the photos on the walls beside the fridge. Audrey and Joseph, smiling on a long-gone picnic. And a little girl, a series of her—gapped teeth, graduation cap.
He turned around, sliding the wine glass across the bench toward her. The stem made a soft click on the stone.
She took a sip, then her eyes flicked back to the photos. “How’s Audrey?” she asked.
Joseph looked down at the dark wine in his own glass, watching the light catch its meniscus. He looked back up at her. The words were stones he had to lift.
“Audrey passed away ten years ago.”
Bella’s glass froze halfway to her lips. Her expression shifted, the soft curiosity dissolving into a slow-motion horror. The color seemed to drain from her tan complexion. “Oh. Oh, Joseph. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” The automatic response was ash in his mouth. “A car accident. A drunk driver.”
He took a sip. The wine tasted of nothing.
Bella put her glass down carefully, as if it might shatter. “I had no idea. I just… I’m so, so sorry.” Her green eyes were wide, glistening. “The little girl in the photos…”
“Leah. Our daughter. She’s nineteen.” He said it with a pride that was absolute, and a terror that was equally profound.
The silence that followed was thick, heavy with everything she didn’t know. Bella stared at him, her mind clearly reeling, trying to reconcile the vibrant man she’d known with this reality of solitary fatherhood and loss. She finally took another slow sip of wine, the glass a faint tremble against her lips.
“You raised her alone,” she said, not quite a question.
“I did.”
“That’s… that’s incredible, Joseph.”
He shrugged, a gesture meant to deflect the weight of the compliment. “You just do it.”
Bella looked down into her wine, the deep red liquid a dark pool capturing the light. The quiet of the kitchen, the familiar grain of the countertop under her fingers, it all dragged her back. She thought back to a past memory, the reason she left town.
It was a university party, the air hazy and loud. She’d been searching for him all night, a funny story about her philosophy professor ready on her tongue. She found him in the cramped, sticky kitchen, leaning against the fridge. And he wasn’t alone. Audrey was there, laughing at something he’d said, her hand on his forearm. The way he looked at Audrey—a focused, surrendered warmth—was a door silently closing. Her and Joseph always had unspoken chemistry but neither acted on it. That night, she found out he’d gotten with Audrey. She moved away after graduation, knowing she couldn’t just be near him, a witness to a life she couldn’t have.
The memory was a sharp, clean pain, now layered with a profound guilt for the reason Audrey was gone. She shook it off, visibly pulling herself back to the present, to the man in front of her who had lived a decade of a different kind of pain.
“She’s beautiful,” Bella said, nodding toward the photos of Leah.
Joseph smiled, a genuine one that softened the hard lines of his face. “She is.” He paused, the new reality of the evening momentarily overriding his caution. “I found out about an hour ago, actually. She’s pregnant. Fourteen weeks.”
Bella’s eyes widened, her professional empathy seamlessly blending with personal astonishment. “That’s amazing.”
“Yeah,” he said, the word laden with a universe of feeling. “It is.”
He pushed off the counter and walked to the fridge, more for movement than need.
“A grandfather,” Bella said softly, almost to herself. “That’s wild.”
“Tell me about it.” He turned, leaning against it. “You just got back and I’m dumping all this on you I’m sorry”
“Don’t be. It’s life.” She finished her wine, the glass making a soft, definitive tap on the counter. “Is she… is she okay? With everything?”
“She’s happy. Scared, but happy. The father’s a good kid.” Joseph’s voice was steady, analytical. “They’re setting up the nursery, planning names. All the normal things.”
He said ‘normal’ like it was a foreign country he was observing from a great distance. Bella heard the disconnect. She studied him—the tension in his shoulders beneath the thin tank, the way his eyes, even in this soft light, never fully settled. He was a man holding the perimeter.
“And you?” she asked.
The question hung there. It was too big. It encompassed the pregnancy, the past decade, the empty house, the life he couldn’t speak of. The ghost of Jao in a white-tiled room felt suddenly very present in the clean, quiet kitchen.
Outside, a car alarm wailed briefly then cut off. The sudden silence it left was deeper.
Joseph just looked at her, his piercing blue eyes unreadable. “I’ll manage.”
The words were a wall. Bella recognized the tone—final, allowing no further excavation. She nodded, accepting the boundary. Her eyes drifted again to the photos, the narrative of a life she’d missed etched in frozen smiles. She took a slow sip of wine, the quiet between them not quite uncomfortable, but thick with the weight of twelve years.
“What do you do for work?” she asked, shifting the conversation, her finger tracing the rim of the glass.
“I’m in IT support.” He said. It’s what he’d told Leah he was, what he talked about when she’d asked how work was. The lie slid out, smooth and practiced.
“That’s good.” She said, her tone neutral, observational.
“Yeah. It keeps me busy.” He said. The phrase was hollow. Busy meant travel manifests under aliases, the chemical smell of a rented storage unit, the specific weight of a pistol’s slide as he field-stripped it. Not resetting passwords.
He pushed off from the fridge and picked up the wine bottle, tilting it toward her glass in question.
She covered the top with her palm, a soft shake of her head. “I should probably head out. It’s late, and I just... dropped in.”
“Oh yeah that’s okay.” His reply was quicker than he intended.
They walked back to the front hall. The air was cooler there. He lifted her trench coat from the stand, the weight of it familiar in a distant way. She turned, slipping her arms into the sleeves, her movements close enough that he caught the faint scent of her shampoo—something clean, like rosemary.
As she turned back to face him, fixing the collar, their eyes met. The porch light from outside bled through the narrow window beside the door, cutting a sharp diagonal across her face.
“It was good seeing you, Joseph,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, it was,” he said.
She took a step towards him. They both hugged. His arms polite around her waist, her hands went to his back, her head against his chest. They held it for a long moment before they pulled back. The hug was a closed circuit, a brief, warm shelter from the separate storms of their last twelve years.
“Good night, Bella,” he said.
“Good night, Joseph,” she said, heading out to her car.
He watched her go, a silhouette sliding into a small, dark sedan. The engine coughed to life. The headlights sliced through the mist, washing over his faded front lawn before turning away. He stood in the open doorway until the red taillights vanished around the corner, swallowed by the night.
Then he closed the door. The latch clicked with a sound like a vault sealing.
The quiet of the house rushed back in, but it was different now. It felt interrogated. Her presence had left a trace, a subtle rearrangement of the air that made the familiar spaces seem suddenly observed. He walked back into the kitchen, his bare feet silent on the floor.
He picked up her wine glass, noting the faint imprint of her lipstick on the rim. He washed it, watching the water turn the residual red into a pink spiral down the drain. The image was a sudden, unwelcome callback to the Mandarin’s bathroom sink, the different kind of pink he’d washed away hours earlier.