Page 7 of Wrong Mail

But it’s not dead.

When he holds me, I still believe him.

That has to count.

"Call me tonight," he says, his lips pressed into my hair. "Not text. Call."

"Yes, Doctor."

He almost laughs. Then his phone buzzes in his pocket. He steps back to read it, and whatever was about to show on his face disappears. He thumbs the screen dark and puts it away.

"Work?" I ask.

"Always work." He picks the coffee back up. "Helen wants numbers before the board meets. If I make Chief I'll never sleep again, and if I don't make Chief I'll never sleep again. But someone has to pay for this lifestyle."

He says it lightly. He says almost everything lightly. It lands anyway, and neither of us picks it up.

"Go," I tell him. "You don’t want to hit traffic on the bridge."

He smiles and gets his suitcase. At the door he turns, and he's just my husband in a blue shirt in the morning light, and I love him so plainly it frightens me.

"Lock up this evening," he says.

"I always do."

The front door opens, and Julia's voice rises from the hall, bright over the top of his. "Hello, David."

"Julia."

A car door slams, an engine turns over, and then it's just gravel.

Julia appears in the kitchen the way she always does. No knock. Already talking. Luna goes to pieces at her feet.

"Tell me there's coffee," she says.

She's in her running clothes, damp at the collar and the small of her back. She’s already clocked six miles while most people are still hunting for their slippers. At thirty-nine, Julia looks exceptional.

She drops onto a stool at my island and steals my unfinished toast without asking, which is one of the reasons I love her.

“Here’s that coffee," I say, handing her a cup.

Julia's eyes go to my bare wrist. “Mal, you're not wearing it."

"I'm not driving, either. Not much use for it if I'm not driving."

"Ugh. It isn't only for driving." She takes my wrist, turns it over, lets it go. "It's for when your head goes somewhere you don't want it to. You feel it on your wrist, you breathe, you come back. That's half of it."

"And the other half?"

"The bead, silly." She reaches over and picks it up from the bowl, showing me the little dull-gray ball threaded on the band. "I went down a rabbit hole for hours after you told me about your accident. Car-escape tools, grounding, all the cheerful things a person Googles at two in the morning when her friend nearly drowned in a river. That bead's tungsten. You put it against a side window and pull the band back and let go. Smash. The glass goes to pieces. One snap. It could save your life."

"So could an open window," I say.

"You were lucky your window was open. Luckier that someone stopped to pull you out." She says it gently, which is worse than if she'd said it any other way. "Put it on. Please. For me."

I shake my head, but take it from her and put it on. "Happy?"

"Getting there." She points the toast at me. "You look pale, hon. Is it a bad morning?" She doesn't wait, which is her mercy. She never makes me answer the direct ones. “Anyway, have you been out yet? The weather is vile. You can't breathe. The humidity is awful. My phone's been screaming weather alerts since six." She fans herself with a napkin. "The weather people say there's a storm coming. A bad one. We are in for days of rain, if they’re right. All this heat has to go somewhere, and then after that, it's outages, outages, outages. I’m telling you, if the whole point goes dark for two days, Chris will act like it's a personal insult from the sky." She rolls her eyes at the ceiling. “So. Where is David off to now?”