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“I want it on the record that I am leaving under protest.”

“Noted.”

She picked the dish towel up off the counter, and then put it back down, and then picked it up again. She’d never once backed down from me in my own kitchen, and a dish towel was beating her. At the door she stopped with her fingers hooked on the frame and her back to me. She turned her head and looked at me a beat too long, and let herself out.

Then I was alone in my own kitchen with flour still in the seam of my watch band and the weight of her still in my hands. She was on the other side of one door, and nothing about any of it was decided.

CHAPTER 18

Delaney

I didn’t sleep.

The room had one ceiling fan and it ticked once a turn, and by midnight I had the count of it and couldn’t lose it again. I lay on top of the sheet with one foot out of the bed and flipped the pillow for the cool side until there wasn’t one.

I ran it back from the start. I had the seam of his shirt under my hands again, and the weight of being hauled to the edge of the counter by a man who didn’t appear to find it difficult. My mouth was at the side of his neck, saying his name plainly, with no question in it. His hand was on the button of my jeans. Then a door opened three inches down a hallway.

Each time through got me a little further than Iris had let us. By four, in my head, I had his jeans on my bedroom floor and his weight on me and I was lying there wide awake, with the sheet kicked off, furious at a door.

Well before light I gave up on the bed and put my feet on the cold tile, because there was a little girl in the house who needed eggs on a schedule regardless of what her father had been doing to me on the counter she would sit down and eat them at.

He made coffee.

He’d made it before I was awake every morning since September, and I’d been drinking it and saying nothing about it. The morning after the perogies he made it the same as ever, and it was a completely different event.

I came through my door earlier than the job required. The pot was full. He was standing at the far counter in a gray t-shirt with his back to me, a banana and a cutting board in front of him. The t-shirt was old and soft and stretched thin across his shoulders. The coins slid on the board as they came off the knife and he pushed them back into a stack with the side of the blade. The counter was wiped down with the crumbs pushed into a line at the edge of it where he’d swept them with his hand. There was one mug out beside the machine.

It was for me.

“Morning,” he said, without turning around.

“Good morning.”

We didn’t say anything else. Iris came through in her pajamas a couple of minutes later and demanded to know whether it was a school day. I poured my coffee, one sugar and a splash of milk I didn’t have to open the fridge for, because he’d left the carton out beside the mug. It had been standing there a while and sweated a ring onto the granite. I drank it in his kitchen in the gray part of the morning, being unbearably happy about dairy.

He caught me at it on his way past to the table with the banana cut into coins. The skin at the corner of his eye creased and smoothed and he kept walking, and the back of the gray t-shirt was no help to me at all.

I thought about the carton of milk all day.

I called Maren from the car in the preschool lot with the engine running and the air conditioning on full and my sunglasses on, which was where all my important business got conducted.

“So,” I said.

“Finally.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Delaney Rhodes. It is nine in the morning and you are calling me from a parking lot with the engine running. In all the time I have known you, you have never done that once. Say a sentence. I want to hear a whole one.”

“He made perogies. From his mother’s recipe, which has no amounts on it, with his daughter, over four hours, and she cut ten of them into squares, and he filled every single one and served it on the Christmas plates.” My voice came apart halfway through and I let it.

“Okay,” Maren said. “And then what?”

“And then his kid went to bed. And then I was at the sink with the last plate and he came across that kitchen and told me he wanted me.”

Maren didn’t answer right away. “Those words?”

“Three of them, and nothing after. He left it sitting there on purpose.”