Astrid was quiet for a second. Then, she said plainly, "Are you sending Duke to Nepal because you want him to be free? Or because you don't want to be the one who needs him?"
I felt the question land in the place I'd been protecting for six days, the place under the not-opening of the door, the place where every reason I'd built for the morning kitchen was stacked. The question went through it.
My eyes were wet. I was looking at Astrid with the expression of a woman who had just been asked the question she'd been afraid of hearing.
"I don't want to be my mother," I said.
"Aud." Quiet. "You're not your mother. Your mother would have begged him to stay and then watched him go. You shut the door because you couldn't beg. That's not the same thing."
"Then what is it?"
"Fear. The version of your mother's wound your body learned. Different shape. Same wound."
The line landed hard. My face held, barely, the tears sitting at the edge of my lashes without falling.
She put her hand over mine on the counter.
"I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you what I did. I told a man I loved that I was letting him go, and I called it nobility." She looked at me. "You can look at the door you closed and ask yourself what it really was. Then you get to decide whether to open it."
I let my hand stay under hers.
She let me sit with it.
After a long beat, Astrid stood. She drained her coffee, rinsed the mug at the sink, crossed to where Nova was sleeping in the bouncer, and kissed the baby's head. She came back to me, hugged me with one arm around my shoulders, her chin against the side of my head. She let go.
At the door, she turned.
"Aud. Whatever you decide, I'm here. But if you don't open the door the next time he knocks, and he's going to knock, Audrey, you know he is, you're going to have to live with that for the rest of your life."
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her. I sat at the island with Astrid's question sitting in every corner of the room.
I didn't move for a long time. Then I got up. I went to the bathroom. I washed my face. I brushed my hair. I put on clean clothes for the first time in three days and looked at myself in the mirror.
I was making my face match a decision I hadn't named yet. But my body knew. My body had known since the floor at the door, since the thirty seconds with my palm on the wood and hisbreathing on the other side. My body knew what it wanted. I was the one who hadn't caught up.
Evening. The apartment was different with the lights on, real clothes on my body, and my hair down for the first time in a week. Nova was in the bouncer. A pot of soup was on the stove, the first real thing I'd cooked since before the morning kitchen, and I was hungry for the first time in days.
The knock came at seven-twelve.
My heart went fast, and my hands went still, and I was across the apartment before I could think about what I was doing. I walked to the door and opened it.
Duke on the threshold.
Jeans. A T-shirt I recognized. His hands in his pockets. His face was the face of a man who had been driving to this building for days and not getting out of his truck, and tonight, he'd walked up the stairs. His jaw was set. The circles under his eyes were dark. He looked like he'd slept about as well as I had, which was not at all, and I could see on him what the week had cost, the same way he could probably see it on me.
He stood in the doorway, and he waited.
I stepped back. "Come in."
He came in. I closed the door behind him. He walked past me into the apartment, stopped in the middle of the living room, and turned.
"Aud."
I held up my hand to say let me go first.
He waited.
