His jaw tightens.
“Theo, I'm not...”
“You will be here, Dad. If you leave, I will leave, and we both know you can't carry me. You'll be here.”
I take my plate. I take the coffee. I walk out of the kitchen with both, and I do not turn around.
I call Diane from my bedroom floor.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Sweet boy.”
I start crying the second she says it. Not small. The full-body kind I kept swallowed in the kitchen. She lets me go for thirty seconds, a minute, without saying anything, and when I can talk, I tell her. All of it. The game. The office. Paul bursting in. Maddox eating four punches. Callahan. The security on the lawn. Blackridge. Maddox flying out tomorrow. The draft in my thread I haven't sent.
I tell her I'm in love with him.
I tell it to the carpet. I tell it to my aunt. It's the second time I've said it out loud and the first time I've said it to another person, and she hears it how she's heard everything I've ever needed her to hear, which is quietly and without reaction, like a person who hears a thing and keeps it instead of grabbing at it.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I'm getting in the car.”
“Di—”
“I'm getting in the car, Theo. I'm forty-five minutes from your door in traffic and it's Sunday so there's no traffic. I'll be there in thirty-two.”
I press the phone harder against my ear.
“He's going to say you can't come in.”
“He's going to try. It won't work.”
I hear a car door open on her end. The jingle of her keys.
“Aunt Di?”
“Yes.”
My throat does a small thing and recovers.
“Thank you.”
“Baby. You have been thanking me for breathing for a week. Stop thanking me. I am youraunt.I get to be in this with you. That is myjob,and one I’ve been wanting to do for years. Put on clean clothes, drink some water, eat the toast he made you. I will be there in thirty-two minutes.”
She hangs up.
I sit on the floor for another second. I breathe. I get up.
I eat the toast.
She knocks at the front door thirty-one minutes later.
I hear Paul answer. I hear her voice. I hear herwalk past himwithout stopping, which is something only a sister can do, and then I hear her in the front hall calling up the stairs.
“Theo. Come down.”
I come down.
She's in her trench coat with a tote on her shoulder and her hair pulled back and her reading glasses on top of her head and she looks like she's been up for nine hours, which she probably has. She sees me on the stairs and her face does the thing it does, the small crumple-and-recover I have known my whole life, and have missed desperately for years, and she opens her arms and I go into them and she holds me for a count of maybe five seconds, which is the maximum she'll allow in front of Paul, and then she pats my back twice and turns me toward the living room.
