"Honest answer? Some days, I miss her. Some days, I feel like I haven't even started missing her yet, like I'm still ahead of it." He was looking at Penny, not at me. "But mostly, I keep coming back to the fact that she isn't suffering anymore. The last six months were hard. She didn't want them. There isn't a clean way to say I'm glad they're done with, but they're done with."
He glanced up. "That sounds bad."
"It doesn't sound bad. It sounds true."
"Mhm."
"It's what nobody tells you about loving somebody through a long sickness. The relief feels like betrayal until you understand it isn't."
He looked at me for a long beat. Long enough that I knew he'd noticed which voice that sentence came out of and which voice it hadn't.
"Yeah," he said. "That's it."
I let it sit. It was a silence Audrey would have filled. A silence Easton and I both seemed willing to let exist.
"So Hartsdale Fire?" I asked.
"Two and a half years now."
"How is it?"
He shrugged a little.
"It's good. The shifts are long. The bad calls are bad. But you get to be the person who shows up on the worst day of somebody else's life and make it a little less worst. There are a few days a year when that means everything. You hold on to those dayswhile you're doing inventory on the truck." He looked up. "What about you? What brought you home?"
"I got married young," I said. "It didn't work out. I came home."
He waited a beat to see if there was more. There was. He could see there was, but he didn't reach for it.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Don't be. I'm not anymore."
He nodded once, letting it lie.
"And the plan? Now that you're back?"
"A clinic, actually. There's a space on Main I'm walking through tomorrow."
"A clinic?"
"I'm a vet."
He sat back. The smile started slowly and didn't bother to hide.
"Of course you are."
"What?"
"That tracks. With everything."
"With what?"
"I watched you work on a sparrow once."
I stared at him.
"Your front porch. For the better part of an hour. I watched the whole thing from across the street. I figured it was a goner."
