She opened the door, got out, and crossed the sidewalk to her building. I sat in the truck and waited until she was inside.
My house was quiet when I closed the door behind me.
The two plates were still on the small table, the wine bottle half-finished beside them. The kitchen lamp still on. The stove off, the pan soaking in the sink, the evidence of a dinner I'd cooked for a woman who sat across from me and told me the truth about her life.
The Nepal email was still in my inbox. Thirty-six hours, untouched since that first night, unanswered. The confirmation deadline was sitting at the bottom of the message like a line I hadn't decided whether to cross.
I read the email again.
The dates. The training. The confirmation deadline.
I put the phone face down on the counter.
I didn't reply. I didn't delete it.
I stood in the kitchen with the plates on the table and the email on the counter, and I knew that the two things were in the same room now. Everything Audrey had told me tonight—the father who left, the mother who waited, the twenty-eight years of walls—was in the room with a climb that would take me to the other side of the world for weeks, away from a woman who had just told me that the deepest wound she carried was the wound of someone leaving.
I turned off the kitchen lamp, left the plates on the table, and went to bed.
The phone stayed face down on the counter in the dark.
CHAPTER 15
Audrey
I tried on three shirts before I admitted what I was doing.
The gray pullover was a no—fine for the couch, fine for the clinic, fine for every version of myself that had stopped requiring an opinion. The blouse from before the pregnancy sat differently across my chest now, in a way I wasn't ready to have an opinion about either. The black top with the low scoop neck I put on, took off, put back on, and stood in front of the mirror with for a full minute.
I'd told Astrid once that the secret to looking put together was deciding what you wanted people to see and then only showing them that. She said it sounded exhausting. It was. It was also the only way I knew how to walk into a room.
I kept the black one.
The mascara wand felt foreign in my hand—the weight of it wrong, the angle off, like I'd forgotten a language I'd been speaking since I was fifteen. Eight weeks of the same four shirts and the robe will do that. I stood at the mirror longer than I needed to. Not the mother reaching for whatever was on the chair. A woman who had been invited somewhere and was choosing, deliberately, to look like it.
The lipstick was still in the top drawer. I couldn't remember the last time I'd reached for it—sometime before the highway, before the robe became a permanent fixture, before I stopped caring what the mirror said. I looked at it. I didn't reach for it. Not yet.
Nova was on the bed in the carrier, already dressed in the fox onesie. The good one. I laughed at myself in the mirror. My daughter was attending her first Rhodes family dinner, and I'd dressed her like it mattered.
My phone was on the dresser. The screen was dark. Sunday. I told my mother on Wednesday that I had plans this weekend, and she asked what plans, and I said just dinner with friends. The silence since Wednesday was its own message. Twenty-eight years of Sundays at the house on Birch Hill, and I was about to spend this one at the Rhodes kitchen table, and I'd not told her.
I threw the phone on the bed beside the carrier and finished the mascara.
His knock came at the door. Duke had a key, but he knocked when he knew I was getting ready, which was either consideration or self-preservation.
I opened the door. He was in jeans and a button-down he'd ironed badly, the collar sitting crooked on one side. I looked at it. He looked at me in the mascara and the black top, and something crossed his face that he kept to himself.
"You ironed that shirt," I said.
"I did."
"How long did it take you?"
"That's not relevant."
"The collar is crooked."
"I know about the collar." The corner of his mouth went up.
