Each answer she'd received with a small nod that had looked like a woman filing a receipt. The questions had been polite. They'd been specific. They'd been building something.
"And how are you and Audrey planning to?—"
"Mom."
One word. Audrey had said it from the bed without raising her voice, and Colleen had stopped. The question had hung in the air, unfinished, and Colleen had let it go with a smile that hadn't changed shape. She'd turned back to the food. She'dunpacked it. She'd moved through the room with the quiet competence of a woman who knew hospitals and knew her daughter and knew exactly when she'd been told to stop.
I'd stood there holding the baby and filed everything I'd just seen. What Colleen had been doing. What Audrey had stopped her from doing. The fact that Audrey had needed to stop her at all.
I didn't know what she was measuring me against. I didn't know the rubric. I just knew there was one, and she wasn't showing it to me. The smile she’d given me when I left the room was warm and real, and it’d carried something underneath it that I couldn't name.
The weeks that followed confirmed it. Once Audrey and Nova were home, Colleen came over once or twice a week withThe Yarn Roomtote bag and containers of food. She cooked. She held Nova. She asked me about my shifts, my house, my hours, and my schedule. Each question was polite, specific, and received with the small nod I'd seen in the hospital room.
I answered plainly every time. She filed every answer. She never said a critical word about me. She never said an unkind thing. She just kept taking the measurements, quietly, patiently, with the thoroughness of a woman who believed the data would eventually tell her what she needed to know.
One Sunday afternoon, I came off shift and let myself in. Colleen was on the couch with Nova in her arms. Audrey was in the kitchen. Colleen looked up when I came through the door, and I crossed the room and reached for Nova because that was what I did now when I walked through this door.
"She just ate," Colleen said, handing her over. "About twenty minutes ago."
"I'll burp her."
I settled Nova against my shoulder. Her fist closed in the front of my shirt. Her face pressed into the space below mycollarbone, the same spot she always found, and her body went slack—the full weight of her trust against my chest.
Colleen watched my hands on the baby's back. She watched Nova settle against me. She gave the small nod. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just the nod. The receipt.
I burped the baby and walked her around the living room. Colleen went back to the knitting she'd pulled from the tote. When I looked over, she was counting stitches, her eyes on the needles, and she wasn't watching me anymore.
But she had been. I caught it.
By the end of the first month, I realized I hadn't been on a date in almost a year. Not since before the wedding. I hadn't wanted to. That was the part I kept noticing and not examining—the absence of the want, the fact that the Tuesday nights and the easy goodbyes had stopped pulling at me, and in their place was something quieter that I wasn't ready to look at yet.
One morning at the end of a twenty-four shift, I walked out of the firehouse to my truck. The air was bright and warm, the last of summer still holding in the valley, and I was already thinking about the drive to Audrey's. The coffee from the place on Main. The spare key on my ring. The baby in the bouncer, Audrey on the couch, the apartment that smelled like milk, laundry detergent, and whatever lotion she used on Nova's skin after the bath.
I wanted to go there. The wanting was simple and unremarkable—as natural as wanting coffee in the morning—and I noticed it only because it had been true for a while and I was only now looking at it directly.
I got in the truck.
"So when do we meet the kid, Rhodes?"
Micah was at the stove with the eggs on, which was already a problem. Halsey was at the island with his coffee and the expression of a man watching something go wrong and deciding not to intervene. The kitchen smelled like grease, diesel, and scorched butter. Lou was in the office with the clipboard. The fluorescent over the island hummed.
I let the question sit, then let the easy version of myself come back—the firehouse version, the one who had answers for rooms like this.
"Not until she gets all her shots. Pediatrician was specific. Two months minimum, full set of vaccines. Then we'll talk about her being around a bunch of guys who roll in covered in smoke and diesel."
Halsey purposefully didn't look at the stove. He looked at his coffee. "’Pediatrician was specific.’ Listen to you."
"What?"
"Duke Rhodes talking about vaccine schedules." He shook his head. "Never thought I'd see it."
"See what?"
"You. Slowing down." He said it to his coffee, not to me. "Used to be a different girl at the diner every week. Now you're talking about shot records."
Micah came around from the stove with the plate. Halsey looked at the eggs and grunted.
Lou, from the office doorway, clipboard at his hip: "It's a good look, Rhodes."
