18. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
The house looks exactly the same from the outside.
I stand on the front walk for a long moment, just staring at it. The pale blue siding. The white trim. The rosebushes I planted our first spring together, dormant now but still alive.
I haven’t been here since the morning Kirk threw me out. Haven’t set foot inside since he handed me divorce papers and told me to be gone by nightfall.
“You okay?” Kirk’s voice is soft beside me.
“I don’t know.” I take a breath. “This is harder than I expected.”
“We don’t have to go in. We can come back another day.”
“No.” I square my shoulders. “I need to do this.”
He takes my hand and leads me up the walk. The key is in my pocket, a new one, silver and gleaming, that he pressed into my palm this morning. So you can come home whenever you want, he said. No questions asked.
The door swings open, and I step inside.
The living room is neat but impersonal. No flowers on the table. No throw blankets on the couch. No signs of the home we built together.
But it smells the same. That particular mix of cedar and coffee and us that I’ve carried in my memory for weeks.
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Kirk says nervously. “I haven’t been here a lot. Mostly just sleeping.”
“It looks like a house waiting for its people to come home.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “It has been.”
We move through the rooms together. The kitchen, where I used to make breakfast on lazy Sunday mornings. The bathroom, where I took the pregnancy test that started all of this.
He’s kept small faith everywhere, and the rooms testify one at a time.
My mug is still first in the cabinet row, handle out, the way I leave it.
The grocery list pad on the refrigerator holds a single entry in his handwriting, weeks old: peaches, if good.
In the hallway, the frame with our Provence photos hangs level, and I know for a fact it never hung level in six years, which means he fixed it, alone, in an empty house, for no audience at all.
We stop at the bedroom door and neither of us goes in. The bed is made with hotel corners, and I stare at it, and he stares at me staring at it. This is where we made love and fought and made up again, night after night, year after year.
Don’t, I warn myself. You came to see the house, not to relearn that mattress.
Moving down the hall takes real effort. My feet want to vote.
And then we reach the nursery.
I stop in the doorway, and my lungs forget their job.
Kirk has been busy.
The walls are painted pale yellow, a soft, warm shade that catches the afternoon light and glows. A white crib waits in the corner, a mobile of stars and moons hanging above it. A rocking chair sits by the window, upholstered in cream-colored fabric that looks impossibly soft.
And on the wall above the crib, in a new frame, hangs the ultrasound.
The original photo, the seven-week one, the tiny seahorse. He’s had it enlarged, matted in soft white, and the new frame is simple and sturdy, and I would know that grainy image anywhere because I carried the creased pocket copy of it through the worst month of my life.
“The old frame cracked,” Kirk says quietly, behind me. “I kept it. It’s in my desk. I couldn’t throw it away, but she shouldn’t have to grow up under it, either. So. New frame. Same picture.”
“I didn’t know if you’d come back,” he adds, softer. “But I wanted it ready. In case.”
Tears stream down my face. I don’t try to stop them.
“Kirk-”
“I know it doesn’t fix anything. I know there’s still so much we need to work through. But I wanted you to see-” His voice cracks. “I wanted you to see that I’m serious. That I’m not just saying the right words. I’m doing the work.”
I turn to face him. This man who broke my heart. This man who’s trying so hard to put it back together.
“I’m still angry at you,” I say.
“I know.”
“Some mornings I wake up and I’m furious all over again, before I even remember why.”
“Then be furious. I’ll be here for that too.”
“And I don’t know how long it’s going to take. The trust. There’s no schedule.”
“There’s no schedule,” he agrees. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“But I want to try.”
He crosses to me in two steps and pulls me into his arms. I bury my face in his chest and breathe him in: sandalwood and cedar and home.
“You won’t regret it,” he whispers against my hair.
“Good.” I pull back to look at him. “Because I’m going to hold you to that.”
He laughs, a wet, broken sound that’s somehow also joyful. And then he kisses me.
It starts soft. Gentle. A question rather than a demand.
But I’ve been starving for him since that hotel doorway, and my body remembers what my mind is still trying to forget.
I deepen the kiss. Pull him closer. His breathing stutters as my hands slide under his shirt.
“Andrea-” He pulls back, his eyes searching mine. “Are you sure?”
“Take me to bed, Kirk.”
This is the bed he exiled you from, something in me says as he leads me down the hall.
You slept on a couch for a month while these sheets waited for a wife he’d thrown away.
I know it. I walk into the room anyway, because the wanting is louder than the warning, and tonight I’ve decided the wanting gets to win.
***
He leads me to our bedroom as if I am something fragile, something precious he’s terrified of breaking. The room smells of home and the faint, lingering scent of the lavender sachets he’d kept in the drawers while I was gone. It’s a reclamation.
Kirk stops at the foot of the bed, his hands hovering at my waist, his knuckles barely grazing the fabric of my dress. The hesitation isn’t about desire - there’s enough of that in this room to burn the house down - but about the weight of everything we’ve survived.
“We don’t have to do this,” he says, his voice rough. “If you’re not ready-”
“I’m ready.” I take his face in both hands and pull him down to me. “I need to feel close to you. I need to remember what we have.”
He doesn’t need another invitation. He undresses me slowly, his movements reverent. As each piece of clothing falls, he replaces the fabric with his lips.
He presses a lingering kiss to my shoulder, then trails his mouth down to my collarbone, sucking gently on the sensitive skin there until I gasp.
When he reaches my belly, unmistakably round now at sixteen weeks, he freezes. He sinks to his knees, pressing his forehead against the curve of my stomach.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he murmurs, his breath warm against my skin. “Both of you. So beautiful.”
He begins to worship me, his tongue swirling around my navel before he moves upward. He captures one breast, his mouth closing over my nipple.
It’s more sensitive now, a sharp, electric pull that makes my toes curl. He sucks hard, his tongue teasing the peak, while his hand slides down to cup the underside of my breast, squeezing softly.
“Then be careful with me,” I whisper, pressing my palm to his chest. I can feel his heartbeat knocking against my hand, erratic and wild. “Be so, so careful.”
“I will.” He captures my hand, kissing my knuckles with a desperation that makes my chest ache. “Starting now.”
He moves lower, his kisses trailing over the flare of my hips and the dip of my waist. He parts my thighs, his eyes dark as he looks at me. He doesn’t rush.
He uses his tongue to find me, licking slowly from the bottom up, tasting me with a hunger that feels like a homecoming.
I arch my back, my fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer as he laps at my clit, his tongue flicking in a rhythm that has me sobbing his name.
“Tell me if anything doesn’t feel good,” he murmurs, glancing up at me, his lips glistening. “I know your body is changing.”
“Everything feels good,” I moan, my voice thready and desperate. “Don’t stop.”
He rises, shedding his own clothes in a blur of motion before sliding over me. I pull him down for a kiss, my tongue dancing with his. “I want to see your face.”
He enters me slowly, a long, steady push that fills me completely. The stretch is different at this stage of pregnancy - more intense, more overwhelming - but it feels right. It feels like the final piece of a puzzle clicking into place.
“God,” he breathes, his forehead resting against mine. “Andrea-”
“I know.” I wrap my legs around his waist, locking him in, pulling him deeper into me. “I know.”
We move together, a slow, grinding rhythm that is both familiar and entirely new. Every thrust is a promise, every gasp a confession. His eyes never leave mine, dark and glassy with an ache he isn’t hiding anymore.
He kisses my eyelids, my cheeks, the tip of my nose, as if he’s trying to memorize me all over again.
“I love you,” he says, his voice breaking, a ragged sound of surrender. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too.” The words come easier this time, the lock I broke in that hotel room staying broken. “I never stopped. I’m not going to.”
He groans, picking up the pace, his thrusts becoming deeper, more urgent. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, his breath hot and heavy. I can feel the tension building, a coil tightening in my gut until it snaps.
I shatter around him, my muscles clamping tight on his cock, and he follows me a second later, a low, guttural shout escaping him as he cums deep inside me.
He doesn’t pull away. He stays there, heavy and warm, holding me as if he’ll never let go.
“I want to stay,” I whisper. “Tonight. Maybe longer.”
He lifts his head. “Really?”
“Really.” I trace the line of his jaw. “I’m not saying everything is fixed. But I think - I think we’re on our way.”
He kisses me, soft and reverent, and tucks me against his chest. We lie tangled together, his hand making slow passes over the crest of my belly, and for a while the only sounds in the house are our breathing, the tick of the radiator, and the ordinary music of a life resuming.
“Stay tomorrow too,” he murmurs into my hair. “And the day after. I’m not asking you to move back in one conversation. I’m asking in installments. Tonight’s installment is tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I agree, drowsy, my hand finding his and lacing through it on the highest curve of the bump. “Ask me about the day after tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“That’s the system?”
“That’s the system.”
“I love the system,” he says, with his whole chest, and I fall asleep to the sound of my husband negotiating with the calendar.
The doorbell rings.
Kirk groans into my hair. “Ignore it.”
“It might be Melissa. I texted her that I was staying.”
“Melissa texts back. Melissa does not do doorbells.” But he’s already pulling on his jeans, already padding downstairs in his bare feet, and I lie in our bed listening to the door open, and then to nothing.
No voices. No footsteps. Nothing.
“Kirk?”
He comes back up the stairs slowly. He’s holding a padded envelope, and his face has drained of color.
“There’s no one there. It was propped against the door.” He turns it over so I can see the front. “No postage.”
The handwriting is his mother’s.
I sit up, pulling the sheet around me, and he sits on the edge of the bed and opens it because one of us has to.
Papers slide out onto the blanket. Printouts.
I recognize them before my brain finishes focusing: the text thread.
I can’t stop thinking about you. Our baby.
Our secret. Every fabricated word, printed clean and fresh, as if the lie had just been laundered.
And clipped to the top page, a note card. Cream stock. Two lines.
Keep these, dear. You’ll never be sure he won’t believe the next one.
Kirk’s hands close around the pages until they crumple.
Neither of us says a word, and the house we just reclaimed goes very, very quiet around us.