She didn't say anything.
"I'm not goin'. I told him there was somethin' I had to take care of up here. The somethin' is you. I'm staying. I was gonna call him back tonight and tell him I was out."
She nodded the small nod she gave a thing when she was filing it.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"Take the slot."
The bank went quiet.
"Astrid."
"Take it."
"I don't want it."
"I think you do."
"I don't."
"I think you've been telling yourself you don't because I'm in your house and I make you dinner. I think the man you'd be on that line in Queens is the man you've wanted to be since you put on a uniform. I'm not gonna be the thing that kept you from him."
"You're not the thing that kept me from him. You're the thing I want."
She set her hand on the front of my T-shirt, where the water from her hair had been.
"I love you," she said. "I want you to hear me say it. I love you, Easton Ford. You spent your whole adult life trying to get on a line like this one. I'm not going to be the woman who looked at the man she loved and told him don't take the thing you spent twelve years trying to get. I'm not gonna be that to you. You'd come to resent me eventually. Or you'd come to resent yourself, which would be worse."
"I'm not gonna resent either of us."
"You don't know that."
"I know it."
"You don't, Easton. You don't know how you're going to feel in two years, sitting at my kitchen counter listening to a story about a friend of yours making captain on the line you turned down. You don't know how you're going to feel in five. I do. I sat in a brownstone in Boston for six years next to a man who'd given up the thing he was good at because it was easier to let his mother choose, and I watched it eat him. I'm not signing up for the version of that where I'm the one he gave it up for."
"Astrid. I'm not him."
"I know you're not. You're the better man. I'm telling you the better man is the one who takes the slot."
I let that sit.
I had nothing to say to it that was going to move her. I knew it standing at the picnic table. I knew it, crossing the bank backto her. She was making the call alone and fast because there was no time to do it any other way.
"Astrid. Come home with me. Sit at my counter. Let me tell you the whole thing."
"I can't."
"Astrid."
"Easton."
She kept her hand on the front of my shirt. She looked at it.
"There's another thing," she said. "I should have said it sooner."
