Chapter 15
Audrey
I tried on three shirts before I admitted what I was doing.
The gray pullover was a no—fine for the couch, fine for the clinic, fine for every version of myself that had stopped requiring an opinion.
The blouse from before the pregnancy sat differently across my chest now, in a way I wasn't ready to have an opinion about either.
The black top with the low scoop neck I put on, took off, put back on, and stood in front of the mirror with for a full minute.
I'd told Astrid once that the secret to looking put together was deciding what you wanted people to see and then only showing them that. She said it sounded exhausting. It was. It was also the only way I knew how to walk into a room.
I kept the black one.
The mascara wand felt foreign in my hand—the weight of it wrong, the angle off, like I'd forgotten a language I'd been speaking since I was fifteen.
Eight weeks of the same four shirts and the robe will do that.
I stood at the mirror longer than I needed to.
Not the mother reaching for whatever was on the chair.
A woman who had been invited somewhere and was choosing, deliberately, to look like it.
The lipstick was still in the top drawer. I couldn't remember the last time I'd reached for it—sometime before the highway, before the robe became a permanent fixture, before I stopped caring what the mirror said. I looked at it. I didn't reach for it. Not yet.
Nova was on the bed in the carrier, already dressed in the fox onesie. The good one. I laughed at myself in the mirror. My daughter was attending her first Rhodes family dinner, and I'd dressed her like it mattered.
My phone was on the dresser. The screen was dark.
Sunday. I told my mother on Wednesday that I had plans this weekend, and she asked what plans, and I said just dinner with friends.
The silence since Wednesday was its own message.
Twenty-eight years of Sundays at the house on Birch Hill, and I was about to spend this one at the Rhodes kitchen table, and I'd not told her.
I threw the phone on the bed beside the carrier and finished the mascara.
His knock came at the door. Duke had a key, but he knocked when he knew I was getting ready, which was either consideration or self-preservation.
I opened the door. He was in jeans and a button-down he'd ironed badly, the collar sitting crooked on one side. I looked at it. He looked at me in the mascara and the black top, and something crossed his face that he kept to himself.
"You ironed that shirt," I said.
"I did."
"How long did it take you?"
"That's not relevant."
"The collar is crooked."
"I know about the collar." The corner of his mouth went up.
I let him have it. He looked at me again—the top, the mascara, the fact that I'd clearly tried—and whatever he was keeping to himself stayed there, warm behind his eyes.
"Ready?" he said.
I picked up Nova in the carrier. He took it from my hand without being asked, his fingers replacing mine on the handle, and we left.
The Rhodes house was small. Two stories, white siding, a porch with a railing that needed paint. The late-afternoon sun was coming sideways through the trees on Cedar Lane, throwing long shadows across the lawn, and the front door was already open before Duke cut the engine.
Diane was on the porch. Apron still on, hands wiping on a dish towel. "Audrey, honey, finally."
The “finally” was warm. A woman who had been wanting me in her house for two months and waited for me to be ready.
She hugged me first, her arms going around my shoulders, firm and brief. She smelled like vanilla and something savory. Then she reached for the carrier, held Nova against her shoulder with the ease of a woman who'd done this three times, and hugged Duke last. The order mattered. I clocked it.
Inside, the house hit me in layers. The roast, heavy and warm from a kitchen that had been going since the afternoon.
A football game on the television nobody was watching.
A radio in the kitchen tuned to a different station nobody was listening to.
Ray Rhodes in his armchair with the Sunday paper on his knee, narrating the game to no one.
"Defense was bad on that one." Nobody responded. Nobody was supposed to.
Reese was already in the kitchen with a wineglass in each hand. She held one out to me before I'd said hello. "I poured before you said anything. You're going to need it."
I laughed and took it.
Caroline was on the couch with Henry, who was standing at the coffee table holding himself upright with both fists on the wood, wobbling with the determined fury of a toddler who had decided that walking was a thing he was going to do today.
He saw Duke and his whole face changed. He let go of the table, took three lurching steps, and grabbed Duke's leg with both hands.
Duke hoisted him. Henry went from the floor to Duke's shoulders in two seconds, his hands fisting in Duke's hair, both of them laughing. Caroline didn't try to stop it. She picked up her coffee and watched.
I watched it, too. Duke with a toddler on his shoulders looked like a father.
He'd looked like one with Nova for two months.
But Duke with someone else's child on his shoulders looked like something I hadn't seen before.
A man whose body defaulted to this, who had been doing it with Henry for two years, long before Nova existed, because this was who he was in this house.
Diane had Nova in the kitchen before I'd finished my first sip of wine. She was sitting in the chair by the window with Nova against her shoulder, one hand on Nova's back, looking at Nova's face with an expression I recognized instantly.
Her eyes tracked from Nova's cheek to the left side of her mouth, where the dimple sat, and then her gaze lifted, just for a second, across the kitchen to Duke, whose dimple had been out since Henry grabbed his leg.
She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
She'd been looking at her son's face for thirty-two years, and she knew exactly what she was seeing on her granddaughter's.
I watched her hold my daughter with no instruction and get it right. The hand on Nova's back in the exact position Nova slept best, palm flat between the shoulder blades, steady pressure. I hadn't told her. She just knew.
We ate at the kitchen table because there was no dining room.
Six chairs around a table built for four, elbows touching, serving dishes passed hand to hand because there was nowhere to set them down.
Reese poured more wine. Ray carved the roast standing up because his chair was pinned against the wall.
Diane held Nova on her shoulder with one hand and served herself salad with the other.
The noise was constant—three conversations at once, none of them waiting for the others to finish.
Reese dropped it midway through the first course. She set her fork down, looked at me across the table, and delivered it flat. "So you're the reason he's been buying diapers."
"I've also been buying wipes," Duke said, not missing a beat. "And a brand of formula I can't pronounce. My browser history is a nightmare."
I laughed. The real one. The full-body one that tipped my head back and took my whole chest with it.
It had been gone for the entire postpartum stretch, buried under the fog and the exhaustion, and it came back in the Rhodes kitchen at a joke at my expense.
Reese clocked it across the table with the satisfied look of a youngest sister who knew exactly what she'd done.
"So, Audrey." Ray leaned back in his chair with his elbows wide. "How long have you been on the L&D floor?"
"Six years."
"Six years. And how many deliveries is that, roughly? Ballpark."
"I stopped counting around three hundred."
He whistled through his teeth. "Three hundred. You missing it?"
"Every day." It came out before I'd thought about it. "It won’t be long until I’m back."
"Mhm." He pointed his fork at Duke. "She sounds like you."
My mother asked about my work because she worried I was working too much. Ray asked because he was interested in the work. The difference landed somewhere in my chest and stayed.
Caroline caught me at the counter, refilling my water glass while the table argued about pie.
"Can I tell you something?" She kept her voice low, under the noise.
"If it's about the robe, I've already retired it."
She smiled. "The second three months are easier than the first three months. And the third three months are easier than the second."
She didn't ask if I was okay. She didn't offer advice. She said it like a weather report from a woman who'd already lived through the season, standing at my shoulder with her wine while the table argued about pie.
"How much easier?" I said. I heard the hope in my own voice and didn't bother hiding it.
"Enough."
I nodded. I believed her, and that was enough.
Back at the table, Ray was telling a story about a game from the '90s. He had the setup, but he'd lost the thread, circling back to a detail he'd already given, and the table was starting to drift. Reese reached for her phone. Caroline glanced at the clock above the stove.
"Wait, Dad," Duke said. "Was this the Beacon game? The one where Hartsdale ran the fake punt?"
Ray's face lit up. "The fake punt. That's exactly right. Fourth and eight, their own thirty-two—"
The table came back. Ray found the best part of the story because Duke had handed it to him, and nobody noticed except me.