“Sophia.”
He was at the curb across the road, one boot toe out on the asphalt. He’d been waiting a while, and he’d just decided to cross. I didn’t turn my head. I lifted one hand a few inches in his direction, vaguely, a thing that on any other morning would have been an invitation and this morning was only a wall. Not now. Please not now. I kept walking. Four more steps.
“Sophia.” Lower this time. Closer — he’d come off the curb, I could hear it, boots on the road and then the gritted edge of my own path, and the gentleness in it was the exact wrong thing, the one weight the shelf couldn’t take, because I could armor up against the night all I liked but I had no armor built for kind. Not from him. Not aimed at me soft like that at six in the morning with it still running and my whole body one held breath.
The key wouldn’t go in. My hand was shaking too hard to find the slot, the brass skating off the metal, and his boots were on the path behind me, and he’d said my name twice in a registerthat meant he’d already seen the whole of it on me. He’d clocked from the first day that I hadn’t put a face on for him. And I was going to come apart on my own front step in front of God and Willow’s curtains and the entire sleeping cul-de-sac if I didn’t get this door open in the next three seconds.
I got the key in.
I turned it.
I was going to make it inside.
13
Caleb
I’d kissed her in my garage the morning before and been about half as much use as usual ever since.
It stayed on me all day and most of a night I spent listening for her car. When it turned into Sycamore Row at six minutes past six, I was already up and out my own front door with the loose idea of crossing the road to say good morning like a man with a right to.
She got out under the cone of her porch light, and I stopped where I stood, because her face was the color of ash and it had a look on it I knew.
I’d seen it once in my life, on a man I’d have sworn couldn’t wear it — my father, the morning we lost Jace, standing in a kitchen gone too big around him, hollowed out from the inside and still up on his feet.
She had it now, crossing her own yard in that thin first light, and every good thing I’d been carrying since the garage went out of me like air out of a tire.
I went.
“Sophia.”
She didn’t turn. She lifted one hand a few inches without looking back, low and flat, and I read it for what it was because I’d thrown it myself a hundred times: not a greeting. A wall. A please-not-while-I’m-carrying-this.
“Sophia.” Lower. I was a stride behind her, close enough to hear her breath go in short and snag on the way back out.
Her keys were up, her hand shaking too hard to make them land — brass skidding off the lock, once, twice — and she got it in anyway, on her own, and turned it, because whatever had hold of her she was going to open that door under her own power.
I reached past her, put my palm to the door above hers, and pushed it open. Got my other arm around her — not pulling, just there, a rail if she wanted one — brought her in over her own threshold, came in after, and shut the door.
Then it was the two of us in her front hall, her swaying like the floor had moved since she last stood on it, me with one hand at her back, waiting to see what she’d do.
She moved off like she’d forgotten I was there, which I’d have bet money she had — toward the kitchen, fast and low, the walk of something heading for cover — and I followed at the distance you keep behind a person who might bolt. She went straight to the counter, lifted the kettle like her hands had been sent on ahead without the rest of her, carried it to the sink, and turned the tap.
And started talking without turning toward me.
“There was a boy. In the corridor. He wouldn’t — he had both of them, he had his arm round both of them, and he wouldn’t look away?—”
The kettle was filling. I stood where I was.
“—the mom came in first, somebody still up on the rail doing compressions, and the dad, they thought they had the dad, they said they had him — pajamas, the little ones were in pajamas,one set had dinosaurs on them, who puts a child to bed in dinosaur pajamas and then?—”
Her voice wasn’t rising. It was going flatter, faster and lower, the words coming off her in a level run like something paid out off a reel that had stopped braking.
“—two shots. There were two shots. The pantry. The pantry, and Liam had his arm, Liam had his — across — and the sound, oh God, the sound, you don’t…you never…”
I didn’t try to make it join up. You don’t reach into the middle of a thing like that asking which piece goes where. You hold the ground. You wait.
The kettle had filled and gone over, water sheeting off the lip and over her knuckles into the basin, and she hadn’t felt it — still tipping it under the tap, still pouring more into a thing that couldn’t take any, still talking.
