Breaking (First on Scene #1)

Chapter 1

Astrid

I'd been someone else's for so long I'd forgotten what was mine.

That was the part about leaving a marriage that no one warned me about. Not the leaving. The after. Six months out, and I was still cataloging.

The lamps had been chosen by Brett's mother's decorator. The wedding china had belonged to Brett's mother's mother. The car I was driving was a rental. The dog asleep on the passenger seat with his chin on the center console. Moose was mine. I'd had him before there was a Brett at all.

He'd been the easy one to claim.

The phone in the cup holder buzzed, showing Audrey's name on the screen. I let it ring twice before I picked up.

"Tell me you're not crying."

The familiarity of her voice cracked something open at the base of my throat. I swallowed it back down. "Hi to you, too."

"Are you?"

"No." I glanced in the rearview at Moose, who hadn't lifted his head from the console in two hours.

"How close are you?"

I checked the GPS. The little blue dot was hooking northeast off the interstate. "Hour out."

"Okay." I could hear her on the other end—the way I always could—moving around her apartment, opening something, closing something else.

"I'm coming over tomorrow at ten. Don't fight me on it.

I'm bringing wine and cinnamon bread from the bakery on Main, and I'm going to sit in your mother's kitchen until you stop looking like you slept in a U-Haul. "

"I am going to sleep in a U-Haul."

"Funny."

I smiled at the windshield. The sun had started to go orange at the edges of the trees on either side of the road. "I'm okay. I'm just driving."

"Mmhm." A beat. Whatever she'd been doing on the other end stopped. "Just don't sit on the porch tonight, thinking about him."

"I'm not thinking about him."

"Astrid."

I reached over without looking and put my hand on Moose's head. He huffed once into the leather and didn't move. "I'm driving. I'll see you in the morning."

"Love you."

"Love you back."

We hung up.

I wasn't thinking about him. Not in the way she meant. I'd done my thinking about Brett in March, in the brownstone on Marlborough Street, the night he came home after his father cut him off, grabbed the lamp off the side table, and held it like he was going to throw it.

He didn't throw it. He set it down. He cried.

I sat on the floor and watched him cry, and a small, flat voice inside me said: I am not going to die in this room.

I'd done the thinking back there. The driving was just the part I had to do to get away from it.

Hartsdale hadn't changed. That was the first thing.

I drove down Route 23 past the river, over the green bridge they'd painted a long time ago and never quite gotten around to repainting, past the diner with the green awning, past Doyle's Hardware—still called Doyle's, even though Mr. Doyle had been dead since I was fourteen.

The bookstore was still where the bookstore had always been.

I rolled the window down. Moose put his head out and started doing the thing where he closes his eyes against the wind.

It smelled like September. Cut grass, river, and asphalt that had been warm all day.

I took the back way to my parents' street.

The house was at the end of Maple Avenue, three blocks off the square, on a street that ran toward the river.

I knew every house by memory. The yellow one belonged to the Maguires.

The blue one with the porch swing had been the Anderssons, two s's.

The bungalow across from my parents' place, with morning glories climbing the porch railing, had belonged to Mrs. Ford.

She had given me lemonade in mason jars the summer I was ten and kept coming back from the river, too muddy for my mother's kitchen. She'd passed away a year and a half ago. I'd thought about coming up for the funeral.

I'd done a lot of thinking about doing things in the last year and a half.

I pulled into the driveway. Sat there a second. Moose looked at me.

"I know, buddy. I know."

The lockbox was where my dad had said it would be. The key turned. The door swung.

The house exhaled.

Rosemary. Lemon. The cedar of the closets. Four years vacant, and the house still smelled like my mother.

I stood there with my hand on the doorknob and let myself stand there.

Moose pushed past my knees and disappeared down the hall.

I walked through the rooms one at a time. Same wallpaper in the dining room. Same green tile in the powder room my mother had always meant to replace. Same warped board on the third step up to the second floor.

In the kitchen, I set the two coffee mugs I'd packed in my carry-on on the windowsill above the sink. The only two I'd actually picked out myself.

Two things on the windowsill that were mine.

It was a start.

I unloaded the trailer alone. I'd been unloading things alone for most of a year, and I'd gotten efficient at it.

Box from the trailer, across the threshold, into whichever room the label on the side said it belonged in.

Living room. Kitchen. The spare bedroom upstairs had been mine until I was eighteen.

The lifting wasn't the hard part. I'd spent the last five years getting eighty-pound dogs onto exam tables, and a box of someone else's wedding china weighed less than a sedated Lab. The hard part was the pause every time I set a box down and didn't know which room it went in.

A box of books neither of us had opened. A box of lamps the decorator had chosen. A box of throw pillows Brett's mother had insisted I needed.

She'd done a lot of insisting.

The veterinary journals I knew. They went on the kitchen table.

My books—the actual ones, the worn-spined Agatha Christies and the Diane Ackerman from grad school—I left in their box for now.

The herbs I'd packed at the last minute had survived the move better than I had.

I lined them up on the windowsill next to the mugs.

Five things on the windowsill that were mine. I was carrying the last box up the porch steps when my phone rang. I set it down on the top step before I looked at the screen.

Mom.

I tapped to answer and tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder.

"You made it."

"I made it." The screen door behind me had swung half-closed in the breeze. I caught it with my heel before it could clap shut.

"How long did it take?"

"Six hours. Moose breathed in my ear the whole way."

"He hates the car."

"He does." I put the box down and lowered myself onto the porch step. The wood had the kind of give old porches develop, soft from a hundred summers of rain.

"How does it look from where you are?"

"Dust on everything."

"I bet."

I ran my thumb along a chip in the railing paint where the white had worn down to something gray underneath. The yard was already starting to lose the day, the light gone copper at the edges. "The grass is mowed, though."

"Your dad pays for a service." I could hear her smile through the phone, the way I always could. "I told him not to bother, but he wouldn't hear it."

I smiled at the porch railing. Somewhere two doors down, a sprinkler clicked on and started its slow rotation against a fence.

"Are you eating?" she said.

"I'm about to."

"Astrid."

"I'm about to, Mom." A breeze moved through the maple at the corner of the lot and shook a few early leaves loose onto the grass.

A small breath on her end, the kind she made when she was choosing what to say next. "Audrey there?"

"Tomorrow at ten."

"Good." A beat. "Are you okay, honey?"

Moose had come to find me when the phone rang, the way he always did, and was leaning his whole weight against my hip. I dropped my hand into his fur and rubbed the soft place behind his ear where he liked it best.

"I will be."

"Yes," my mother said. "You will."

In the background, I could hear my father calling her to something. The clatter of a screen door on their end, too, all the way down in Florida, and the low murmur of his voice through a kitchen I'd never been inside, but could picture anyway.

"I have to go. Your dad's burning something."

"Go save him."

"I love you, sweetheart."

"Love you, Mom."

I sat with the phone face down on my knee for a minute before I moved.

Moose pushed his head harder into my hand, the way he did when he was asking for more, and I gave it to him.

The late-September sun was hitting the side of my face at the angle it only hits in early fall, low and gold and not in any hurry.

A cricket started up somewhere in the bushes. I'd forgotten what quiet sounded like.

I picked the box up and went inside.

It was a little past seven by the time the kitchen was assembled. The coffee maker sat on the counter. My mother's pie plate had been there the whole time, in the spot it had always been in. I'd worked through dinner without noticing.

There was nothing in the refrigerator. I made a list. Groceries. Propane. A new bird feeder. Call about the empty storefront on Main that Audrey had texted me about three weeks ago.

The list felt like a life.

A small one. But mine.

The two weeks after I got back went the way the first weeks after anything went.

I unpacked one box at a time. I called Howie about the storefront on Main that Audrey had texted me about, and left two voicemails he hadn't returned.

I walked Moose along the river in the mornings, the air going a degree cooler each time, the maples starting to turn at the tips.

The bungalow across from my parents' place had its lights on most evenings now.

A truck I didn't recognize in the driveway by six most nights, gone again by six the next morning.

Sometimes a golden retriever on the porch in the late light, white at the muzzle, watching the yard the way old dogs watched yards.

I noticed her before I noticed him.

I noticed him on a Tuesday.

I'd poured a glass of the wine my mother had left in the cabinet four years ago, which had somehow survived. I called Moose and went out to the porch.

The bungalow across the street had its lights on.

Someone moved past the front window.

I meant to look once and look away. But he came out the front door, a man in a Hartsdale Fire Department T-shirt and basketball shorts.

He was big through the shoulders. He bent down and rubbed the ears of a golden retriever who'd come to meet him at the door, and even from across the street, I could see his face soften.

Whatever he murmured to the dog didn't carry across to me. The dog leaned into his hand how dogs lean into the people who belong to them.

He straightened.

The porch light caught him from above and pulled his face out of the dusk.

The wineglass had gone still in my hand.

The cricket in the bushes was still going, but I couldn't hear it the way I'd been hearing it a second ago.

There was just the bungalow across the street, the man on the porch, and the strange, sliding sensation of recognition arriving before my brain could catch up to it.

I knew him.

I knew him the way you know someone you haven't thought about in fourteen years and could still draw from memory. The jaw. The hair that fell across his forehead. The shape of him at eighteen, filled in now with the body of a grown man.

Easton Ford.

Mrs. Ford's grandson. Who used to come every summer.

Who I'd watched from this same porch the summer I was fifteen, because he'd been eighteen and easy-going, laughing at whatever the older boys he ran with were saying.

I'd had a fifteen-year-old's crush on him for exactly one summer.

Never spoken to him. He hadn't noticed me either.

Three years and a foot of height between us, and that was the entirety of it.

He didn't notice me now, either.

He went into the bungalow with the dog. The door shut. The porch light stayed on against the dusk.

I stayed on my porch.

Longer than I needed to.

I came back here to be no one's, I told myself, the way I'd told myself in the car driving north. No one's wife. No one's project. No one's anything. Hartsdale, and just Hartsdale, and nothing else.

I went inside, shut the door, and left the porch light off.

I checked the window twice on the way to bed.