I got to the apartment. Started the coffee maker. Stood at the counter while it ran. The brass lamp was the only thing in the place that didn't look like a sublet.
The phone was on the counter.
I picked it up. Opened the thread.
The last message.
Astrid
Locked.
From the Saturday before. We'd ended every night for a month with that exchange—me on her porch in the dark, her on the other side of the door, the deadbolt sliding before I'd made the front walk.
I looked at the word.
I didn't type. I didn't delete.
I set the phone face down on the counter and slid it to the far end.
She'd told me she wasn't ready. She'd told me to take the slot. She'd kissed me on the curb of Maple Avenue and told me to do great things. She'd meant two of those three things. The third was the only door on her that would close. I'd let her close it,because the alternative was overriding a woman who'd spent six years calibrating around a man who'd overridden her.
I wasn't going to be that.
I'd come to Queens because she'd asked me to. The rest of it was me keeping my end. I was going to miss her every morning I woke up in a city that wasn't hers and every night I came home to an apartment she'd never seen, and I wasn't going to lie about either one to a single man in this lifetime, including myself.
The coffee maker made its small final sound.
I poured the cup I wasn't going to drink.
I drank it anyway.
CHAPTER 22
Astrid
It'd been three weeks since I watched his truck pull out of the driveway across Maple Avenue, turn at the end of the block, and go.
I woke up alone. I made coffee for one. I looked out the window over the sink at a bungalow with its lights off, its driveway empty, and a for-sale sign at the curb that the wind kept working on. The realtor came back twice to straighten it. The second time, she stood at the curb with her hands on her hips and looked across the street at my window. I stepped back from the glass before she decided to come over.
The clinic was what kept me upright.
The bell over the door started ringing the morning the four firefighters walked in with their pets, and it never stopped. The Bishops referred Mrs. Bishop's sister-in-law, who referred the woman who ran the bookstore, who referred two families from her church group. Halsey brought his cat back for the post-spay check. Mendoza's terrier went on a six-month rotation. Duke's mother switched her spaniel's chart over without making a thing of it—called the practice on Elm and told them, in plain language, to send the file across town.
By the second week, the waiting room was full. I hired Marisol full-time on a Wednesday and a part-time receptionist on the Friday. The receptionist was a woman named Joanne who had run the front desk at the dentist's office on Main for fifteen years, retired in the spring, gotten bored by August, and walked in on a Thursday afternoon to tell me she could start Monday. She started on Monday.
In three weeks, I never took lunch. I took coffee at the counter, standing up, and half a sandwich between appointments, and the second half cold at four in the afternoon at the desk in the back office.
Audrey clocked it in the first week. She came by on a Wednesday at one with a paper bag from the diner and the face she'd been using on me since the third grade. She came back the next Wednesday with another bag. She didn't ask. She ate her half standing up. I ate mine on the stool.
Neither of us said his name.
I crossed Maple at six-fifteen on a Tuesday morning in the middle of the third week. The cold had come in overnight. The grass was stiff with frost, and my breath made a small cloud every other step.
Moose was at my hip. He'd been at my hip every morning for three weeks. He stopped going to the back door around the time Easton used to come home from shift. He stopped putting his paw on the front door when a truck went by on Maple. He stopped looking up at boots on the porch boards.
He still slept with his head pointed at the front door. Every night. His chin on his paws, his head turned toward the hallway,and the hallway led to the front door, and the front door faced Maple.
He was waiting. I couldn't look at him doing it without my throat going tight.
