Chapter 24
Audrey
The birthday banner Duke's mother made was tied across the kitchen archway with two pieces of twine and a confidence in spacing that suggested she'd measured it twice.
The letters were hand-cut from green felt.
NOVA. ONE. A small fox stitched into the corner of the O because Diane Rhodes didn't do things halfway.
Two coffee mugs on the counter. The picture on the bookshelf—me on the curb in front of my building the night of the fire, Nova against my chest, the shock blanket over my shoulders, the red and white of the engine behind us.
Astrid put it in a frame six months ago and brought it over without asking if I wanted it.
I kept it on the shelf because I couldn't decide what to do with it, and then I stopped trying to decide, and it stayed.
Through the wall, I could hear Duke's voice.
Low, easy, the morning register he used with Nova when he was getting her dressed.
"Arms up. There you go. Other arm. Good girl.
" Nova making the small sounds back—not words yet, not all of them, but the sounds that meant she was participating in the conversation because her father expected her to participate in conversations and she had been meeting that expectation since she was four months old.
I stood at the counter spreading cream cheese on bagels and let the morning sit in my chest.
A year ago, I was a nurse who took a pregnancy test in a staff bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid with her hands on her knees.
A year ago, I drove to Astrid's house at six in the morning because I couldn't go home to an empty apartment with the news.
A year ago, I was the woman who set a table for one, called it strength, and believed it completely, daily, without examining what she was locking out.
The woman at this counter had cream cheese on her thumb and a man in the next room singing something off-key to a one-year-old, and the distance between the two versions of herself was a year she would not trade for anything.
Duke had been weird for a few days. He went to his parents' house twice in one week, which was once more than normal.
He took a phone call on Tuesday with the bedroom door closed, which was not how he took phone calls.
He bought me flowers on Wednesday—no occasion, no reason, just flowers on the counter when I came home from shift.
He'd been doing small things with a frequency that suggested he'd decided something and hadn't told me yet.
I figured he was planning something for Nova's birthday. A toy, a stuffed animal, a song. Something small and Duke-shaped that would make me cry in front of his mother.
He came out of the bedroom with Nova on his hip.
She was in the pale green sweater dress my mother knit for her, the one with the fox on the front pocket, and her hair was just long enough to hold the small ribbon Duke put in it.
The ribbon was crooked. He knew the ribbon was crooked. He didn't care.
I crossed the kitchen. Fixed the ribbon. Kissed Nova on the head. Kissed Duke on the mouth.
"Ready?"
"Yeah."
The Rhodes house was cleaner than I'd ever seen it. Streamers in the kitchen. The dining room table set out for cake. The TV was off for the first time in any scene I'd witnessed in this house—Ray Rhodes had muted his sport, which was either love or a hostage situation.
Ray greeted us at the door. My mother at the kitchen counter with Diane, cutting fruit, laughing at something Caroline said.
I clocked it from the entryway and let it land.
Colleen Callahan and Diane Rhodes at the same counter, laughing about anything—twelve months ago, I would have bet money against it.
Reese was already in the living room with a bag of presents and a glass of wine.
Caroline had Henry the toddler on the rug, two and a half now, and when Duke set Nova down, she went straight for him.
Henry opened his arms. Nova grabbed his shirt.
The two of them on the rug together, the small alliance they'd been building for six months that nobody else was allowed into.
Easton and Astrid came through the door with Charlie in the carrier.
Astrid in jeans and a sweater, looking like herself again.
Easton's hand on her lower back. She crossed the room and hugged me—the long hug, the one she'd been giving me for a year, her arms tight around my shoulders, her chin against the side of my head.
She pulled back. Looked at me. "Happy birthday to your kid."
"I know. She's one. I can't believe she's one."
The firehouse came in waves. Hank pushing Mary's wheelchair up the small ramp Ray built for the porch.
Mary with a wrapped gift in her lap. Lou.
Halsey with a pan of something he insisted on putting in Diane's kitchen even though Diane had it covered.
Micah. These people were strangers to me not so long ago.
Now, they were family by proximity and by the man who connected all of us, and the fact that I could stand in a room full of them and feel like I belonged was something I was still getting used to.
The party. Cake on the table. Nova in the high chair Diane bought for her—the one with NOVA carved into the back, Ray's work, cut in his garage last month.
My mother and Diane feeding her small handfuls of cake from opposite sides, the two-grandmothers choreography they'd worked out over the year without ever naming it.
Nova covered in frosting. Henry the toddler eating cake off the floor.
Duke laughing at all of it from across the room with a beer in his hand and his sleeves rolled and the dimple out.
I sat on the couch with cake on a plate and watched the room hold a birthday party for my daughter. I was allowed to belong here. I'd been allowed for a long time. I was finally letting myself.
Duke caught my eye from across the room. He gestured—small, just for me—toward the hallway that led to the back of the house.
I handed my plate to Astrid. "Excuse me a second."
I crossed the room. Duke ahead of me, leading. Down the hallway past the family photos, past the bathroom, to the small back office Ray used for grading game film.
The door closed behind us.
There was a desk with a notepad on it. A framed photo on the wall of Duke at fifteen in his Hartsdale Wildcats jersey, grinning, the dimple already doing its work. A football on the shelf. The afternoon light through the small window above the desk.
Duke in the middle of the room. Me at the door.
He didn't say anything right away. I read his face. The charm was off. The grin was off. The room-reading posture I'd catalogued since the night of the rehearsal dinner was gone. What was on his face was the man underneath all of it, the one I'd been falling in love with for a year.
"Duke."
"Aud." A beat. "I've been trying to figure out how to say this for six months, and I haven't figured it out, but I'm going to say it anyway."
My chest went tight. My hands went still. The thing I hadn't let myself believe was happening today was happening today, and my body knew it before my brain caught up.
"A year ago today, I pulled up to a highway and delivered a baby on the shoulder of Route 9.
I looked through the window of a sedan and saw you.
I didn't know in that moment that you were going to change my entire life.
I didn't know the baby I caught was mine.
I didn't know that the woman in the car was the woman I'd been waiting to be in love with. "
His voice was steady. His eyes were wet.
"I know now. I've known for a long time. I've been waiting until I earned the right to ask you."
He went to one knee.
Duke Rhodes, in his father's office, on his daughter's first birthday, with frosting still on his hands. One knee on the carpet beside a desk covered in game film notes. He pulled the ring box out of the pocket of his shirt and opened it.
The ring was simple and warm. A stone that caught the afternoon light through the window without trying to.
"Audrey Callahan. Will you marry me?"
I looked at him. The man who caught my daughter on a state highway.
The man who sat on a bathroom floor at two in the morning and said he wasn't going anywhere and meant it.
The man who learned the cries, brought the coffee, put the ponytail in crooked, and never once asked me to be anyone other than the woman I was.
I'd spent twenty-eight years building a life around the certainty that saying yes to this question was where women like my mother got destroyed.
"Yes."
My hand was shaking. I felt it before I saw it. My fingers trembling against his, the ring between us, my body saying the thing my voice had just said and meaning it twice.
Duke laughed—short, surprised, the laugh of a man who hadn't been sure. His face broke open. The relief and the joy and the wet in his eyes all at once, no performance in any of it.
He stood and took my hand. He steadied my fingers with his, slid the ring on, and held my hand in both of his for a beat.
I kissed him. Slow, sure, decided. His arms came around me, and the kiss was the smallest, truest version of everything we'd been building for a year.
He pulled back. "We have to tell them."
"I know."
He opened the door. My hand in his. Down the hallway.
The living room turned. My mother saw the hand first. Then Diane. Then Reese, who said "Finally" loud enough that Henry the toddler startled. I held up my hand with the ring on it, and the room erupted.
Diane crying. My mother crying. Reese cheering.
Ray crossing the room and hugging Duke, then turning and hugging me with the full weight of a man who had learned that the best thing his son ever did wasn't a touchdown.
Caroline laughing with both hands over her mouth.
Henry the toddler clapping because everyone else was.
Astrid's arms came around me before I'd finished turning, her face wet against my shoulder.
She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes went to my mouth for one second—the lipstick I'd put on that morning without thinking about it, the same way I used to—and she smiled like she'd been waiting for that, too.
Easton was behind her, clapping Duke on the shoulder.
Hank was in the corner with Mary, both of them smiling. The firehouse crew lined up to tap Duke on the shoulder one after another, the greeting that was theirs.
I stood in the middle of it and let my face do whatever my face wanted to do. Ten years of managing rooms. Ten years of keeping the machinery invisible. The machinery was off. The face was mine.
I looked across the room at my mother. She looked back at me. Her eyes were red, and her chin was lifted, and the woman who spent most of my life afraid her daughter would say yes to this question was watching her daughter say yes to this question, and the look on her face was not fear.
It was pride.
Nova was asleep in my arms by seven, frosting still on her cheek. The three of us in the truck. Duke driving. My hand was in my lap, the ring catching the streetlight every few blocks.
The house was quiet when we came in. Nova into the crib. My hand on her chest until her breathing steadied. Monitor on. Door pulled to.
Duke was in the kitchen pouring water when I came out. The house at the end of an important night, the same way it ended every important night—the two of us in the kitchen.
I crossed to the dresser in the hallway. Second drawer. The frame I'd been keeping there for months, tucked under a folded blanket where he wouldn't find it.
I brought it to the kitchen.
"Duke."
He turned. Saw what I had in my hand.
I held it out.
He took it. Looked at it. The frame was small, the kind people use for photos.
Inside it was the certificate that came back from Albany six months ago, the one I opened without him and put in a drawer.
His name in the father's field. Duke Anthony Rhodes.
The state seal. The signatures. The document that made official what had been true since the morning he walked back into my hospital room and said he wanted to be part of her life.
His face did the thing it did at the bassinet the morning he held Nova for the first time. His eyes went wet. He didn't comment on them. He looked at the certificate for a long time.
"Aud."
"I wanted to give it to you tonight."
He set the frame on the counter. Pulled me against his chest. His arms around me, his face in my hair, my hands flat against his back. The kitchen was quiet. The certificate was on the counter. The ring was on my finger. Our daughter was asleep through the wall.
He pulled back and looked at me.
"I'm glad I made you let me get in that Uber."
I laughed. "I let you get in the Uber because you were annoying and wouldn't stop."
"Worked out, though."
We both had the small private smile that lived between two people who had stopped performing anything for each other.
"I love you," he said.
"I love you," I said.
The house held us. Small, warm, full. The certificate on the counter. The ring on my finger. Nova through the wall, breathing.
I spent twenty-eight years building a life on the principle that needing someone was where a woman got ruined. I was standing in my kitchen with my daughter's birth certificate on the counter, and my mother's voice still somewhere in my head, and the loudest thing in the room was my own laugh.