He leaned against the bumper beside me. We stood there for a beat, the two of us drinking bad coffee in the bay with the warm air coming in and the morning running itself around us.
"How's the elevation training?" he said.
"Good. Did Breakneck Ridge last weekend. Ran the scramble twice."
"Twice?"
"I wanted to see how my lungs handled the second push."
"And?"
"Lungs are fine. Knees are talking to me."
"When do you hear about the roster?"
"They're finalizing the roster this summer. My slot's been on the waitlist since last year. Should hear back any week now."
The answer came easily because I'd given it a dozen times—to my father, to the crew, to anyone who asked about Nepal. The answer was true. The training was real. The slot was real. The expedition was the next line on a list I'd been writing since I was old enough to understand that my father's pride ran on forward motion, and stopping was something Rhodes men didn't do.
I believed in the answer. I also noticed, standing at the bumper beside the man who had rewritten his entire life for a woman across the street, that the answer felt lighter than it used to. The way something feels lighter when you've been carrying it so long your arms have gone numb and you can't tell anymore whether the weight is real or just familiar.
I opened my mouth to ask about Audrey.
The question was right there—casual, easy to frame, nothing that would betray what I was actually asking.How's Astrid? How's the crew? Everybody good?The way you work your way toward the name you actually want to hear without landing on it first.
"You've stopped dating," Easton said.
I closed my mouth.
He didn't look at me. He took a sip of his coffee and kept his eyes on the bay doors, and his voice had the flat calm of a man who was making an observation, not an accusation.
"You used to have somebody most weeks. Tuesday night, a Saturday. Months now, nothing."
"I've been busy."
"Mhm."
The firehouse syllable. Drawn out, unhurried, meaningI'm not arguing with you, but I'm not believing you either.
"I've been coaching," I said. "Saturday peewee hockey at the rink. Eight kids, seven of them can't stop without hitting the boards. The Delaney twins have figured out how to hold their sticks. I haven't missed a Saturday all season."
This was true. The rink on Saturday mornings was a room I'd walked into by accident and kept walking into on purpose. Eight kids between five and seven, most of them in helmets that were too big, all of them calling me Coach D. I liked it more than I'd expected to. I liked that the kids didn't need me to be charming or quick. They needed me to show up, blow the whistle, andteach them how to stop without crashing. It was the simplest version of showing up I'd ever done, and it was the only room I'd been in all year where I didn't feel like I was holding something up.
Easton let it sit.
He stood beside me at the bumper with his coffee and let the silence do what silence did between us—hold the space for the thing neither of us was going to say. He knew. I could feel it, the way you feel someone reading a room you thought you'd locked. Easton Ford, who had spent months pretending he wasn't in love with the woman across the street, was standing next to a man doing the same math, and he was giving me a chance to say it out loud.
I didn't take it.
"Good program," Easton said. He pushed off the bumper and clapped me on the shoulder on his way past, the same way he had on the morning of the wedding.
I watched him cross the bay toward the kitchen.
He'd given me a door. I'd looked at it, and I'd looked away, and the door had closed behind him with the quiet click of a man who would open it again whenever I was ready.
I wasn't ready.
The tones dropped at eleven-forty.
