12. Harper
HARPER
I catch myself saying it on a Tuesday, standing at the front desk with Renata beside me, half listening to a guest complain about the ice machine on the third floor, still broken after all this time.
“I still need to call home before Ginger’s bedtime,” I say, and it’s out of my mouth before I notice what I’ve called it.
Home. Not Viktor’s house. Not the place I’m staying. Home, easy, unremarkable, like I’ve been saying it for years instead of a few weeks.
Renata doesn’t catch it, still filing a complaint form, but I catch it, and I stand there for a second longer than the moment requires.
The court case ended weeks ago now. Nobody’s mentioned an end date since.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Renata says, glancing up.
“What thing?”
“The staring off into space thing. You’ve been doing it a lot lately.”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.” She falls silent for a moment. “You never actually told me the real plan,” she says a minute later, once the guest has wandered off toward the elevators. “The contract. Isn’t there a clock running on it somewhere?”
“A year, minimum. Either of us can end it after that with thirty days’ notice. We’re nowhere close yet.”
“So there’s no rush.”
“No rush.”
Renata studies me the way she does when she’s deciding whether to push or let something drop, and for once she lets it drop.
There’s no rush, technically. The contract gave us a full year before either of us had to think about an ending at all, and we’re not even halfway through it.
My shift ends at six, and I pick Ginger up from Mrs. Bennett’s on the way home, and she talks the entire drive about a project at school, some diorama involving a shoebox and more glitter than I’m going to enjoy cleaning off the car seat.
“Viktor said he’d help me with the trees part,” she says. “He’s better at cutting straight lines than you are.”
“That’s true. I’ll give him that one.”
“Can we do it tonight? After dinner?”
“If he’s home in time, sure.”
She nods, satisfied, already planning the details out loud, colors for the trees, whether the diorama needs a river, and I watch her in the rearview mirror and feel my chest go tight in a way that has nothing to do with glitter or shoeboxes.
Four months ago, she wouldn’t ask if Viktor was home in time for anything. Four months ago, she barely spoke his name at all.
Now she assumes him into every plan without a second thought, the way you assume a permanent fixture of your life will still be there tomorrow.
It hits me clearly, driving home with glitter already migrating into the car’s air vents, that ending this now would cost her more than it would cost me.
I’m not sure when that math flipped, but it’s flipped completely, and I’m not the only variable in this equation anymore.
There’s a version of me from four months ago who would have called this reckless.
That version of me didn’t know yet how much steadier Ginger would sleep with two people checking on her instead of one, or how much lighter the whole house would feel once someone else started carrying part of the weight I’d been carrying alone since Mia died.
I don’t regret any of it. I thought I’d feel trapped by now, tied to a stranger longer.
Instead, I mostly just feel tired in a way that has an actual bottom to it, rather than the kind that used to stretch on forever with no floor in sight.
Viktor’s home when we get there, sleeves rolled up, and Ginger launches into the diorama plan the second she’s through the door, dragging him toward the kitchen table before he’s even set his keys down.
“Trees first,” she informs him. “You said trees first.”
“I did say that.” He catches my eye over her head, a warmth passing between us that I choose not to examine too closely tonight.
“Green for the pine trees, but the ones by the river have to be different, because Ms. Alvarez said not all trees are the same green.” Ginger dumps a pile of construction paper onto the table. “You have to cut them pointy at the top.”
“Pointy at the top. Understood.” Viktor picks up the scissors like he’s accepting a formal assignment, and Ginger nods, satisfied, settling into the chair beside him with the total focus of someone twice her age.
I watch them work from the doorway for a while, Viktor cutting careful lines into green construction paper while Ginger narrates every decision as if a documentary crew was following her around.
He asks her questions that actually require her opinion, not the kind adults ask kids just to fill the silence, and she answers every one of them as if the conversation matters, because to her, right now, it does.
“Do you think the river should be blue or more like a green blue?” she asks him, holding up two shades like the decision carries real weight.
“Depends on the season you’re going for. Summer river, more blue. Spring river, closer to your green blue.”
“It’s summer. Obviously.” She says it with the particular exasperation only a six-year-old can manage, like the answer should have been self-evident, and picks the blue without further debate.
I should say something tonight. About timelines, about what happens next, about whether either of us has actually thought past this point at all.
I don’t.
I tell myself it’s because Ginger’s still awake, because there’s never a good moment with a six-year-old underfoot, and that’s true enough, but it isn’t the whole truth.
The whole truth is closer to what I watched happen in that kitchen just now: a girl who’s finally stopped flinching at change, and I’m not willing to be the one who hands her another one.
Later, after Ginger’s asleep and the diorama sits half-finished on the kitchen table, glitter glue drying in uneven patches, Viktor finds me on the back porch with a glass of wine I’ve barely touched.
“She talked my ear off tonight,” he says, sitting beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch.
“She likes you. In case that wasn’t obvious from the shoebox summit.”
“I like her too.” He says it simply, no hesitation, and the plainness of it lands harder than if he’d dressed it up. “More than I expected to, if I’m honest.”
“Me too. About all of it, I mean.”
He’s quiet for a moment, turning his own glass in his hands without drinking from it, and the silence stretches long enough that I start counting the seconds without meaning to.