Chapter 2 - The Favor
So in February of this year, I finally asked Roan Delaney for a favor.
Roan is forty-one. We've worked together at Halloway Freight for six years now — he handles the scheduling side, I handle the accounts, and we've shared one genuinely terrible coffee machine since 2020 that neither of us has the heart to replace.
He's the single most unflappable person I've ever met in my life. He's also completely, entirely uninterested in me romantically, and I in him, and that mattered more than almost anything else in this whole plan.
He laughed at me for a solid, uninterrupted minute.
"You want me to spy on your kids."
"I want you to come to dinner as my boyfriend, and then tell me exactly what happens the second I leave the room."
"Tamsin—"
"Roan. Three men. Same night, every single time. They're doing something, and they're doing it while I'm not there to see it."
He stopped laughing about halfway through that last sentence. His whole face changed.
He said yes on Wednesday. He came over the following Friday, the sixth of March.
I introduced him as someone I'd started seeing at the beginning of the year. I'd prepped the girls the day before — new person, be kind, don't be weird about any of it.
Sorrel is sixteen. Tibby is ten.
They welcomed him beautifully. That's the word that stuck with me first, and it's the word I keep circling back to even now.
Not warmly. Beautifully. Like two people executing a plan they'd already rehearsed a dozen times before.
Tibby asked him right away if he had a dog, which he does, and made him pull his phone out to prove it, which he happily did, and there were eleven separate photographs of a dog named Bramble, and the whole exchange was completely, perfectly normal.
Sorrel said hello politely and then said almost nothing at all for the next forty minutes.
She ate. She watched him. And she wore this small, closed, knowing little smile the entire time — the exact kind of smile you wear when you already know precisely how a story is going to end before anyone else in the room does.
I nearly called the whole thing off right there. I want that on the record. Halfway through the pasta, I looked over at my own sixteen-year-old daughter and thought, genuinely: I don't know who that is sitting across from me.
At twenty past eight, I stood up from the table.
"I forgot the dessert. It's out in the garage freezer."
There is no dessert. There has never been a dessert in that freezer, not once, not ever.
I walked out to the garage and stood there in the cold with the freezer door hanging open for a full four minutes, shifting bags of frozen peas around uselessly, feeling like a complete idiot.
When I walked back inside, the entire room had changed.
Roan was sitting perfectly still. Both hands flat on the table in front of him. His face had gone a color I'd only ever seen before on people standing in hospital corridors, and his fork was gripped so tightly in his right fist that I could see the tendons standing out along the back of his hand.
Tibby was chattering happily about a school trip.
Sorrel was calmly eating her pasta like nothing in the world had happened.
"Everything all right?" I asked.
Roan looked up at me, and did one very small, very deliberate thing with his eyes — a single, tiny shake of his head.
So I sat back down. I ate the rest of that meal. I made conversation about a school trip to a paper mill for twenty-five straight minutes, and it remains, to this day, the longest twenty-five minutes of my entire adult life.
May you like
He left around half past nine. He said a warm goodnight to the girls, thanked them for having him, and did the whole exit perfectly, like nothing had happened.
At the front door, he squeezed my arm once and said, quietly, "Tomorrow. Office. Before nine."
