"I slept."
"All night?"
"All night."
"Good."
I poured the coffee. He took his with cream and one sugar. He didn't ask me to stay. I didn't offer. There was a clinic to open, and the morning had its own shape we both understood.
At the door, he caught my wrist. His thumb settled in the dip below my palm.
"Astrid."
"Yes?"
"Thank you for staying."
I looked up at him. There was gratitude, disbelief, and something quieter underneath, all three of them crossing his face at once.
"Easton."
"I know."
He let my wrist go.
I crossed Maple in his shirt with my green dress balled under my arm and Moose at my hip. Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved in the front window. I lifted my hand without thinking. She lifted hers without pretending to do anything else.
The week settled into a shape neither of us named out loud.
In the mornings, I crossed Maple at six with my hair still wet from the shower. He learned how I took my coffee. He learned I'd drink one cup at his counter while he packed his lunch for shift, and carry the second on the river trail. Moose figured out the routine in two days and stopped being one woman's dog.
On shift days, I worked late at the clinic, walked Moose along Maple in the dusk, crossed the street at seven to bring in Easton's mail. Twice that week, I let myself into his house with the key he'd given me in October and slept in his bed. I didn't do it every night. I didn't want to make it a thing I couldn't undo.
When he was off shift, he was at my house. He fixed the back gate latch, the loose porch step, and the kitchen drawer that wouldn't close. He used my mother's cast iron with the sameeasy hands he'd used on his grandmother's. He read the index card I'd taped to the inside of the cupboard door, made the soup the same way she did, and didn't make a thing of it.
Around town, we were no longer a question anyone was asking. Mrs. Halloran clocked his truck in my driveway on Saturday morning and stopped pretending she wasn't clocking it. The waitress at the diner started pouring his coffee before he sat down. Audrey called me on Thursday and said,you're sleeping over there,and I said,some nights,and she said,Astrid,and I said,I know.She didn't push past that.
At the clinic, the bell over the door was ringing six times a day, where it'd been ringing once. Word traveled after the firefighters brought their pets in. The Bishops referred Mrs. Bishop's sister-in-law. A woman from church who'd been Caldwell's for twenty years came in with a basset hound named Earl and told me at the counter she'd heard I was gentle with the old ones. Duke brought his mother, and his mother stayed for an hour. The sunflowers from opening day were long gone. Audrey replaced them with chrysanthemums, and Steve slept in the wedge of sun they made on the counter.
The firefighters had given the town permission, and the town had taken it.
I had a pot of my mother's tomato sauce on the stove Saturday evening when the pounding started.
Easton was on shift. Moose was at my feet. I'd been stirring the sauce for an hour. The knock came heavy and uneven—a fist, not knuckles. Wrong rhythm.
The back of my neck knew it before the front of me did.
I set the wine glass on the counter and went down the hall. I put my eye to the peephole.
Brett.
He was on my porch. His hair was wrong. His coat was wrong. He hadn't shaved. He was swaying on the boards with a fist up, ready to bang the door again, and he was looking at the door with the same expression he'd worn the night his father cut him off.
I opened the door.
I didn't know why I opened the door. A part of me had been calibrating around him for six years, and that part, even eight months out, still answered when he knocked. My hand turned the bolt before my head caught up. The door swung in two inches.
"Brett."
