Then "Still," he said, "you have to at least give me a chance to try."
I felt the pull. Low in my chest, the same pull I felt every time someone said the right thing at the wrong moment, the pull that made me want to believe that a man who admitted he wasn't ready and asked to try anyway was a man worth trusting. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to hand him the chair and watch him sit down and stay.
But I'd watched my mother want that. For years.
The line came out before I had time to soften it.
"She's not going to grow up wondering why someone who said he'd try stopped trying."
His face changed. The openness stayed, but something behind it flinched, and I knew the words had landed where I'd aimed them and also somewhere I hadn't.
"Raising a child isn't a Tuesday date that you never see again, Duke."
I watched it hit. I watched his mouth close. I watched his shoulders take the weight of what I'd just said, and I saw him decide not to argue.
"I don't have an answer for you right now," I said. "Can you give me time to think about it?"
The quiet ran long. His eyes went to the bassinet one more time. I saw what was on his face. I made myself look at it without letting it change anything, because if I let it change something, I was going to ask him to stay, and asking him to stay was the thing I couldn't do.
He exhaled. Long, slow, through his nose.
"Fine," he said.
He turned, walked to the door, and put his hand on the handle.
When he opened it, Astrid was there.
She was in the hallway with a bag from Rosario's in one hand and her car keys in the other. She looked at Duke, and her face lit with something that was relief and warmth and the uncomplicated gladness of a woman who had been carrying a secret for nine months and was seeing the two people at the center of it in the same room.
"Duke." She said his name like a door opening. "Oh, that's good. You've met your daughter."
Duke looked at her. His face held for a second, everything he'd just been carrying visible on it for anyone who knew how to read him, and then it smoothed over.
"Yeah," he said. "I just need to get some air."
He went past her. His boots were quiet on the linoleum. Astrid stood in the doorway and watched him go. I saw the moment she understood that the air he needed was not the kind you get from a hallway.
She turned to me with the Rosario's bag and a smile that was ready to celebrate. Then she saw my face.
She didn't ask.
She set the bag from Rosario's on the chair by the window, crossed the room, and put her arms around me.
I put my face against her shoulder. She held on, and I let her.
CHAPTER 10
Duke
I don't remember the drive home. I remember parking.
The truck was crooked in the driveway, the front left tire on the grass, and I sat behind the wheel for a while with the engine off and my hands on my knees. The streetlight was on. The house was dark. Somewhere inside it was a couch, a kitchen, a bed I was supposed to sleep in, and none of those rooms had a plan for the man who was about to walk into them.
I went inside.
The house was what it always was. A firefighter's house, small and functional, the furniture secondhand except for the couch I'd bought new because Reese told me the old one was a health hazard. The kitchen had a coffeemaker, a toaster, and a cast-iron skillet I used for everything. The nonfiction stack on the nightstand—Krakauer, Junger, a dog-eared copy ofEnduranceI'd read three times—sat where I left it. The pinball machine in the basement was still running the high score I'd set in February, the one I told Easton I'd beat and hadn't.
I stood in the living room, sat on the couch, stood up, went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and looked at what was in it—eggs, hot sauce, a takeout container from Thursday I should have thrown away. I went to the bedroom, but didn't lie down. Isat on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees, still in the uniform, still in my boots.
