Chapter 23
Duke
The months came in like they do when you stop performing them.
A few days after the fire, I brought up the form. On the couch, Nova was asleep in the bouncer between us. I said we should fill out the new one. Audrey nodded, pulled her laptop out, and started the download. It was a Tuesday.
The first weeks at the house were three people learning how to live in a space built for one.
The bathroom was too small for two adults to brush their teeth at the same time.
The kitchen had one Brita that needed refilling twice as often.
The bassinet went in the second bedroom, then the crib Caroline brought over, then the changing table my mother sent without asking whether there was room.
There was barely room. None of us cared, because the house being too small was its own kind of closeness.
Audrey's robe went on the back of the bathroom door.
Her coffee mug went beside mine on the counter every morning, the oat milk thing with the name I still refused to learn.
The folded onesies sat on the dresser in the bedroom because the dresser in Nova's room was already full.
The pinball machine in the basement got a small lock on the door at the top of the stairs because Nova was starting to pull herself up on everything, and a set of basement stairs was not a thing either of us was going to test her on.
I came home from every shift and went straight to wherever Nova was. My hand on her chest, the flat palm between her shoulder blades where she slept best. The gesture was reflexive now. My body just went there.
Colleen's question from months ago—does Duke's house have a second bedroom—answered itself. The second bedroom was Nova's room now, and the question was never about the room.
Audrey at four months postpartum. At five.
At six. The L&D nurse going back to her shifts at Hartsdale General, the familiar scrubs, ponytail, and the half-smile she gave a patient when she wasn't going to give a full one.
The fog from the early months lifted in small increments I could track because I was the person who saw her every morning.
She laughed more easily. She stopped reaching for the robe first thing and started reaching for real clothes.
She put on mascara one morning while I was in the doorway with Nova on my hip, and I watched her do it without saying anything, and the small relief of my woman coming back to herself was something I carried to the firehouse that day and kept.
My mother handed Audrey a therapist's name in January, written on a piece of paper in her handwriting.
Audrey called the next week. She went every other Wednesday after that.
The appointment was on the family calendar between peewee practice and Nova's pediatrician visits, and nobody in the house treated it as anything other than what it was: a thing on the schedule because it was a thing on the schedule.
Astrid had a boy in February. They named him Charlie, after Easton's grandfather.
Nova and Charlie were on a couch in the bungalow together one afternoon, two Hartsdale Fire babies propped against pillows, their fists in their mouths.
I looked at Easton across the room while he held his son, and Easton looked at me, holding my daughter.
Easton's hand came down on my shoulder on his way to the kitchen. One solid tap. Same as always.
Captain Hank asked to meet Nova in March.
Audrey brought her to the firehouse on a Thursday, and Hank held her in his office with the same hands that held the framed photo of Mary on his desk.
"She's got your trouble, Rhodes." At the spring pancake breakfast, Mary came in her wheelchair, and Hank put Nova in her lap for ten minutes while Mary talked to the baby in a voice I'd never heard from her before.
The form. We printed it on a Tuesday in April.
I sat at the kitchen island and wrote my name in the boxes while Audrey stood at the counter with her coffee.
My name, my birthday, my address, my phone number.
Duke Anthony Rhodes. The pen was a ballpoint from the junk drawer, and the form was three pages, state seal in the upper left, and my handwriting was still crooked because my right hand was still the worst of the two from the burns, though the bandages were off by then and the scars were just scars.
I signed at the bottom. Audrey signed at the bottom. Two signatures on the same paper. The notary was booked at the Hartsdale post office for that afternoon.
The notary was a woman named Linda who worked behind the counter at the post office and had been notarizing documents in Hartsdale for twenty years.
She checked our IDs, watched us sign, stamped the form, and put it in the envelope without ceremony.
The envelope went into the outgoing mail slot.
The slot made the small metal sound of a thing going somewhere it couldn't come back from.
We stood on the sidewalk outside the post office. Nova was in the carrier on Audrey's chest, asleep, her fist curled against the strap. The April sun was on the brick storefront across the street, and the flag above the post office door was moving in a wind I barely felt.
Audrey took my hand. I squeezed hers. We stood there for a beat, two people on a sidewalk in a small town with a baby between them and a form in a mailbox heading to Albany.
We walked back to the truck.
I drove us home. The thing she carried for weeks was in a federal mailbox. Whatever came next was ours.
Seven months in. A Wednesday evening. I came down the hallway with a stack of folded onesies from the dryer.
Colleen was on the living room floor with Nova, the play mat spread out, a small basket of board books beside them.
The late light from the kitchen window was coming in low and warm across the rug.
Nova's hair was past her ears for the first time. It came in dark in the front and lighter at the back, and it fell in her face whenever she pulled herself up on the coffee table. She was doing it now, one hand on the table edge, the other reaching for a book Colleen was holding just out of range.
Colleen held out a hairbrush and a small elastic band without looking up from the floor.
"She needs a ponytail. The front's getting in her eyes."
I stopped in the middle of the living room with the brush and the elastic in one hand and the onesies in the other.
"Bring her over here," I said. "I'll hold her, you do it."
"No." Colleen was already shifting Nova into position on the rug, cross-legged, facing the books. "You're doing it. I'm telling you how."
I set the onesies on the couch. I knelt down beside Colleen. Nova was between us, half-interested in a board book about a dog, half-interested in the new thing happening above her head.
"Brush from the top," Colleen said. "Gentle. She's got tangles in the back."
I brushed. Nova squirmed. She grabbed for the book and missed.
"Keep going," Colleen said. "She'll settle."
She settled. I got the brush through the back without a fight.
"Now gather it. All of it. At the back of her head, not the top. She's not in the army."
I gathered. My fingers felt too big for the job. I'd held a bulb syringe in the back of a medic unit, threaded an IV on a moving rig, caught a baby on the shoulder of a state highway. A ponytail was defeating me.
"Now wrap the band. Twice. Then once more."
I wrapped. The first attempt came out lopsided. Nova didn't care. Colleen took the band back out, smoothed the hair with her palm, and handed the elastic back to me.
"Again."
I did it again. The second attempt was straight. The ponytail sat at the back of Nova's head, small and dark and not quite even, and Nova reached up with one hand and patted it. She looked at me. She smiled.
Colleen laughed. The real one, low and full, not The Yarn Room laugh or the Sunday brunch laugh. I'd heard it three times this year, and I wasn't tired of hearing it.
"Now you can do it without me," Colleen said.
I looked at her. The woman who spent ten months measuring me from across a counter was sitting on my living room floor with her knees folded under her and a hairbrush in her lap, and she had just taught me to put my daughter's hair up because she decided I should know how.
"I'm going to need you for the next one," I said.
The words came out before I'd planned them. Colleen went still. Not the old still, not the composure she wore to Sunday dinner. A different kind. The still of a woman hearing something she didn't expect from a man she had been learning to trust for less than a year.
She looked at Nova on the rug between us. She looked at me.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
The line landed in the room and stayed there.
The same words I said to Audrey on a bathroom floor at two in the morning in a different apartment, in a different life.
Colleen didn't know that. She didn't need to.
The words were hers now, given from her own mouth, in a room she chose to be in, to a man she chose to stay for.
Nova reached for the book again. Colleen handed it to her. I stood up to start dinner because Audrey was home in an hour, and I wanted the kitchen to smell right when she walked in.
The new certificate came in an envelope from Albany six weeks after we mailed the form. Audrey opened it without me and put it in a drawer. I noticed. I didn't ask. I trusted her with what she was doing with it. Some part of me knew it was going to be a thing. Some part of me was happy to let it.