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“Unbelievable,” she said.

She left. At the door she stopped and put her palm against the frame and didn’t turn around, and then she pushed through it. The door shut behind her and made no sound.

I wiped the counter and put her mug in the rack, and I stood outside my daughter’s room and listened to her breathe.

Gerald was still on the counter facing the window. His blue plate was in the rack where Iris had left it, washed, propped on its edge against the whale mug. I gave the dragon a good minute. He’d outlasted a road trip and every argument I had left in me. I thought about Desert Tails out past Glendale and a woman who’d told me on the phone that she was publicly neutral.

I turned him around to face the room. He’d earned the view and it didn’t commit me to a cat.

Light showed under the casita door.

I went to bed. On the far side of the kitchen a woman was lying in a bed I’d chosen for her before I’d ever seen her face, and I could still taste her on my mouth.

I fell asleep fast. I slept through the night for the first time since training camp.

CHAPTER 16

Delaney

I reached past him for the sugar and the backs of my thighs remembered the edge of his counter before the rest of me could stop them.

The kitchen smelled of wet coffee grounds and the dish soap I’d used on the last of the plates, and when the refrigerator cycled off, the pot hissing out its last inch was the loudest thing in the house.

He was at the machine with his back to me, pouring, one hand on the lid while it finished. He didn’t turn around. I stirred the sugar in and dropped the spoon in the sink, and moved down to the far end of the counter, the end that hadn’t been under me the night before, and blew on coffee that didn’t need blowing on. My hip was against the drawer pull and I left it there. I made a note never to eat so much as a cracker off the other end of that counter again, and then another note under it that I was lying.

Iris was at the table in her pajamas with a bowl of cereal. Her hair was slept flat on one side and stood up in a nest on the other. She chewed with her mouth open and the cereal cracked between her teeth. Gerald was up on the counter against the fruit bowl, turned away from all of us again, still on strike.

“He’s not eating,” she told the room.

“Still not eating,” Eli said, to the coffee machine.

“He says not ever. Not breakfast and not dinner and not ever.”

“He’s allowed principles.”

“He says you don’t have those.”

Eli turned around at that with the pot still in his hand, and his eyes skipped past his daughter and landed on me at the end of his counter, and stayed there too long before they swung back to her.

“Tell Gerald I’ve got plenty,” he said.

I knew one thing he had plenty of, and it was patience. Last night I’d had all of it between my thighs, and he hadn’t been in any hurry at all.

I put my mug to my mouth and kept it there.

Neither of us said one word about the counter.

He slid the pot back into the machine and picked up his travel mug and his keys, and his eyes lifted to mine for as long as it took him to say, “Morning.”

“Morning.”

“She’s got the library bag today.”

“It’s by the door.”

He nodded once. The garage door went up behind the wall and the truck backed out of the drive, and I was still at the end of his counter with my mug under my chin and every muscle from the backs of my knees to my hips aching from a night on his granite. Then the door rolled back down and hit the bottom rail with a knock that carried through the tile into my feet, and after it there was only Iris and me and the cereal.

I got Iris dressed, which took two shirts and a negotiation about socks. I had the brush through her hair in four passes and she held the edge of the dresser for all four without one complaint, because she had spent all of it on the socks. I drove her to preschool with the library bag on her lap and both arms around it.