I didn't know. I didn't know, and the not-knowing was a door I'd never stood in front of before, and I could feel it opening whether I was ready or not.
I kept coming back to Wednesday night. Nova had been crying and then stopped, and the silence woke me faster than the crying had. I got to the nursery door and found it already open—Duke in the rocking chair with her against his chest, singing something low and off-key I didn't recognize. His voice was quiet enough that I shouldn't have been able to hear the words from the hallway. But the song carried.
I'd sat down on the floor outside the door because my legs wouldn't hold me. My back against the wall. My hands on my knees. He didn't see me. The song went on past the point where she needed it, because he wasn't ready to stop.
CHAPTER 14
Duke
Her feet were across my lap, and she was asleep.
Her breathing slowed, but her hand still held the edge of the blanket like she was ready to get up if Nova called. The apartment was settled in the way it got quiet around eleven—the low hum of the refrigerator, the street outside muffled through the windows, the particular stillness of a baby who had been down for two hours and woken once already and gone back down because I walked her in the dark until she did.
I'd been here since five. Made dinner—the pasta with the red sauce from the jar she kept on the second shelf. She ate half. The dishes were done. The bottle rack on the counter was full. The burp cloth she'd been carrying on her shoulder all evening was folded on the arm of the couch beside her. I'd folded it while she was in the bathroom, and she hadn't said anything about that, because I'd been folding things in this apartment for five weeks, and neither of us commented on it anymore.
I looked at her on the couch. The sweatshirt was too big for her. The sleep pants had a small stain on the knee she hadn't noticed or didn't care about. Her hair was down, unwashed, tucked behind one ear. She looked tired in a way that had stopped being about hours. The tired had become a thing shelived inside of, a room she walked through all day, and I could see it on her face, even when she was smiling, even when she was fine, even when she handed me the baby with a joke about how I held her like a football, and she was not a football.
I was watching her sleep on a Tuesday night, and the thing I was feeling was simple and enormous, and I wasn’t going to name it on her couch at eleven-thirty while she was unconscious.
I slid out from under her feet. Set them down on the cushion, gently, one hand under her ankles. She stirred but didn't open her eyes. I stood up. Pulled my jacket off the hook by the door. Came back to the couch.
I stood over her for a second. Her face was turned into the cushion, and her breathing was even, and I wanted to bend down and put my mouth against her hair. I didn't. I was the man with the spare key who came by, made dinner, and left. That was the role, and the role didn't include kissing a woman who hadn't asked to be kissed.
"I've got it from here," I said softly. "Get some sleep."
She didn't open her eyes. She made a sound that was almost a word. I pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, picked up my keys from the table by the door, and let myself out.
The hallway of her building was lit by one fluorescent light that buzzed at a frequency I'd stopped hearing three weeks ago. I stopped at the top of the stairs. I stood there for a beat, my hand on the railing, looking down the stairwell, and the feeling I wasn’t going to name on her couch followed me into the hallway and stood there with me.
I kept going.
My kitchen at midnight was dim and still. The bowl from the morning was still by the sink. The one lamp on over the counter.
I poured a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.
I pulled it out. An email. The subject line had the expedition name in it and the word waitlist.
I read it standing up.
The email was short. Two of the original confirmed climbers had dropped out—one medical, one personal. The waitlist had shifted. My name was no longer third. I was next. If they didn't hear otherwise from me, my spot would be confirmed automatically should anyone else drop out. The dates were firm. The training requirements were attached.
I read it twice.
Then I locked the phone and put it face down on the counter.
The email was in the room. I could feel it sitting on the counter two feet from my hand, the way you feel a thing you're choosing not to look at. The choosing was the point. I'd been at Audrey's apartment for ten hours today. I wasn’t going to answer at twelve-thirty in the morning in a kitchen with one lamp on.
I went to bed. I didn't sleep.
My body was tired. My brain was running the circuit it ran now—Nova's face when she woke up at nine, the sound she made before the crying started, a small complaint that was more opinion than distress. Audrey's feet across my lap. The weight of them. The fact that she let me hold them without thinking about it.
My phone rang at two in the morning.
I was awake before the second ring. I was out of bed and across the hall to the kitchen before the third.
Audrey.
