Page 56 of Trust my Heart

“There’s a thing fathers are supposed to say here,” he said, not looking up. “I don’t have the sentence for it. Consider it said.”

I stood there for a moment with my hand on the frame.

“Consider it heard, sir.”

He waved me out with two fingers, and I went.

The floor had given up pretending to work by the time we came back. Reid rolled his chair into the aisle to intercept us, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, and Chen appeared behind him fast, and I’d have bet she had money riding on it. Down the row, Doyle opened the notebook.

“Well?” Reid said. “You were in there for almost an hour. Transferred, promoted, fired, or wedding.”

“Evicted,” I said, and kept walking.

I heard it land behind me. Reid choked on one of his coffees. Chen said that wasn’t one of the options and demanded a ruling, and Doyle, after consulting the notebook, announced that nobody had taken evicted, so the pot stayed with the house. By the time I reached my desk the floor had voted to reopen betting on where we’d end up living, and Doyle was quietly writing odds.

Ryan sat down across from me, at the desk that had faced mine, and turned his monitor a few inches so I could see the screen. He already had a listings page open. Two bedrooms. A kitchen you could stand in together.

“Bigger kitchen,” he said. “Non-negotiable. Half our arguments need the counter space.”

“One bedroom,” I retorted. “Non-negotiable. All our post-arguments are reconciled there.”

Ryan laughed and I smiled.

We had a month, no lease, no program, and a form going up the chain with both our names on it, asked for in our own handwriting. I pulled my chair in and looked at apartments with my partner, on the clock, while the pool built behind us. The whole morning came down to one thing.

Nobody was assigning us anywhere. We were choosing.

Epilogue: Trust My Heart

Ryan

The last box would not close.

I pressed the flaps down and they popped back up. I had packed a winter coat on top, like a man who had learned nothing all afternoon. Luke came up behind me, put both hands flat on the cardboard, and leaned. The box gave up. I ran the tape across it under his weight, and before he let go he kissed the back of my neck, unhurried, like we had all day.

We did not have all day.

“Last one,” he said, against my hair.

“Last one.”

He carried it to the line by the door and set it down square with the others, no wasted moves. He packed like he did everything, economical, nothing done twice. I watched him instead of flattening the leftover cardboard, and I’d watched more than I’d worked. He was sure of every move, and it had been getting to me since the first week, back when I couldn’t stand him. It still did. I wanted him, right there, boxes and all.

The one framed photo we owned rode on top of the second box, wrapped in one of his shirts. He hadn’t trusted me with the glass. That was the arrangement, start to finish. He did the careful things and handed me the ones I couldn’t wreck, and I’d stopped minding it somewhere around box four.

The apartment did not look empty. It never would. The worn couch out of surplus, the low table, the two beds, the strip of a kitchen with its two burners and the fridge that always hummed too loud. All of it belonged to the Service, and all of it was staying for whoever they assigned here next. Forty square meters, furnished out of a supply catalogue. Two strangers had been handed one key and told to make it work, and somewhere in these four rooms we had.

The old keys were already on the kitchen counter, next to the building’s checklist, signed at the bottom, and the note Almeida had left us. Block capitals, no greeting, the way he wrote everything. DON’T TOUCH GNORMAN ON THE WAY OUT, HE’S BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH TENANTS. Then, farther down, smaller, the part that cost him: YOU TWO WERE NO TROUBLE. THAT’S THE NICEST THING I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT ANYBODY IN THIS BUILDING. DON’T LET IT GO TO YOUR HEADS. NEW PEOPLE MONDAY. DON’T COME BACK TO CHECK ON THE PLACE. A.

Gnorman was the gnome by the front step, chipped, one boot repainted the wrong green. Almeida guarded it the way he guarded that basement dryer, and he had cleared our steps before dawn all winter without being asked.

“We’re going to miss the old man,” I said.

Luke read the note again. “He’d hate hearing that.”

“He’d put it in capitals.”

The new keys were in my front pocket. I had checked three times that they were still there. All that was left was to pick up twelve boxes and walk out of the first home I’d ever had that deserved the word.