He brought me dinner on a tray.
I ate. I didn't think I was going to be able to. The sauce was my mother's, and I'd made it a hundred times in Boston for a man who'd stopped tasting it by year three. Tonight, I sat on a couch in Hartsdale with a tray on my lap and a firefighter on the cushion next to me, and the sauce tasted different in a bowl he'd carried out with both hands.
He didn't ask me to talk.
I talked anyway.
I told him what Brett said on the porch. About the text on the night of the water tower, which I'd already told him. About the lamp in March. About his mother, the dinners, and the voice she used on me. I told him I'd thought the silence meant it was over, and I'd been wrong.
He listened for the whole of it. His hand stayed flat on the table.
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"He's not coming back."
"You don't know that."
"He's not coming back to this porch. Not tonight, not next week. I told him at the curb." He set his fork down. "I told him I had his license plate, his address, and a friend of mine on the desk at Hartsdale Police. I told him he had a choice. He made the choice."
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"You can't fight him for me."
"I'm not fighting him for you. I'm not letting him on your porch. There's a difference."
I let that sit.
He was right. Eight months ago, I would have meant the first sentence and stopped there. The woman on the couch in Hartsdale in November heard the second sentence and let it stay where it landed.
I picked up my fork.
"Stay tonight."
"I'm staying."
"At my house. Not at yours."
He smiled softly. "I figured."
"I don't want to leave my own house."
"Astrid. I'm not going to make you leave your own house."
He picked up his fork.
We went to bed in my room at half past ten.
He knew where the towels were and which side of the bed I slept on—the side away from the door. I'd slept on that side since I was twenty-six in a brownstone in Boston, because it was the side a woman picked when her husband let himself in late and she didn't want to be the first thing he found in the dark. I'd never examined that habit until tonight. He got in on the side toward the door without saying anything about it.
I put my hand on his chest.
He put his hand on mine.
Two hours ago, that hand had been on the back of a man's neck on my porch. After that, it had held a wooden spoon over a pot of my mother's tomato sauce. Now, it was under mine, warmand still, in a room where the reading lamp threw the same soft yellow it had thrown my whole childhood.
