Her side was cold—the deep cold, hours old. I reached across the sheet before I opened my eyes, and my hand landed on empty linen.
I opened my eyes.
Audrey was sitting up against the headboard with her knees pulled to her chest. Her hair was up in the messy knot she put it in when she'd been awake long enough to be annoyed by it being down. She was staring at the far wall with the focused stillness of a woman who had been thinking for a long time and arrived somewhere she didn't want to be.
"Aud." I reached for her hip. Sleepy, easy.
She let me pull her down. She let me kiss her—soft, the half-awake kiss I gave her every morning now, my mouth against hers, my hand finding the warm skin at her waist under the T-shirt she slept in. She kissed me back. The kiss was shorter than it should have been.
I pulled back. I looked at her face.
"Hey. What's going on?"
She sat up. Pulled her knees back to her chest.
"Your phone lit up last night," she said. "While we were doing the dishes. I wasn't looking—it was on the counter next to my hand, and the screen came on. I saw the email." She paused. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have read it. But I need you to tell me about Nepal."
She was apologizing. She was sitting in my bed at six in the morning with hours of sleeplessness behind her eyes, apologizing for accidentally seeing something I should have told her about weeks ago. My face went still. The hand I'd had on her hip came back to my own side of the bed, and something inside me went quiet.
I sat up.
"I accepted the waitlist spot over a year ago. Before you. Before Nova. Before any of this." My voice was even. "I was going to withdraw. I've been planning to since the first week I showed up at your apartment with coffee. I was handling it—the answer was already no. I was working out the logistics."
I looked at her.
"I should have told you. Not because I was still deciding—I wasn't. I should have told you because you deserved to know, and not telling you let you build a version of this that isn't true."
Audrey listened. Her face on her knees, her eyes on the duvet. When I stopped talking, the quiet ran long enough that I could hear the furnace cycling in the building's basement.
Then she spoke. Clear. Deliberate. The woman who had been awake for two hours and had arrived somewhere.
"I don't want you to withdraw."
I felt the ripple—the half-second of relief that lasted as long as it took for me to register what she actually meant.
"I've been watching you," she said. "Since you got here. Since before this. I've watched what you've been giving up. The training you stopped doing. The hikes. Your calves are thinner than they were in August, Duke. I've watched you stop checkingyour phone—not because you want to less, but because you've stopped letting yourself want what's on it." She lifted her face from her knees and looked at me. "I've seen what that does to someone. Over the long arc. My mother was married to a man who stayed when the staying wasn't what he wanted, and I watched what it did to him, and I watched what it did to her."
Her eyes were dry. Her voice was steady.
"I won't be the thing you resent in ten years, Duke. I won't watch you give up something you wanted before you knew us and then come to hate me for the version of yourself you became when you stayed."
I heard her. I heard every word of it. And I understood why she believed it—from where she sat, the evidence looked exactly right. A man who stopped training. A man who held an email. A man who went quiet. I could see her mother's kitchen from here. The phone on the counter, the empty chair, the years of waiting.
But she was wrong about what the quiet meant. And I couldn't prove it to her at six in the morning in her bed, because the proof wasn't a sentence. It was everything I'd already done, and she'd watched me do all of it and still couldn't believe it was real.
"Audrey. I'm not going. I've already decided."
"You accepted the slot, Duke."
"I was waitlisted. And that was months ago. Before I knew what this was. I'm telling you I'm not going."
"I know you mean that right now."
"I mean it permanently. I want to be here."
She looked at me, and her face held something I couldn't argue with—not disbelief, not anger. Fear. The deep, foundational kind that lived underneath everything she'd built. The kind you don't talk a person out of in a conversation.
"I think we should take some space," she said. Steady. Clear. Final.
