I'd told him to take the slot. I'd meant it. That was the part I had to keep telling myself.
I woke up on Sunday morning alone in my own bed for the first time in three weeks, and the first thing my hand reached for on the chair beside the bed was his gray Hartsdale Fire shirt. My hand caught on the way to it. I put on my own sweater instead.
The kitchen had the wrong shape. Moose was on the rug by the back door, where he'd been every morning since I moved to Hartsdale. The two mugs on the windowsill were the two I'd brought up from Boston in my carry-on, the only two I'd picked out myself. The cold of the tile was coming up through my socks.
I saw the car at ten-fifteen. A silver sedan pulled into Easton's driveway. A man got out in a navy blazer with a folder under his arm. A woman came out of the passenger side a beat later in heels that did not suit Maple Avenue. The sign was up by eleven. FOR SALE in block letters at the top, the name of the agency under it, and a phone number under that.
Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved twice. She looked at the sign. She looked at my window. I stepped back from the glass before she could decide to come over.
The bell over the clinic door rang six times on Monday. Every count between every ring and my looking up was a count in which it was not going to be him. Nobody told you that about a person leaving—the not-being-him of every door. Audrey came on Wednesday at one with a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. She didn't say his name. She ate hers half-standing at my counter, watching me eat mine, and she told me she was going to be on that stool every Wednesday until I was eating without her there.
I saw the first box leave on Thursday morning. He came out of his front door with a flat brown box on his hip, walked it down the front walk, and set it in the bed of his truck. He did three of those before he saw me at the window. He stopped on the front walk on his way back up. He looked across Maple. He lifted his free hand once. I lifted mine. I closed the curtain over the kitchen window for the first time since I'd moved in.
Moose blew past me Thursday afternoon when I opened the door for the mail. He didn't run. He sat on the strip of grass at the curb and looked at Easton's porch the way a dog looks at a door he's been waiting for someone to come through. I crouched in my socks with my arms around my dog's neck and pressed my cheek to the top of his head, and I made him a promise I had no right to make.
That was the first time I cried since the lake.
The knock came at half past seven on Friday.
I'd been making a dinner I didn't plan to eat. Two even raps a beat apart. I hadn't opened the door to that knock in six days.
I looked through the peephole. He was on the porch in jeans, a navy long-sleeve, and his Hartsdale Fire jacket, a brown bag from the diner in his hand. He hadn't asked. He'd just come.
I opened the door.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
I had a sentence ready. The sentence hadcan'tin it andpleasein it.
What came out was different.
"I'm tired, Easton."
He looked at me a beat longer.
"Yeah."
He didn't fight it.
I'd wanted, in some small, mean place I hadn't let myself look at, for him to fight it. To stand on my porch in the cold with a bag of takeout and tell me I was wrong. He didn't push.
He started to turn.
He turned back.
"Can I stay tonight?"
The smallest line a man could ask.
I let him in.
We didn't pretend. He set the bag on the counter, took his coat off, and hung it on the hook by the door. We ate at the counter. We did the dishes after—he washed, I dried, and our shoulders bumped once at the sink when he reached for the towel. Neither of us moved.
He hung the towel back on the hook.
"Astrid."
"Yes."
