"I heard that," said Minna, from the doorway, surrounded by luggage and holding two passports and a juice box like a woman who'd raised armies. "I don't cheat. I win. The two feel identical to people who lose."
It got a laugh out of Louis, a real one, and Aislinn loved her cousin-in-law-to-be, or whatever Minna now was to them, fiercely and completely for it, because laughs were currency this week and Minna had been spending her own reserves freely for three straight days, handling schools and movers and security and grief like they were all just items on the same list.
Which was why Aislinn waited until Louis had gone to supervise the wrapping of the rabbit's scarf before she asked.
"Minna." Her voice came out smaller than she'd planned. "When is he coming back?"
Minna stopped sorting the passports.
It only lasted a second, the stopping. But eight years had taught Aislinn to read the pauses of careful people, and in that one second she watched something move behind her friend's unflappable face, something that looked exactly like a heart changing its footing.
"He didn't say."
Three words, delivered evenly, and the delivering cost her, Aislinn could see it cost her, this woman who never once spent a feeling in public.
"Okay." Aislinn nodded too many times. "Okay. Then, can I, is there a way I can reach him? A number, an email, anything, I don't need to use it, I just need to know it exists, I just need—"
"I'm sorry." Minna's voice went thick and clogged, twice in one week now, which from her was rare enough to notice. "I can't."
Not there isn't one.
I can't.
Aislinn heard the difference the way you hear a floorboard give, and understood, in one cold drop, that somewhere in the world the man she loved was reachable, and had left instructions, and that the instructions did not include her.
"Okay," she said again, because her son was in the next room, and mothers don't get to sit down on the floor of an emptying penthouse. "Then we'd better not miss our plane."
NEW YORK RECEIVED THEMat night, glittering and indifferent, and the new penthouse had a doorman who already knew their names and a private elevator and a guest room Louis walked past without comment to claim the bedroom closest to hers.
They were eating airport sandwiches on unpacked boxes when Louis's phone rang.
Aislinn didn't know the ringtone. She knew her son's face, though, and her son's face went up like a city at dusk, every window at once.
"Papa!"
She stopped chewing. She stopped everything.
"Yes. No. The plane was okay, I had the window. Aunt Minna let me have two sodas but she says if you ask, it was one." A pause. Louis's eyes found the chessboard, still in its tissue, and he was already tearing it free one-handed. "Yes, I set it up. Okay. Knight to f3." He moved the piece with surgical care. "That's a boring move, Papa." Pause. "Fine, it's a solid move. Boring and solid are the same—okay, okay."
Aislinn sat very still on her box, holding half a sandwich she'd forgotten existed, listening to one side of her whole heart talk to the other across an unknown number of miles, and she was smiling so hard it hurt, it genuinely physically hurt, right up until Louis said,
"Do you want to talk to Mama? She's right here, she's—"
Pause.
She watched it happen. She watched her seven-year-old listen, and glance at her, and understand something too early, the way he understood everything too early, and fold it away behind his eyes where he kept the things that hurt.
"Okay," Louis said. "Yeah. I'll tell her. Goodnight, Papa. Your move."
He set the phone down with both hands, very carefully, the way you set down something that might spill.
"Papa says goodnight," he reported, not looking at her. "He had a meeting. It's a different time zone where he is. Time zones are..." He searched, and settled, with dignity, on, "...strict."
"Of course they are," Aislinn said warmly, around the stone in her throat. "Very strict. Come eat your sandwich, my love."
He came. He ate. The call never came up again that night, from either of them, and that was the first night of the both of them pretending, though neither knew yet how good at it they were going to get.
Later, when he was asleep with the rabbit and the white king both stationed on his nightstand, Aislinn lingered in the doorway of her son's new room in her son's new city and looked at the chessboard he'd insisted on setting up in the living room, mid-game, one white knight advanced, black's reply already made, the whole board turned patiently toward the door.
