Chapter 17
Astrid
I opened my eyes to the light coming through the hole in the curtain at the side of the bed.
The hole was the size of a quarter, where his grandmother snagged the curtain on a hanger one summer a long time ago.
The light came through it in a single straight beam and landed on the back of my hand that was on his chest. He had his hand over mine, set there sometime in the dark before he went back to sleep.
I lay there for a moment without moving.
Easton was on his back. His chest was warm under my hand.
His breathing was slow and even. The breath in him had gone all the way down at some point in the night, the same deep settling I'd felt the night Penny went, and it stayed there.
Blond hair pushed back from his forehead, the pale line at his temple where the cat scratch had healed weeks ago, the stubble I'd felt against my mouth the night before.
Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. His hand on top of mine.
I'd never, in my life, looked at a man asleep beside me and felt this safe.
I didn't check his breathing for clues. I didn't clock the set of his shoulders or his jaw to figure out what morning was coming. I just looked.
My eyes drifted past him to the rest of the room.
His grandmother's dresser against the wall, a doily on top.
Her vanity under the window with her hairbrush still on it.
And on the seat of the small floral armchair across from the bed, my green dress, the one I'd stepped out of the night before and dropped where it landed.
My dress. His grandmother's chair. Same Wednesday morning.
He stirred under my hand. He didn't wake. His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch.
I closed my eyes.
I thought about the night before in pieces.
The cast iron on the stove. His eyes were on me across the kitchen table.
His hand at my wrist in the doorway of this room, not letting me lead him into a place he'd been leading me into for six weeks.
The Queens-tinted laugh when Moose scratched at the door.
His grip on my hip when I told him my hands were shaking.
The two I'm okays I'd said on purpose, because I'd decided, in the dark of a man's bedroom, that with him I was going to be heard the first time and the second time both.
I'd been waiting six years to know what that felt like.
I got up at six-fifteen.
Carefully, because Easton was still asleep, and because the only thing I had to wear in this house was a dress that wasn't going to make it through a vet appointment with a basset hound.
I slipped my hand out from under his. He didn't wake.
I crossed the room, took the gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt from the top drawer of his dresser—the soft one he'd given me the morning of the bath towel—and pulled it on over my underwear.
Moose was on the rug by the back door when I came into the kitchen. Penny's rug. He lifted his head, gave me one slow tail-thump, and put it back down. He'd decided some time before sunrise that he was a dog of this house, too, and he wasn't going to be talked out of it.
I put the coffee on.
Easton came into the kitchen five minutes later.
He had pulled sweatpants on but not a shirt. His hair was sticking up on one side. He looked at me at the counter in his gray T-shirt with the coffee pot already filling, and he didn't say anything for a count of three. The corner of his mouth turned up.
"Good morning."
"Hi yourself." I poured the second mug and held it out.
He took it. His eyes went to the hem of the t-shirt at my thigh, then back up.
"You're in my shirt."
"I needed a shirt."
He came around the counter, set his hand on my hip, and kissed me at the corner of my mouth—the small one he'd been giving me for six weeks—and then he kissed me on the mouth properly, the one he'd been giving me for a week.
"Did you sleep?" His thumb stroked the bone at my hip through the cotton.
"I slept."
"All night?"
"All night."
"Good."
I poured the coffee. He took his with cream and one sugar. He didn't ask me to stay. I didn't offer. There was a clinic to open, and the morning had its own shape we both understood.
At the door, he caught my wrist. His thumb settled in the dip below my palm.
"Astrid."
"Yes?"
"Thank you for staying."
I looked up at him. There was gratitude, disbelief, and something quieter underneath, all three of them crossing his face at once.
"Easton."
"I know."
He let my wrist go.
I crossed Maple in his shirt with my green dress balled under my arm and Moose at my hip. Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved in the front window. I lifted my hand without thinking. She lifted hers without pretending to do anything else.
The week settled into a shape neither of us named out loud.
In the mornings, I crossed Maple at six with my hair still wet from the shower.
He learned how I took my coffee. He learned I'd drink one cup at his counter while he packed his lunch for shift, and carry the second on the river trail.
Moose figured out the routine in two days and stopped being one woman's dog.
On shift days, I worked late at the clinic, walked Moose along Maple in the dusk, crossed the street at seven to bring in Easton's mail.
Twice that week, I let myself into his house with the key he'd given me in October and slept in his bed.
I didn't do it every night. I didn't want to make it a thing I couldn't undo.
When he was off shift, he was at my house.
He fixed the back gate latch, the loose porch step, and the kitchen drawer that wouldn't close.
He used my mother's cast iron with the same easy hands he'd used on his grandmother's.
He read the index card I'd taped to the inside of the cupboard door, made the soup the same way she did, and didn't make a thing of it.
Around town, we were no longer a question anyone was asking.
Mrs. Halloran clocked his truck in my driveway on Saturday morning and stopped pretending she wasn't clocking it.
The waitress at the diner started pouring his coffee before he sat down.
Audrey called me on Thursday and said, you're sleeping over there, and I said, some nights, and she said, Astrid, and I said, I know. She didn't push past that.
At the clinic, the bell over the door was ringing six times a day, where it'd been ringing once.
Word traveled after the firefighters brought their pets in.
The Bishops referred Mrs. Bishop's sister-in-law.
A woman from church who'd been Caldwell's for twenty years came in with a basset hound named Earl and told me at the counter she'd heard I was gentle with the old ones.
Duke brought his mother, and his mother stayed for an hour.
The sunflowers from opening day were long gone.
Audrey replaced them with chrysanthemums, and Steve slept in the wedge of sun they made on the counter.
The firefighters had given the town permission, and the town had taken it.
I had a pot of my mother's tomato sauce on the stove Saturday evening when the pounding started.
Easton was on shift. Moose was at my feet. I'd been stirring the sauce for an hour. The knock came heavy and uneven—a fist, not knuckles. Wrong rhythm.
The back of my neck knew it before the front of me did.
I set the wine glass on the counter and went down the hall. I put my eye to the peephole.
Brett.
He was on my porch. His hair was wrong. His coat was wrong. He hadn't shaved. He was swaying on the boards with a fist up, ready to bang the door again, and he was looking at the door with the same expression he'd worn the night his father cut him off.
I opened the door.
I didn't know why I opened the door. A part of me had been calibrating around him for six years, and that part, even eight months out, still answered when he knocked. My hand turned the bolt before my head caught up. The door swung in two inches.
"Brett."
"Astrid."
He started yelling.
"You ruined my life. You owe me. You're nothing without me.” The words came out in the wrong order. The order didn't matter, because the words were words I'd been hearing in a softer register from him for six years and from his mother for the entire run of the marriage.
I tried to slam the door.
He grabbed the frame. His foot wedged in the gap.
I was pushing with both hands. I'd dropped the wooden spoon somewhere on the hall floor.
I was pushing against the door with everything I had, but he was stronger.
His foot wasn't moving. The door was open four inches and wouldn't close.
His shoulder was against the wood from the other side.
He was still yelling. He was still saying you.
Moose was barking behind me in the kitchen.
I drew a breath. I leaned into the door harder.
His hands dropped off the frame.
I heard him stumble backward.
The pressure on the door went from his weight to nothing, and my own weight took me forward two steps into the open doorway.
Easton was on my porch in full uniform.
He had Brett by the back of the neck.
Brett was bent forward at the waist with his hands up and his face very white. Easton was holding him with one hand and not working hard at it. The smell of smoke was coming off his coat from a structure call I didn't know about. His eyes were not on me. His eyes were on Brett.
"She's not your girl anymore. She's mine."
Brett tried to talk.
Easton didn't let him.