“Thank you,” she mumbles.
“You need water?”
“Mm-mm.”
“I’m going to get you water.”
I go to the kitchen, fill a glass, and bring it back. She’s already half-asleep, curled on her side, still in the green dress, still on top of the covers. I set the water on the nightstand, pull the blanket from the foot of the bed, and cover her.
My hand hovers near her face. Her hair is across her cheek, dark against the white pillowcase, and I want to push it back. I want to touch her face. I want to trace the line of her jaw. Instead, I pull my hand back. She’s drunk and asleep and didn’t mean for me to hear any of that.
I close her door. I go to my room and sit on the edge of my bed in my suit, pressing my hands against my face.
The ground I’ve been standing on for fifteen years doesn’t feel solid anymore.
It hasn’t felt solid since she got here, if I’m being honest.
I’m just finally running out of ways to pretend it does.
Chapter Sixteen
Away Game
Sydney
The house is different when Archer isn’t in it.
Not bad. Just different. Like I’m suddenly aware of the refrigerator humming and the heat cycling on and all the small mechanical noises that his presence normally covers up. He left this morning for a three-game road trip, West Coast swing, and the house has felt different all day.
The twins seem to be handling it okay. Lily spent the afternoon teaching her stuffed giraffe a dance routine she claims I taught her, though I don’t recognize a single move. Luke built a tower out of magnetic tiles and then sat next to it for twenty minutes, studying it from different angles, before carefully dismantling it tile by tile and starting over. They’re fine. They’re three. Their world is the size of this living room, and as long as someone is here cutting their strawberries and reading their books, they don’t track the absence the way I do.
His FaceTime comes in at 5:30, right before dinner, and Lily sprints to the kitchen so fast she nearly takes out a chair.
“DADDY!”
His face fills the screen. He’s in a hotel room somewhere—beige walls, a generic headboard, the universal décor of a man living out of a suitcase. He’s wearing a t-shirt, his hair is dampfrom the shower, and he looks tired, but he’s smiling, and Lily is pressed so close to the phone that all he can see is her left eyeball.
“Lil, back up a little. I can see your brain.”
“DADDY, I taught Jeffrey a dance.”
“Who’s Jeffrey?”
“Her giraffe,” I say from behind the camera.
“The giraffe has a name now?”
“The giraffe has had a name since Tuesday. Keep up, Lockwood.”
He grins, and I feel it in my ribs. Through a phone screen, from three thousand miles away, the man grins, and I feel it in my ribs. That’s not normal. That’s not a thing that should happen to someone who is just a friend helping with the kids.
Luke takes the phone next. He holds it with both hands, very serious, and tells Archer that he built a tower today and it was “structurally sound.” Archer asks him where he learned that phrase, and Luke says “the internet,” and Archer looks at me over Luke’s head through the screen with an expression that sayswe need to talk about his internet access, and I nod.
“You guys being good for Auntie Syd?” Archer asks.
“Yes,” Luke says.
“VERY good,” Lily adds, which is a lie—she bit her brother’s arm during a disagreement about crayons at 2 PM, but I’m not going to bring that up on FaceTime because she apologized, and he forgave her, and the crayon situation has been resolved.
