39. Avery
AVERY
Giving Declan the guest room is easier when I can point at rules.
The bathroom beside it is his until morning.
The towels are in the cabinet. He may use the kitchen for water, but my bedroom, office, and nursery remain closed unless I open them.
I say each one while standing in the hall like a landlord explaining where a tenant may smoke, and Declan listens the whole way through, taking each rule as given rather than asking whether I truly believe he might walk into my bedroom.
I don’t. That is the problem. I stopped trusting him with anything I could not watch, and now I believe he will obey one closed door even after I go to bed.
“I don’t have clothes for you,” I tell him, opening the guest-room door. The bed is made with the grey comforter June said would hide every bad choice a guest could make with coffee. “There’s an unopened toothbrush beneath the bathroom sink. It isn’t blue.”
Declan sets his tool bag inside the room and keeps his body in the hall.
He knows why the color matters. Sasha kept a blue toothbrush beside his in the safehouse, and I made him name it while I stood in the room where he had used it after kissing her.
“I’ll use what you have. I won’t take it when I leave. ”
“Good. I’m not starting a toothbrush restitution program.” I turn toward the nursery to switch off the lamp and find him looking at the open door. The crib sits finished beneath the window, empty and waiting, while rain taps the glass behind it. “What?”
“The level is against the wall.” Declan points from the hallway with both feet behind the threshold. “May I get it?”
The level is close enough for him to reach in one step, but he waits. I could pick it up myself. I could also make him wait for every harmless object until neither of us remembers the difference between a boundary and punishment. “Yes. Get the level and come back out.”
Declan enters, takes only what he named, and returns to the hall before I close the door. The latch clicks between us. He looks at my hand on the knob, then moves toward the guest room and leaves the closed door where I put it.
“The road alert updates at six,” he says, placing the level beside his bag. “If it opens earlier, I’ll leave. If you want me gone before that, wake me and I’ll find another route.”
“I’m not sending you into floodwater because hearing you in the house makes me uncomfortable.” I brace a hand against the wall when the baby shifts lower and my bladder takes the insult personally. “It’s my discomfort. I can live with it for one night.”
“You shouldn’t have to live with anything in your own house for my sake.” He stays where I put him, though concern pulls his attention toward the hand beneath my stomach. “I can sleep at the clubhouse if the northern road is clear.”
“And if it isn’t, Gage gets to explain to me why your truck floated into a soybean field. Stay in the room, Declan. I offered because I meant it.”
He nods once. “Then I’ll stay in the room.”
I retreat to my bedroom before his obedience can become another thing I want to examine.
The house has never held him overnight. He carried the car-seat box across the living room yesterday and built a crib today, but he has not opened a cabinet without permission or learned which floorboard complains outside my bedroom.
I lie down with a pillow between my knees while the storm throws branches against the roof, and every small sound on the other side of my door arrives wearing a memory from the old house.
Water runs in the guest bathroom. Declan coughs once.
A floorboard creaks, followed by nothing, and I picture him standing in the hall outside the nursery even though I know he promised not to enter.
My body expects the weight of him to settle into the other side of the bed.
It remembers before my anger can correct it, leaving me irritated with my own skin and too awake to ignore the baby’s foot scraping along my side.
At eleven, I check the gate camera. His truck waits beyond the fence with rain running over the windshield.
At midnight, I check the county map and find both roads closed.
At twelve ten, I answer the assistant U.S.
attorney’s office and accept the witness interview they have offered for the twelfth, because agreeing at midnight costs less than deciding at noon whether I can sit in another conference room and say Sasha’s name out loud.
At twelve thirty, I wake from a dream in which the old kitchen is burning while jasmine fills the house, and the gun beneath my coat will not come free.
I sit upright with my hand grasping an empty sheet, listening for an elevator that does not exist here.
The baby moves. The bedroom smells like lemon soap, wet earth through the cracked window, and nothing else. I make myself name those facts before I leave the bed.
Light spills from beneath the guest-room door, and the door stays shut the whole time I am in the hall.
He could be awake. He could be staring at the ceiling as I have done since Sasha died, thinking about the office wall, her gun, and how close he came to arriving after everything ended.
I keep walking. Inviting him to sleep here did not make his fear mine to manage, and my nightmare does not make me responsible for letting him hold me through it.
I walk into the kitchen and switch on the light above the stove. The baby wants cereal, or I want cereal and have assigned blame to a person too small to object. I am reaching for the bowl when the guest-room door opens behind me.
Declan stops at the end of the hall in his jeans and black T-shirt.
The shirt is damp around the collar where he washed it in the bathroom sink, and the sight of him barefoot in my house reaches somewhere anger has no control.
I used to watch him walk into our kitchen half-dressed and wonder how long I could keep him there before work.
Now I have to remind myself that wanting his mouth on my neck has no useful connection to whether I should trust him with my life again.
“I heard the cabinet,” he says, keeping one hand on the guest-room door. “Do you want me to go back?”
“No. Get your water. I’m not rationing the sink.” I pull the cereal from the cabinet and catch him looking at the box. “Don’t say anything about the sugar. Dr. Evans says I’m allowed.”
“I wasn’t going to.” He walks to the island but stops on the other side instead of coming around me for a glass. “Where do you keep the cups?”
He knew where the glasses lived in every house we shared, even the apartment with the cabinet doors that never closed. I point to the cupboard beside the refrigerator. “There. Go ahead.”
Declan takes one glass, fills it, and leans against the far counter while I pour cereal.
He does not ask why I am awake. The old question would have been automatic, followed by him taking the bowl from my hands and leading me back to bed whether I wanted help or not.
His refusal to assume leaves room for me to tell the truth, which is far more annoying than being ordered around.
“I had another nightmare,” I say, settling onto a stool. “The baby moved when I woke up. I’m not bleeding, hurting, or having contractions, so don’t turn this into a call to Dr. Evans.”
Declan’s fingers tighten around the glass before he puts it on the counter. “I won’t call. Do you want me to listen, distract you, or leave you alone?”
“Those sound like options from a pamphlet.” I take a bite and discover that pregnancy has not improved cereal eaten after midnight. “Did June coach you?”
“No. June says if I ask her how to talk to you, she’ll teach me with a tire iron.
” He looks toward the dark living room instead of inspecting my face for damage.
“The counselor at the literacy center said asking what help someone wants works better than guessing. She was talking about reading, but it sounded useful.”
The answer is awkward and practical enough to sound like him.
The words come out too plain to be a line rehearsed for winning a wife back.
He sounds like Declan stealing one practical tool from a lesson and trying it on a woman who has spent months telling him his guesses were another kind of control.
“Distract me,” I say. “Tell me something about work that does not involve Sasha, a stolen account, a gun, or anyone calling me brave.”
He thinks while I eat, respecting the limits so carefully that I nearly regret giving him four.
“Bones finished the document checks I wrote after the table approved them. Two men open separate copies before a route leaves. They read the numbers back to each other, and the system records which files they used.”
“That involves Sasha even if you don’t say her name.”
“You’re right.” He rubs his thumb over the red mark left by the car seat, then catches the movement and picks the glass back up to give the hand a job.
“Gage moved my old desk into his office. It got stuck in the door because he refused to take the legs off. Hutch watched him fight it for half an hour before mentioning the hinges have removable pins.”
I picture Gage trying to prove he owns the Enforcer desk while Hutch lets stubbornness collect its own payment. “Did you help?”
“No. He told me it was his desk now and I wasn’t allowed to touch it.” Declan drinks his water, his eyes meeting mine over the rim. “So I sat at the bar and asked whether he wanted me to call Avery for advice.”
“You used me as a threat?” I put my spoon down and picture Gage’s face when my name entered the argument.
“He took the door off after that.” Declan drinks his water, but the satisfaction around his mouth belongs to the asshole I married, not the careful guest asking permission to open a cabinet.