"It's been four minutes."
"I drive fast."
I dropped the second hoop into my ear and looked at the dress lying on the bed. Green silk jersey. Wrap front. Three-quarter sleeves. I bought it the second year of my marriage and wore it once to a dinner at his mother's, who gave me her disappointed look, the one she used when something didn't have a polite word attached to it. I hung the dress in the back of the closet and let her win that one. It moved with me from the brownstone to the storage unit to the U-Haul to here. It had been waiting, too.
The phone buzzed on the counter while I was reaching for the lipstick.
I picked it up to silence it. The lipstick was the soft red I'd bought myself at a department store counter at twenty-three, on a Saturday afternoon when a saleswoman told me it was made for my mouth and I believed her enough to spend forty dollars on the proof. It had aged better than the marriage.
The phone screen lit again. I looked at it.
Brett
I miss you.
Three words. Eight months of silence and three words.
Audrey was still talking through the speaker. I wasn't hearing her. My thumb started composing a response before I'd given it permission. I caught it before it finished the first word. I set the phone face down on the counter. I picked it back up. I opened the thread. I deleted every message in it, eight months of silence followed byI miss you, and emptied the deleted folder for good measure.
"Astrid?"
"Yeah."
"You went quiet."
I steadied my voice against the counter.
"I'm putting on the dress."
"The green one?"
"The green one."
"Good girl."
I laughed. The sound came out small and ragged at the edges, a laugh I hadn't heard out of myself in something close to a year. It surprised me on the way out, like overhearing someone in the next room when you didn't know they were there.
I put the lipstick on.
He was at the door at seven on the nose.
I put my hand on the knob, gave myself a half-second, and opened it.
He stood there in dark jeans and a navy button-down with the sleeves pushed to the elbows. The cut at his temple fromTuesday was already half-healed. His hair was pushed back like a man who'd run his hand through it twice on the porch, trying to decide what to do with it. He held a small bunch of cosmos in his good hand. Wild pink, picked from somebody's garden in October. He hadn't wrapped them. He'd just brought them.
He looked at me.
He looked at the neckline of the dress.
He looked at me again, very carefully, like a man working hard not to be caught looking at the neckline of the dress.
"Astrid."
"Easton."
A beat went by while he did what I'd been doing all afternoon, figuring out how to look at a person you'd spent weeks pretending you weren't looking at.
The porch light caught the cut at his temple and the loose curl falling against it.
