I pulled her closer. The word sat in the room with us, quiet and enormous.Ours.Her head fit against my chest, and her hand curled into the front of my shirt, and I felt her body settle against mine with the full weight of a woman who had stopped holding something up.
We talked. What to bring from the apartment, what to give away. The pinball machine she told me I was absolutely keeping because she wanted to watch me lose a fight with it in person. The nonfiction stack she was going to steal from. Nova's room, which was going to need a real dresser and a paint color that Audrey would choose, and I wouldn’t argue with.
The tent was for the asking and the answering, and both of those were done, and what was left was two people lying on sleeping bags in a living room, talking about where to put a dresser.
Eventually, her breathing changed. The slow, heavy breathing of a woman who had spent the afternoon hanging string lights and staking a tent into her rug and was now done. Nova made the small sound in the bassinet that wasn't waking, just the body of a sleeping baby, confirming she was still in the world. The string lights were still on through the fabric of the tent. The fireplace was still crackling on the TV. Neither of us had gotten up to turn anything off.
I'd spent thirty-two years trying to be the man every room needed. Turns out, the room I needed was a tent a woman built for me in her living room because she wanted me to come home.
CHAPTER 21
Audrey
The string lights were still up.
Two days since the tent, and the lights were still looped across the ceiling in their long warm rows, casting the kitchen in the same gold that made everything look softer than it was. I kept meaning to take them down. I kept not doing it. The plants from Astrid's bungalow were still in the corner by the window. The tent—broken down, folded flat, leaning against the wall by the door—was the last big thing Duke was going to carry to his truck the next time he went back to the house on Elm for a load.
His house. Our house. I was still getting used to the word.
Duke was at the counter with a bowl of cereal, standing up because he always ate standing up before shift. Hartsdale Fire t-shirt, duty pants, his bag already packed and slung over the chair by the door. The radio was on low. Nova was in my lap at the table, one hand on the toast I was holding for her, her fist closing and opening against the crust while I took bites between hers.
"What time are you off tomorrow?"
"Eight, if nothing goes long."
"Bring Halsey's bagels if you go past the place."
"Mhm."
The morning moved the way our mornings moved now—small, unhurried, domestic in a way I was still learning to trust. He finished the cereal. Rinsed the bowl. Picked up his bag from the chair. Pulled his Hartsdale Fire jacket on over the T-shirt, the navy one with the crest at the chest that smelled like cedar and the laundry soap he'd been using since before I knew him.
Then the goodbye.
He crossed back from the door to the table. He bent over Nova and kissed the top of her head, his hand cupping the back of her skull for a second, the same hand that caught her on Route 9. Then he straightened, put his hand on my jaw, and kissed me. Short, warm, his mouth firm against mine. I kissed him back. Two people who liked kissing each other at seven in the morning in a kitchen still lit by string lights.
He stopped at the door. "Love you."
"Love you. Be safe."
He raised a hand. "Always."
The door closed behind him.
I sat at the kitchen table with Nova in my lap, the cereal bowl drying in the rack, and the radio playing something I wasn't listening to.
I was allowed to want this.
The thought arrived whole, quiet, too large for the small kitchen it was sitting in. I'd spent nine months managing my face, managing my expectations, managing the distance between what I wanted and what I let myself reach for. I was sitting in my own kitchen at seven in the morning watching the father of my child go to work, and the wanting was just here, ordinary, unhidden, mine.
I kissed the top of Nova's head and started my day.
The day passed. Nova on the playmat while I packed another box for the house on Elm. A text exchange with Duke at four about whether we needed milk. The last of the pasta reheatedfor dinner. Nova's bath, the duck onesie pulled on and zipped—the one she'd finally grown into. Her 1:30 wake-up, the small opinion cry that meantI am awake, and I have thoughts about it.I walked her. She went back down. I stood at the kitchen counter at 1:45, drinking water in the dark.
The smoke alarm in the hallway went off.
My body heard it before my brain did. Six years on the L&D floor, a thousand code alarms, a thousand drills. My hand opened. The glass hit the tile and shattered. I was already moving.
The nursery. I pushed the door open. Nova in the crib, asleep through the alarm, her fists curled at her shoulders. I scooped her up—one hand under her head, one under her back—and pulled her against my chest. She woke with the small, confused sound of a baby lifted out of sleep too fast.
