I was about to find out how much of her was left.
The earring stuck.
I tipped my head sideways at the bathroom mirror and worked the post through my earlobe with the patience of a woman who hadn't worn a pair in months. It came through eventually. I worked the back into place and looked at myself. Hair pulled back at the nape. The navy blouse Audrey had told me to wear before I'd even asked. The small gold hoops I'd dug out of the dresser drawer for the water tower date.
The phone buzzed. Audrey on speaker.
"You wearing the navy?"
"I'm wearing the navy."
"Lipstick?"
"Audrey."
"Lipstick, Astrid."
I uncapped the tube and pressed the soft red against my lower lip. The smell of it, wax and something faintly floral, brought back the brownstone bathroom on Marlborough Street. The same lipstick I'd bought myself at twenty-three. I'd been keeping it in the drawer next to the earrings, which was something a woman did when she was coming back to her life. Two pieces of evidence that she was coming back, and she didn't want them in different rooms.
"Are you ready?" Audrey said.
"Yes."
"Liar."
I looked at myself in the mirror.
"I'm worried about him being there tonight."
"He wants to be there."
"I know he does. I want to give him a quiet week."
Audrey filled silences as a rule. She didn't fill this one.
"Astrid."
"Yeah."
"Wear the lipstick."
I finished putting it on.
I capped it and set it on the counter. The cat came around the doorframe and sat on the bath mat with the deep yellow-eyed look of a cat who had decided I was a thing he was now in charge of. He'd come out of the crate on Monday morning and stayed out. He'd taken Moose's spot on the bed without consulting him, and Moose had let him.
The cat watched me put my blazer on.
"You're going to need a name," I told him.
He blinked at me once.
I'd been calling him "sir.” A placeholder, the word a woman uses when she knows she has a cat now and is waiting for him to be himself long enough that the right word falls out of her mouth.
He pressed his shoulder against my ankle. I bent down and rubbed his head. He leaned. He'd been with me two weeks, and he'd been with me always. That was what cats did.
The doorbell rang.
Easton's truck was in his driveway across Maple. He came down the front walk before Audrey had backed out of mine. Dark jeans, navy button-down under his Hartsdale Fire jacket, hair combed back the same as the first date, the cut at his temple from the cat night fully healed. He came across the street with a forward walk, a man who'd been working through grief and had decided, today, to be somewhere.
