I walked her around the living room. The route was worn in by now—past the bouncer, past the bookcase Audrey had moved from the nursery to make room for the crib, around the kitchen island, back to the window. Audrey watched me from the couch. She picked up the coffee, took a sip, and made a sound that was somewhere between relief and worship.
I put Nova in the bouncer when her eyes stayed closed for a full minute. I sat on the floor beside it. Audrey was on the couch above me, her knees drawn up, the coffee in both hands.
The quiet stretched. Nova made a small sound in the bouncer, the one that wasn't a cry but was close, and I put my finger against her palm. Her fist closed around it. The grip was strong. It always surprised me, the strength in a hand that small.
"You know you don't have to be here every time you're off shift," Audrey said.
I looked up at her. "What are you talking about?"
She shrugged. Her eyes were on her coffee. "Didn't you used to go out a lot?"
"Audrey."
"I'm just saying." She took a sip. “We're not dating. You can go out with other women if you want to.”
I didn't say anything. Nova's fist was still around my finger.
The truth was plain and simple: I didn't want to go out with other women. I hadn't wanted to for a long time. I didn't know how to tell Audrey that without making it into something she hadn't asked it to be.
"Good to know," I said.
She looked at me over the rim of her coffee. I looked at the bouncer. Neither of us said anything else.
I leaned my head back against the side of the couch. Audrey's knee was close to my shoulder. The late morning light was coming through the window. Audrey was drinking her coffeeabove me with the warmth of her knee an inch from the back of my neck.
I liked coming home to them.
The thought arrived without buildup, without the architecture of a decision. It was just there, sitting in my chest beside the sound of the baby breathing and the smell of the coffee and the warmth of the room, and it was true.
I didn't say it. I didn't even let it settle. I filed it back—the same shelf where I kept everything I wasn't ready to look at yet—and I sat on the floor with my daughter's fist around my finger and my head against the couch where the woman I wasn't supposed to want was drinking the coffee I brought her.
I noticed it. That was all. I noticed it, and I let it be.
CHAPTER 13
Audrey
Astrid let herself in on a Thursday because I didn't hear the knock. I was on the couch with Nova on my chest, both of us half-asleep, the TV on mute. I hadn't showered. The robe I was wearing had spit-up on the shoulder that I'd wiped with a burp cloth and stopped thinking about. Duke had been here yesterday and left the kitchen clean. Since then, I'd gone through four bottles and a pump session and left all of it on the counter.
"I brought soup," Astrid said from the doorway. "And rice. And the chicken thing from Rosario's that reheats."
She didn't wait for me to get up. She came to the couch first, leaned down, and put her arms around Nova and me together. She held on for a second, her chin against the top of my head. Then she went straight to the kitchen, put the containers in the fridge, and started on the bottles at the sink. I watched her from the couch and didn't have the energy to tell her she didn't have to do that.
"How's it going with Duke?" she asked, her hands in the water.
"It's going well," I said.
And it was. That was true. It was also the surface of something I didn't know how to describe to my best friend whileshe stood at my sink doing the dishes I hadn't done, so I gave her the surface and kept the rest.
Duke showed up the first week with takeout from the Thai place near the firehouse, not asking if I wanted it, just setting the containers on the counter, washing his hands, and picking up the baby. He held Nova against his chest while I ate pad see ew with one hand.
The rocking chair showed up the second week. Duke carried it in from his truck without explaining where it came from. I didn't ask. It was old, well-used, the armrests worn smooth by years of someone's hands. Not something he'd bought. Something from a family that kept things. I put it in the nursery corner by the window.
"It's perfect," I told him, and I meant it. I used it that night at one in the morning, rocking Nova in the dark, and I used it the next night, too.
Duke at the kitchen sink at one in the morning, washing bottles with Nova in the crook of his left arm, his right hand working the brush with the efficiency of a man who had held patients and equipment at the same time for years. He rinsed each bottle twice. He set them on the rack without looking. Nova was asleep against his chest with her fist in his shirt.
I taught him the cries. Hungry was short, rhythmic, escalating. Tired was a low drone that broke into sharp bursts. Mad was loud and sustained and usually about the yellow onesie. Wet was whimpering, more complaint than crisis. And the one I didn't have a name for yet, the one that was justthis is too much, and I need someone to hold me until it stops.Duke took notes on his phone. He asked me to repeat the tired cry twice. He read them back to me at the kitchen counter like he was studying for a certification exam, and I corrected his description of the mad cry, and he updated it without arguing.
