Chapter 19
Nineteen
Ten months since the twins were born and I have developed the reflexes of a woman who has been through actual combat.
Not metaphorical combat. The kind where you learn to catch a crawling baby mid-lunge without spilling your coffee or breaking your stride or losing track of the laundry you’ve been folding for twenty minutes without actually making progress on it.
Milo has found the recycling bin.
He always finds the recycling bin. I don’t know what it is about that corner of the kitchen, the sound, the smell, the specific texture of crinkled plastic, but it calls to him the way the sea calls to sailors in old stories, irresistibly, with the promise of something magnificent on the other side.
He’s on all fours now, knees slapping the kitchen tiles with rhythm, making a direct and purposeful line for it with the energy of a man who has decided this is the hill he will die on.
I reach him before he gets there, one hand already extended, not even looking up from the muslin I’m folding.
I redirect him with a stacking cup, and he sits back on his heels and stares at it like a tiny philosopher encountering a new metaphysical problem.
Then he puts it in his mouth and the crisis is averted.
Behind me, Maisie is sitting next to the washing basket “helping” with the laundry.
She has a muslin cloth on her head. She put it there herself and seems entirely at peace with this decision.
She adjusts it once, checks my face to confirm I’ve witnessed this, and then fixes me with the solemn expression.
“You look great,” I tell her. “Very distinguished.”
She removes the cloth, holds it out to me, and then puts it back on her head.
“Okay,” I say. “Keep it.”
The Bluetooth speaker on the counter is playing something warm and upbeat. The kitchen smells like banana and coffee and the lemon washing-up liquid I’ve been buying since I switched to the brand I actually like rather than the one Daniel preferred.
I move between tasks with a rhythm that still surprises me sometimes, not the frantic, underwater scrabble of the first months but something more like actual competence.
The ability to hold a thought, finish a sentence in my own head, complete a task from beginning to end without losing the thread of it.
I’ve been waiting for this feeling long enough that I keep expecting it to vanish when I’m not paying attention. It hasn’t yet.
Then my phone buzzes on the counter.
I reach for it automatically, the way you do when you’re expecting nothing in particular. Daniel’s name sits at the top of the notification, and underneath it, the preview of a message so casually worded that it takes me a second to understand what it’s actually telling me:
Hey, any chance we could swap Tuesday’s pickup to Wednesday? I’ve got plans after work Tuesday. Dinner with someone. Let me know.
I read it twice. Set the phone face-down on the counter. Pick it up again. Read it a third time.
The world doesn’t end. Which is either a sign that I’m doing well or that I’ve been so thoroughly emotionally sandbagged by the past year that my system has simply run out of capacity for new catastrophes.
I stand perfectly still for a moment in the middle of my kitchen while Milo bangs two measuring cups together, and Maisie watches me from her spot by the laundry basket with those eyes, the solemn, careful ones that always seem to be registering more than a ten-month-old should.
It’s strange. That’s the word for it. Not devastating and doesn’t stir any jealousy, I actually check for jealousy the way you probe a bruise, pressing lightly to see if it hurts, and find almost nothing there.
Just strange, the way it’s strange to hear news about someone you used to know very well, someone you understood at a level that felt permanent and now don’t have to think about most days.
Like hearing your childhood best friend has moved to another country.
You’re not sad. You’re just aware that a version of the story has ended.
He’s taking someone to dinner.
I turn the information over in my head, and it comes up lighter than I expect. Then heavier. Then lighter again. I can’t quite settle on what weight it should be.
I unlock the phone, type back: Wednesday’s fine. Same time? Then I put it in my pocket before he responds and pick Milo up off the floor before he eats the stacking cup.
“Right,” I tell him, and he grabs my face with both hands in greeting. “Right, yeah. Hi to you too.”
The rest of the afternoon passes in its usual routines, two naps, one bath between feeds because Milo found the potted soil of the kitchen cactus and decided it was a snack, laundry actually folded and put away rather than sitting in the basket for four more days.
Through it all, the information turns over in the back of my mind like something caught in a slow current.
I’m not heartbroken. I keep checking and I’m genuinely not.
What I feel is more complicated and quieter than that, something between wistfulness and relief, the two sitting so close together I can’t quite tell where one ends.
The wistfulness is for the version of things I thought I was getting when I stood at an altar and meant every word.
The relief is that I no longer have to wonder if Daniel is somewhere quietly hoping to come home.
The twins go down at seven after an extended and entirely unnecessary negotiation about whether Milo needs to be holding the orange elephant or the green one.
(He needs both. This is non-negotiable. We have been through this.) I sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and stare at the houseplant on the windowsill, the one I moved to the kitchen from the nursery weeks ago, because I wanted it there, just because I wanted it there, and wait for some delayed wave of grief to arrive.
It doesn’t.
What arrives instead is something smaller and stranger. The realisation that the version of Elsie Quinn who would have spiralled for three days over that text is already gone. Has been gone for a while. I just hadn’t noticed when she left.
Daniel is taking someone to dinner.
And I’m sitting in my kitchen in the quiet of a house that smells like my choices, with two sleeping babies upstairs and a cup of tea gone slightly too cold, and the future is somewhere ahead of me in the dark, and it is mine to walk into.
I take a sip of the cold tea anyway, because that’s what you do, and I think: okay then. Just that. Okay then.
***
Page & Grounds after closing looks like Luca decided that life is too short for overhead lighting, which is a philosophy I’m starting to actively agree with.
The fairy lights are on, strung along the shelves in warm loops, and the mismatched armchairs have been pushed into a loose circle around the low coffee table with the deliberateness of someone who has opinions about furniture arrangement and isn’t afraid to act on them.
Takeaway containers are already open. Wine is already poured.
Harper is cross-legged in the big green chair with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
Luca is sprawled across the loveseat like he lives there.
Liv has claimed the armchair nearest the biography section with the air of someone who scouted the best defensive position before anyone else arrived.
They all look at me when I come in.
Not in a loaded way. More like the way people look when they’ve already clocked that something is running slightly sideways in your brain and they’re giving you a minute to either bring it up yourself or let them pretend they didn’t notice.
Luca hands me a glass before I’ve even sat down. This is love. This is what love looks like.
“Right,” he says, settling back. “I have a story. A man came in today and tried to return a book.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “We’re a bookshop.”
“He’d read the whole thing.” Luca’s eyebrows lift with the expression he uses when he’s describing something that has personally offended his soul.
“Cover to cover. There was a receipt inside from three weeks ago. The spine was cracked. There was a crumb, Elsie. A biscuit crumb in chapter seven.” He pauses for effect. “He said it wasn’t what he expected.”
Harper looks up from her glass. “What did you say?”
“I said that was rather the point of books. He said he’d prefer a refund. I said I’d prefer he learned what irony was. We parted ways. He left a Yelp review.” He takes a long sip. “I’ve read it twelve times.”
“Was it scathing?” I ask.
“It called me ‘theatrical but ultimately unhelpful.’” He says this with the quiet dignity of someone receiving a great honour. “I’m putting it on a plaque.”
Across the table, Liv is staring at her phone with the flat expression she uses when she’s found something personally offensive. “I redesigned the loyalty card again,” she says to nobody in particular. “New layout, better hierarchy. It looks great. I hate it. I don’t know what happened.”
“Classic creator’s guilt,” Harper says without looking up.
“I think I was in a mood when I picked the font. It’s giving ‘doctor’s waiting room.’” She turns the phone around to show us. “Look at that kerning.”
“It looks fine,” I tell her.
“It looks fine,” she repeats, like I’ve confirmed a terminal diagnosis. She puts the phone face-down on the armrest. “Anyway.”
Harper sighs at the ceiling. “I’ve been staring at the same plot hole for three days. The hero drives from Perth to Cheynes in four hours, which is physically impossible, and I cannot figure out how to fix it without cutting the whole third act.”
“Make the car faster,” Luca suggests.
“It’s contemporary fiction.”
“Make him faster. He’s emotionally turbulent. Maybe he drives in a turbulent way.”
“That’s not…“ She closes her eyes briefly. “I’ll think about it.”