Her building. Third floor. Her kitchen window was the second from the left. I could see the corner of the bottle drying rack through the glass—the rack I filled, and she emptied, and I filled again, the ordinary thing we did together every day until four days ago.
I got out of the truck.
Up the front steps. Through the door. Up the stairs. Down the hall.
I stopped at her door.
I raised my hand to knock.
I stood there with my fist in the air and the morning light coming through the hallway window behind me. I was bringing her one sentence. The same one I said four days ago in her bedroom doorway. The one she answered withI know. I was going to say it again, because the first time I said it while leaving, and this time, I was saying it while staying.
CHAPTER 19
Audrey
Three knocks. Even, unhurried. The shape of his hand against the wood.
I was at the kitchen island with a coffee I'd made an hour ago and not touched. Nova was in the bouncer by the couch. The robe I'd been wearing since yesterday was tied at my waist, and the apartment smelled like the candle I hadn't lit and the dishes I hadn't done, and his knock came through the door like a sound my body had been waiting for before my brain agreed to hear it.
I crossed to the door. Slowly. I stopped with my palm flat against the wood at chest height.
I could hear him breathing.
Quiet, even. The breath of a man standing still on the other side of a door, giving it one knock, and leaving the rest to me. I heard his weight shift once, the small adjustment of a boot on linoleum, and then nothing. He was waiting.
I pressed my forehead against the door. My eyes closed. I could feel my own breathing, shallow and wrong, and the distance between my hand and his body measured in two inches of pine.
"Aud."
His voice through the door. Low, close, like he was talking to the wood the same way I was leaning against it. My fingers curled against the paint.
"I'm not going anywhere. I just need you to know that."
My hand moved to the knob. The metal was cool and round under my palm, and my fingers closed around it. He was on the other side of the door, telling me he was staying, and all I had todo was turn my hand.
Then my mother's kitchen. The phone on the counter. The empty chair. The sound of a woman calling a man who said the same thing once and meant it at the time.
The fog pressed down. It came from the same place it came from at three in the morning when Nova was screaming, and the apartment was dark. The place underneath the exhaustion, where every thought I'd had about myself arrived pre-weighted with the certainty that I was not enough, that the smart thing and the safe thing were the same thing, and the safe thing was the lock between my fingers staying exactly where it was.
I let go of the knob.
His footsteps went down the hall. Three, four, five steps. Then a pause at the top of the stairs, long enough that I knew he'd stopped, long enough that I knew he'd turned back to look at my door one more time. Then the stairwell door opened and closed, three flights down, and the building swallowed the sound of him leaving.
I slid down the inside of the door to the floor.
My back against the wood. My knees pulled up. The hallway on the other side of the door was empty now, and the emptiness was something I'd made.
I just did what my mother would have done.
The thought arrived in my own voice, plain and complete. My mother would have stood on the inside of this door with her whole body wanting to open it, and she would have let the manon the other side walk away because the wanting was the thing she was most afraid of. Not the man. The wanting.
The system just lost to a closed door.
I sat on the floor for an hour before I stood up.
The days after the door were the worst stretch since the bathroom floor.
The apartment held the shape of his absence in small places I kept finding. The second coffee mug I hadn't put away. The spot on the counter where he set his keys. The rocking chair in the nursery that I sat in at three in the morning with Nova against my chest, the armrests worn smooth by someone else's mother's hands.
