Henry slammed his sippy cup on the tray in protest. The table laughed.
My father was proud of Nepal. He was proud of it because Nepal was the next line on the list—the quarterback, the scholarship, the firefighter, the mountaineer. Each line earned and real and mine, and each one placed in a frame my father had built before I was tall enough to see over the counter.
I looked at my mother across the kitchen. She was at the counter. She was reading me. She did it quietly, without drawing attention to it, from a position that looked like she wasn't paying attention at all. Thirty-two years of teaching second grade had given her a diagnostic eye that missed nothing. She could tell when a seven-year-old was lying about the homework, and she could tell when her thirty-two-year-old son was performing at his own family's dinner table.
I looked away.
She didn't say anything. She picked up the serving spoon, brought the salad to the table, sat down beside my father, and asked Caroline about Henry's new teeth. The moment passed, and nobody at the table noticed it except the two of us.
Mid-meal, Caroline turned to answer something my father asked about the contractor's schedule for the deck project. She passed Henry to me without asking. The toddler went from her arms to my chest. Her hand was back on her coffee cup before the transfer registered.
Henry settled against my chest in about four seconds. His head went to my collarbone, his fist closing in the front of my shirt. He smelled like baby shampoo and the Cheerios he'd been crushing into his high chair tray for twenty minutes. He was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with his weight—the particular heaviness of a child who trusts you completely, whose entire body goes slack because he decided you’re safe.
I sat with it. I didn't think about why it landed so hard.
When the dinner wound down, I helped clear the table. I dried the dishes while my mother washed.
She looked at me. "You'd tell me," she said. "If something was going on."
"Nothing's going on, Mom."
She held my look for a moment, then kissed me on the cheek and went to join my father.
I drove home alone.
The truck was quiet. The road from Cedar Lane to my place was a ten-minute drive through the dark that I'd done a thousand times, past the fire station, past the high school, past the turn for Main, where the diner lights were still on, and the last of the Saturday crowd was filtering out. The windows were down. The air was cool and still held the end of summer in it, the smell of cut grass and river water, and the faint sweetness that meant the season was about to turn.
The warmth of Henry was still on my chest. The weight. The memory of a small body trusting mine with its full heaviness, the fist in my shirt, the slow breathing against my collarbone. My body was still holding the shape of him.
I'd done casual my whole adult life.
Casual was what I did. It was a system that worked—like the firehouse routine, like my father's highlight reel—a thing I'd built and maintained, and never had to question, because it never cost me anything. A woman came and went, and I was the same man on either side of her, and the sameness was proof that casual was the right word for what I was.
The pact with Audrey Callahan was the most casual agreement I'd ever made. Two adults, one night, move on. On paper, it was the easiest thing I'd ever agreed to.
It was the hardest thing I'd been carrying in a week, and I didn't know what to call that.
I'd done this before. The drive home, the quiet cab, the end of a night where a woman was somewhere else, and I was here. It had never felt like this before. No hospital hallway I stoodin deciding whether to walk down. No morning-after voice in my head that I replayed while checking the rig. No weight on my chest that made me think about someone who wasn't in the room.
I didn't know what this was.
I didn't know what to do with not knowing.
CHAPTER 5
Audrey
Astrid's kitchen still smelled like Easton's grandmother's house underneath everything Astrid had added to it—the lemon soap on the counter, the coffee she made too strong, the dried herbs by the back door. The recipe cards were still in the tin on the windowsill. The brass lamp was still on the side table next to the leather chair in the living room. Astrid had moved into this house without trying to erase the woman who built it.
Moose was under the table with his chin on my foot. Astrid was across from me with her hands around her mug and the face of a newlywed who was still catching herself smiling at nothing. She was doing it now. Small, private, the edge of it visible over the rim of her coffee.
"Stop it," I said.
"Stop what?"
"The face. The newlywed face. You've been doing it for forty minutes."
"I don't have a face."
