Behind me, the kitchen was doing its morning. Halsey had eggs on the burner. The foil tray was out. Micah was at the island with his plate and his phone, and I could hear him trying to start a conversation that nobody was going to finish for him.
"Rhodes," he called through the bay door. "Did you know there's a word for the smell of rain on dry ground?"
"Petrichor," I said without turning around. "Eat your eggs, Micah."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I read. Some of us read."
"I wouldn't have pegged you as a guy who reads."
"That says more about you than it does about me, Micah."
I heard Halsey refill Micah's plate without being asked. I didn't go back in. The bay was mine this morning. The clipboard, the rig, the warm air coming through the doors. A room that didn't need me to be anything other than a man with an inventory sheet.
I'd been thinking about her again.
That was the honest version. I'd been thinking about Audrey Callahan for months—not constantly, not in the way that wrecked a day, but in the low, persistent way a song gets into your head and you don't notice it's playing until you catch yourself humming.
The pact was holding. I told myself this every time her name surfaced, the way you check a wound and confirm it's still closed. We made an agreement. The agreement was sound. She was right—Astrid and Easton were going to be in our lives for years, and a one-night stand between the maid of honor and the best man was something two adults could put behind them as long as neither one of them reached back for it.
I wasn’t reaching back. I was holding the line. I'd held it through nine months of Easton mentioning her name in passing, through every barbecue and birthday at the bungalow I'd found reasons not to attend, through a shift in my own driving routes that I never named out loud. I stopped taking Main home from the firehouse because Main went past Hartsdale General, and Hartsdale General was where she worked, and I wasn’t going tobe the man who drove past a hospital, hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman he'd agreed not to want. I took the bypass instead. The bypass added four minutes. I made peace with the four minutes.
And I'd almost made peace with the rest of it until I saw her on Main Street.
It was a Saturday, a while back, late winter with the last of the dirty snow still banked along the curb. I was coming out of the hardware store with a box of screws for a shelf I was putting up in my place, and she was across the street, walking into the bakery.
She didn't see me. She was in a heavy coat, her hair down around her shoulders, and she looked good. Rested. Like the months since the wedding had been kind to her. She looked like a woman who had her life in order, and I stood on the sidewalk with a box of screws and watched her disappear through the door.
The bump registered before my mind caught up with what I was seeing.
She was pregnant. Visibly, unmistakably pregnant, the silhouette clear under the coat as she turned sideways to pull the door open. My brain processed the shape first, the meaning second, and the feeling third, and the feeling was a drop, like the floor had shifted under me by a quarter inch.
She met someone. After the wedding, after the pact, she met someone, and he was whoever he was, and things moved fast, and this was her life now.
I stood there with my box of screws and built the whole story in the time it took her to walk through a door. A man I didn't know. A relationship I didn't know about. A future that had nothing to do with the night I was still holding in a closed fist somewhere behind my ribs.
I went home. I put up the shelf. I didn't think about it for the rest of the afternoon, and then I thought about it all evening. I sat on my couch with a beer I wasn't drinking and wondered who the man was.
I didn't want to wonder. I'd no right to wonder. I wondered anyway—what he looked like, whether he was good to her, whether she laughed with him at the end of a long day, whether he knew about the place at the side of her neck under her ear. That last one cost me something I wasn't going to name, and I put the beer on the table and went to bed.
I hadn't seen her since. Not because Hartsdale stopped putting her in my path. Because I stopped letting it. I took the bypass. I kept skipping the barbecues. I kept the four extra minutes between myself and the woman who was carrying another man's baby, and I told myself the four minutes were enough.
They weren’t enough. I knew they weren’t enough. But I kept driving the bypass because the alternative was admitting that a woman I'd slept with once at a wedding and agreed to forget was the first person in a decade of casual who had made casual feel like a lie.
I checked the last line on the inventory sheet.
The wedding night came back in a flicker—her laugh in the dark by the gate, the grass under our feet, the weight of her against me in the doorway of her apartment before either of us had said a word. I pushed it down. I put the clipboard on the running board and stood at the bumper, looking at the bay doors, holding the pact up with both hands the way I'd been holding it for months.
It was getting heavier.
Easton found me at the rig at eight.
He came through the bay from the kitchen with a coffee in his hand and the calm, unhurried posture of a man who had been married for the better part of a year and was still adjusting to the fact that his life had turned out the way he'd always wanted. He looked good. He looked like Easton, which was to say settled, certain, the closed door open.
"Rhodes."
"Ford."
