Chapter 14
Duke
Her feet were across my lap, and she was asleep.
Her breathing slowed, but her hand still held the edge of the blanket like she was ready to get up if Nova called.
The apartment was settled in the way it got quiet around eleven—the low hum of the refrigerator, the street outside muffled through the windows, the particular stillness of a baby who had been down for two hours and woken once already and gone back down because I walked her in the dark until she did.
I'd been here since five. Made dinner—the pasta with the red sauce from the jar she kept on the second shelf.
She ate half. The dishes were done. The bottle rack on the counter was full.
The burp cloth she'd been carrying on her shoulder all evening was folded on the arm of the couch beside her.
I'd folded it while she was in the bathroom, and she hadn't said anything about that, because I'd been folding things in this apartment for five weeks, and neither of us commented on it anymore.
I looked at her on the couch. The sweatshirt was too big for her.
The sleep pants had a small stain on the knee she hadn't noticed or didn't care about.
Her hair was down, unwashed, tucked behind one ear.
She looked tired in a way that had stopped being about hours.
The tired had become a thing she lived inside of, a room she walked through all day, and I could see it on her face, even when she was smiling, even when she was fine, even when she handed me the baby with a joke about how I held her like a football, and she was not a football.
I was watching her sleep on a Tuesday night, and the thing I was feeling was simple and enormous, and I wasn’t going to name it on her couch at eleven-thirty while she was unconscious.
I slid out from under her feet. Set them down on the cushion, gently, one hand under her ankles. She stirred but didn't open her eyes. I stood up. Pulled my jacket off the hook by the door. Came back to the couch.
I stood over her for a second. Her face was turned into the cushion, and her breathing was even, and I wanted to bend down and put my mouth against her hair.
I didn't. I was the man with the spare key who came by, made dinner, and left.
That was the role, and the role didn't include kissing a woman who hadn't asked to be kissed.
"I've got it from here," I said softly. "Get some sleep."
She didn't open her eyes. She made a sound that was almost a word. I pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, picked up my keys from the table by the door, and let myself out.
The hallway of her building was lit by one fluorescent light that buzzed at a frequency I'd stopped hearing three weeks ago. I stopped at the top of the stairs. I stood there for a beat, my hand on the railing, looking down the stairwell, and the feeling I wasn’t going to name on her couch followed me into the hallway and stood there with me.
I kept going.
My kitchen at midnight was dim and still. The bowl from the morning was still by the sink. The one lamp on over the counter.
I poured a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.
I pulled it out. An email. The subject line had the expedition name in it and the word waitlist.
I read it standing up.
The email was short. Two of the original confirmed climbers had dropped out—one medical, one personal.
The waitlist had shifted. My name was no longer third.
I was next. If they didn't hear otherwise from me, my spot would be confirmed automatically should anyone else drop out.
The dates were firm. The training requirements were attached.
I read it twice.
Then I locked the phone and put it face down on the counter.
The email was in the room. I could feel it sitting on the counter two feet from my hand, the way you feel a thing you're choosing not to look at.
The choosing was the point. I'd been at Audrey's apartment for ten hours today. I wasn’t going to answer at twelve-thirty in the morning in a kitchen with one lamp on.
I went to bed. I didn't sleep.
My body was tired. My brain was running the circuit it ran now—Nova's face when she woke up at nine, the sound she made before the crying started, a small complaint that was more opinion than distress.
Audrey's feet across my lap. The weight of them.
The fact that she let me hold them without thinking about it.
My phone rang at two in the morning.
I was awake before the second ring. I was out of bed and across the hall to the kitchen before the third.
Audrey.
I picked up. "Aud?"
Her voice on the other end was wrong, like she'd been crying. "Can you come back?" she asked. And then, almost immediately, like the sentence had escaped before she could catch it: "Sorry. I shouldn't have called."
"I'll be there in ten."
I was in the truck before I had time to think about what I was doing. The roads at two in the morning were empty. The streetlights ran their sequence for nobody, the diner dark, and the turn onto Main, where the only light was the gas station at the far end.
I turned onto her street, and the thought landed clean and whole, without buildup: I was just there.
Two hours ago, I was on her couch with her feet in my lap.
Two hours ago, I pulled a blanket over her shoulder, told her to get some sleep, and let myself out because that was what I did.
I left when the evening ended. I didn't stay past the point where staying became a question she'd have to answer.
I'd been doing this for weeks—showing up, helping, leaving before the leaving could feel like a choice she had to make about me.
She hadn't asked me to stay at eleven-thirty. She asked me now.
The distance between those two moments was the whole scene. Whatever happened between me walking out her door and her picking up her phone was the thing I was driving toward, and she had waited until two in the morning to let herself need me, and the waiting told me more than the call.
I pulled up to her building. The lights were on in her windows. I had the spare key. I used it.
The apartment was quiet. I walked down the hall.
Audrey was on the bathroom floor. Her back against the side of the tub, knees pulled up, hair half-pinned with pieces falling around her face, her cheeks wet.
The breast pump was on the counter, plugged into the outlet by the mirror, humming, with one cup detached.
Through the bedroom doorway across the hall, I could see Nova asleep in the bouncer, the small, steady breathing of a baby who had finally settled.
The mother was the one who hadn't.
I didn't say anything. I read the room. I came through the doorway and sat next to her.
The pump hummed. The tile was cold through my jeans. Her breathing was uneven, the shallow kind that came after a long time of crying, when the body was still running the program even after the worst of it had passed.
She spoke first without looking at me.
"I can't stop crying."
She said it flat.
"I filled out the postpartum mood screening at my four-week check-up," she said.
"The Edinburgh. Ten questions. I've been handing that form to women on my floor for six years.
I know what every question is measuring.
I know what the cutoff score is. I know which answers flag for follow-up.
" She paused. Her hand was on her knee, her fingers still.
"I lied on three of them. The one about feeling hopeless.
The one about crying often. The one about thoughts that scared me.
I told my provider I was fine. I checked the boxes that meant fine, and I signed it, and I handed it back. "
I listened. My chest was doing two things at once—the relief of finally being told, and the dread of what was underneath the telling. Both at the same time. Both real.
"I've been the nurse who hands that form to a twenty-two-year-old at her two-week visit and says, be honest, it's just between us, there are no wrong answers," she said.
"I've been that nurse for six years. And I sat in a paper gown and lied on the same form because I couldn't be the one who needed help.
Because the L&D nurse isn't the patient.
The L&D nurse is the one who holds other people's hands and tells them it's going to be okay. "
She was quiet for a beat.
Then she said it. She still didn't look at me.
"I don't know how to need someone this much, Duke."
The word landed in the room and stayed. Need.
She hadn’t said it to me in five weeks. She hadn’t said it in the hospital room when she told me I could be Nova's father, not in the kitchen when she slid the spare key across the counter, not once in all the evenings I'd spent on her couch, holding the baby while she slept. She’d never asked me to stay. She’d never asked me to come back.
She thanked me for showing up like I was doing her a favor instead of doing what a father does, and every time I left at the end of the night, she let me go without a word.
I didn't understand the full shape of it yet, but I understood that the word she just said was the hardest word she knew, and she‘d said it to me on a bathroom floor at two in the morning because she had nowhere left to put it.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. It was the truest thing I had, and I gave it to her without anything around it.
She turned to face me. It was the first time she had looked at me since I came through the door.
Her eyes were red and wet, her face blotched from the crying, and she was looking at me without a wall.
No performance. No competence. No half-smile held in place by force.
Just Audrey, on the floor, looking at me.