That morning Tessa called as he was checking the temperature on the refrigerator. "I'm leaving after lunch," she said, with highway sounds in the background. "I have the rolls and the pie, so if you forget everything else, at least we won't starve." Nolan told her he had already bought the turkey and that he was trying to remember how Anna used to make the gravy without turning it into wallpaper paste. Tessa laughed, and he felt an old ache that no longer hurt in quite the same way.
"You really are off tomorrow?" she asked. He heard how carefully she made the question sound casual. "I have it in writing," he said, looking toward the kitchen drawer, and she told him she would believe it when he sat down at the table. He could not blame her for that, so he promised again, without a joke this time, that she would have him for the whole evening.
Before leaving for his shift, Nolan drove to the grocery store for fresh celery, bread, and the kind of cranberry sauce Anna used to buy even though she was the only person who liked it. He put everything away, checked the thermostat, and made sure the spare bedroom was warm enough for Tessa. Then he sat for a while at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and listened to the radiator knock through the wall. It was a small house, and that was what he loved about it: there was nowhere inside it to hide from the people who belonged there.
At five-thirty he pulled on the navy uniform he had washed the night before. The Whitmore Logistics patch was faded from years of industrial laundry cycles, and the name Avery sat above his left pocket in slightly crooked stitching. His brown work boots had been resoled twice, not because he could not afford new boots, but because he knew the shape of these and trusted the leather. He took his heavy canvas jacket from the hook and touched the photograph by the refrigerator on his way out.
The drive to the warehouse crossed industrial roads, low bridges, and blocks where Christmas lights had begun appearing in apartment windows. Snow had been forecast for late evening, the first serious flakes of the season, and radio hosts were warning travelers to leave early if they planned to cross the state. Nolan checked the rearview mirror at a red light and thought of Tessa driving through that weather. He hoped she would stop somewhere safe if the roads turned bad, and he hoped he could say so without sounding as though he still believed she was fourteen.