Chapter 27 #2
Outside, Sofia's kitchen light went off. A pointed commentary, probably.
"Are you sure?" Nadia said after a while.
I looked down at her. "About what, specifically?"
"About us. About this. About staying." She was looking at the ceiling, not at me, which told me how much the question had cost her to ask. "I need to know you won't wake up in six months and decide you've failed me somehow and disappear again. I can't do that again, Daemon."
I thought about what I'd said in the parking lot. About the math only working one way.
I thought about my mom's headstone, and the crow, and Sofia's story about her husband who'd almost not asked because he thought she deserved someone with more to offer.
I thought about what Malakai had said. About deserving her instead of protecting her from me.
"I'm sure," I said. "I've never been surer of anything." I tightened my arm around her. "You're it for me, Nadia. You've been it for me since that warehouse. I just needed to catch up with myself."
She was quiet for a heartbeat. Then she pressed a kiss to my chest, right above where everything that mattered was located, and settled back against me.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." I could hear the smile in it. "Don't make me say it again."
Outside, the night settled around Sofia's garden. Somewhere in the main house, a radio came back on.
I lay in the pink-lit dark with Nadia warm against my side, the ceramic cats watching, and the needlepoint sampler above the headboard proclaiming HOME SWEET HOME in its cheerful, aggressive cross-stitch.
For the first time in a long time, it felt like it meant something.
The Sunday before Lindsey Hunter's book launch, Nadia came over with a box.
Not a moving box. A medium-sized cardboard one with the logo of the dry goods supplier she used, which she set on my kitchen table before saying, "I brought some things I thought might work in here."
I looked at the box. Then at her. "Work in here how?"
"Small things." She opened the flaps. Inside: a cast iron trivet shaped like a sunflower that had been sitting on her commercial kitchen windowsill, a paperback novel she'd read twice and wanted somewhere it would get used, and a jar of the specific coffee she preferred that I'd never sourced correctly on my own.
"Not a takeover. Just. Things that are mine, in a place where I spend time. "
I looked at the trivet. I looked at the coffee.
"The trivet goes on the stove," I said. "Where do you want the book?"
She let out a breath she'd been holding for what sounded like a while. "Wherever there's room."
There was room everywhere. Sofia's apartment had shelves running most of the way around the living area, interrupted only by the window and the ceramic cats.
We found a spot on the shelf nearest the window and put the book there, spine facing out, then stood back and looked at it the way people look at new things in familiar spaces, checking whether they fit.
It fit.
The afternoon was slow. That was the thing I'd been learning about Nadia since we got back to each other. She moved fast at work, fast in a crisis, fast when something needed doing.
But left alone in a space with no immediate demands on her, she went still in a way that was almost surprising. She could read for two hours without surfacing. She could sit on a kitchen counter with a coffee and watch the garden and not feel the need to fill the silence with anything.
I liked that about her more than I'd known how to say.
We made dinner in the small kitchen, working around each other with the ease of practice. She did the prep automatically, her knife work clean and fast, with no wasted movement.
I handled the pan because she claimed my heat management was the one thing I did better than her, which I suspected was a deliberate concession to keep me useful.
Sofia knocked at six, delivered a small container of something she said was extra but which I suspected she'd made specifically, accepted a glass of wine, and was back in her own kitchen in eleven minutes.
A record, even for her.
After dinner we ended up on the narrow couch with the lamp on and the cats watching, Nadia's legs across my lap, her book open but not being read.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yeah."
"Your mom." She kept her voice measured, not careful exactly, but considered. She'd learned when to be direct and when to come at things from an angle, and this was an angle. "You've told me what happened. What you felt like after. But you've never told me what she was like."
I looked at the lamp. The ceramic cats on the shelf across from us had their usual expressions, which amounted to polite neutrality.
"She was funny," I said. "Not obviously. In the way where you'd be halfway through something else entirely and then you'd realize what she'd said three minutes ago was the funniest thing you'd ever heard."
I thought about it. "She was a terrible cook. She knew she was a terrible cook, and she didn't care at all. She made this chicken every Sunday that was technically inedible, and she was very proud of it."
Nadia smiled without looking up from the page she wasn't reading. "What made it inedible?"
"She added things. The recipe would say garlic, and she'd add garlic, then add more because she felt the recipe had underestimated the situation, then add something else entirely that didn't belong there on any level."
"What sort of something else?"
"Cinnamon. Once." I let that land. "She said she'd misread the label."
Nadia put the book face-down on her stomach and looked at me with the expression of a woman who had devoted her professional life to food. "Cinnamon."
"In the chicken."
"And you ate it."
"Every Sunday for twenty-two years." I fell silent as I remembered the seasons. "It was important to her. She'd made it. It didn't matter that it was bad. You ate the food someone made you with their whole heart."
Nadia was quiet for a bit. Then she said, "She sounds like someone I would have liked."
The thing about that sentence was that she meant it practically. Not as comfort, not as the thing you said. She meant it the way she meant most things, as a direct result of the evidence.
"She would have liked you," I said. "She had very little patience for nonsense, and she respected people who could run things. She would have come to one of your events and told everyone she'd known you for years."
"That's a very specific compliment."
"It's accurate."
She put her legs down and turned to sit sideways, her back against the arm of the couch, facing me. Not readying herself for a serious conversation. Just repositioning. She looked at me with the attention she had when she was about to say something she'd been sitting with for a while.
"I think you should go back," she said. "To the cemetery. Not because you have anything left to fix, but because she's there, and you're here, and you don't have to keep it separate now if you don't want to."
I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. I'd been going to the cemetery as a kind of accounting. Coffee, silence, the crow. Tallying what I owed. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be something else.
"I'd like to come with you," she said. "If that's okay. Not to intrude on anything. I just." She stopped, which she rarely did. "I'd like to know where she is."
I thought about Nadia standing in the cemetery with her coffee and her directness and her complete absence of performance. Saying nothing in particular. Just being there.
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."
She nodded, satisfied, and picked up her book again.
The lamp made its usual warm circle. The cats watched from the shelves. Outside, Sofia's garden did whatever gardens did in the dark.
After a while, I said, "There's something I want to talk about."
She lowered the book. "Okay."
"The apartment." I looked around the room.
The trivet on the stove. The book on the shelf.
The coffee in the cabinet. "It's Sofia's.
I've always known it was temporary. She's eighty-six, and at some point this is going to be a different decision.
" I took a beat. "I've been saving. Since I got out.
Every month. I didn't have a plan exactly.
I wanted to have options." I looked at her.
"I think I've been saving for a specific option without knowing what it was yet. "
She was watching me carefully.
"I'm not asking you to decide anything tonight," I said. "I want you to know that's where my head is. When we talk about next year, I'm thinking past next year."
Her mouth formed an O before she could get it under control. "You're thinking about a house."
"I'm thinking about a house."
"With me."
"With you. And the trivet. And whichever of the cats Sofia lets me take."
She looked at the shelf of ceramic cats and considered this with genuine seriousness. "The tabby with the chipped ear," she said finally. "He looks like he's seen things and kept quiet about them. That's the one we take."
"Done," I said.
She turned back to her book. Two pages in, she reached over without looking and found my hand and held it, her thumb tracing back and forth in the absentminded way she had when she was reading.
I sat in the warm light of the apartment that had been my entire world for three years and would not be for much longer, and thought about the fact that I was not afraid of that.
I could sit here and feel the change coming and want it, completely and without reservation, in a way I had wanted nothing since before I was old enough to know what wanting things cost.
My mom would have had a lot to say about that.
She'd have led with something dry. Made me laugh before I'd realized she'd got to the point. And then she'd have gone back to her kitchen and made something technically inedible and expected me to eat it, because that was how she loved people. Imperfectly, specifically, with her complete self.
I thought I was finally understanding that.