Epilogue
Nora had crossed the lawn nine times. Rognar knew it was nine because she’d told him it was nine. She stood in his kitchen doorway with a phone charger in her fist and an expression he’d come to recognize as the one that preceded a reckoning.
“Nine,” she said again.
“I heard nine.”
“The ninth was for a charger. I own three chargers. There are two in one house and one in the other house and I couldn’t tell you which two are in which house, and I crossed the lawn—in November, in socks, because my shoes are also apparently under negotiation—to retrieve a charger that turned out to be this charger.
” She held it up. “This charger lives here. I have been storing my charger at your house without my consent.”
“You have a lot of stuff here.”
“I’m aware. That’s the—” She stopped. She set the charger down on the counter like something she might otherwise throw.
“Charlie’s bottles are in both kitchens.
Her sleep sacks are in both bedrooms. There is a version of the duck sock in each house, Rognar.
There are now three duck socks, and I don’t know how that happened, because socks don’t reproduce—”
“You bought a backup.”
“I bought a backup because I could never find the original because it was always in the other house.” She pushed her glasses up.
“I’ve been running a two-site operation for six weeks with no logistics plan and it is insane, and I’m a person whose entire career is telling small businesses not to do exactly this. ”
Rognar leaned against the counter and let her get there, because she was getting there, and it was better if she arrived without help.
Charlie was on the floor between them in the fenced-off safe corner, up on all fours, rocking back and forth.
She had the tremendous focused rage of an eight-month-old who had recently discovered that the floor went places and had not yet worked out how to make herself go with it.
He’d rehearsed this in his head. A speech in the shower.
Another in the truck. A third at practice, while Fen talked at him about nothing.
Every version was cautious to the point of being annoying, because there was one mistake he could not make.
One move could wreck the weeks he’d spent taking her name off schedules and fixing her porch light and giving her nothing to be responsible for.
So he did it badly, on purpose, with every exit propped open first.
“I’m not asking you to sell it,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Your house. I’m not asking you to sell it. Or rent it. Or do anything with it. You could keep it exactly as it is, heated, empty, whatever you want, you could keep paying two sets of bills for the rest of your life and I would never once—”
“Rognar.”
“—say a word about it, because it’s your house, it’s the house you’ve lived in for four years and made your own with your effort and your money. I’ve heard the figure, and I would never ask you to give up a single—”
“Rognar.”
“I’m building up to something.”
“You’re building to it very slowly.”
“I’m being careful.”
“You’re being annoying.” But her mouth was doing the little quirk he loved.
She folded her arms and leaned against the opposite counter, so they were mirroring each other across the kitchen with a raging immobile baby between them.
“Ask the question, Rognar. Whatever it is. I can see you’ve got it wrapped in six inches of packing material. ”
He took a breath. He’d known since the truck outside George’s office.
He’d said the word on the step ten days ago, and she’d taken it and filed it and added her name back.
Even so, this specific, practical, address-level question felt like more of a risk than the mate word had.
The mate word was a feeling. This was a lease.
“Move in,” he said. “Properly. One house. Stop crossing the lawn. I’m not asking you to give up being you. I’d never. You keep your office, you keep your quiet, you keep your everything, I just—I want you to only own one duck sock, Nora. I want us to know where the charger lives.”
Silence.
Charlie chose that moment to lunge, and got precisely nowhere, and toppled sideways onto the padded floor with an expression of pure betrayal. Neither of them moved because she wasn’t hurt, just affronted, and they had both knew it.
Nora looked at him for a long moment.
Then she pushed off the counter, walked out of the kitchen, and came back forty seconds later carrying a folder.
It was a real folder with a tab, and a label on the tab in her handwriting.
She set it down on the counter between them with the finality of a woman laying down a winning hand.
He looked at the label. The label said, in block capitals that were an unmistakable and slightly savage impression of his handwriting:
CONSOLIDATION.
“How long have you had that?” he asked.
“A while.”
“Nora. How long?”
“You started it,” she said, which was not an answer.
She opened the folder, and inside the folder were tabs, and the tabs had headings, and the headings had columns.
“We’re already living together, Rognar. I want that acknowledged before we go any further, because I’d hate for you to think you’ve talked me into anything.
We’ve been living together for approximately six weeks.
We’re simply doing it appallingly inefficiently, across two heating systems and two sets of property taxes, and I’ve been sitting on the analysis for two weeks waiting for you to arrive at a conclusion I reached in the middle of the month. ”
“You had a folder.”
“I have a folder for everything. This is not new information about me.” She turned a tab. “Now. On the merits.”
And then they worked it out. On the merits.
He’d braced for a hard conversation and got a planning meeting instead.
It turned out that a planning meeting run by Nora Bennett with a folder was one of the great pleasures of his life.
Two people at a kitchen counter, dividing up their entire future the way she’d divide a shoebox of Rosa’s receipts.
“Your house has the back wall of windows,” she said, tapping a column. “And the nursery’s already built. Charlie’s whole life is set up in that room, and I’m not moving a settled eight-month-old to save myself a lawn crossing. That’s insane, and we established insane earlier.”
“So this house?”
“So this house. Your house has the room, the light, and the nursery. My house has the office and the quiet. The quiet is the only thing I actually need to protect, and the answer to that is the breezeway, which is already glassed in and currently contains—” she consulted the folder “—three boxes you have never once opened and an exercise bike you have used twice.”
“I’ve used it more than twice.”
“You’ve used it twice. It’s in the log.”
“You keep a log of my exercise bike?”
“I keep a log of everything, Rognar, this is still not new information.” She turned another tab.
“The office goes in the breezeway. North light, which is correct for a screen, and it shares a wall with the garage rather than the nursery, which means my client calls and Charlie’s naps stop competing for airspace. ”
"Okay."
She looked at him for a second. Then she got up, crossed the kitchen, opened the breezeway door, and stood there with her hand on the frame.
"There's a heater in here."
"There is."
"Since when?"
"Since I insulated it." He kept his eyes on her list, because he had been waiting for this and he wanted to take his time with it.
"You insulated the breezeway."
"It gets cold out there in January."
"You insulated the breezeway before I ever said the word office."
"Did I?" He turned the page. "Hard to say. I don't keep records.” Then, because she was still standing in the doorway with her hand on the frame and he wanted her back where he could see her, “And your house?”
She paused over that one. It was the only place in the conversation she paused, and he watched her do it.
He watched the bookkeeper give way for half a second to the nine-year-old who’d called the power company from a payphone with an account number copied off a letter.
To the woman who’d spent four years arranging a house so safe nobody could take it from her.
“Rent it,” she said. “Not sell it. You were right not to ask me to sell it—I wouldn’t have. But an empty heated house is exactly the kind of waste I bill people for, so we rent it. A good tenant with a proper lease which I’ll draw up.” A beat. “I’ll be extremely particular about the tenant.”
“I have no doubt.”
“I mean it. I’ll interview them like it’s a job. It’s my house.”
“It’s your house.” He looked at the folder, at the tabs, at CONSOLIDATION in her assassination of his handwriting.
Something settled in his chest that had been standing up on its hind legs since the truck.
He grinned, because grinning was still what he did.
This time it wasn’t a deflection. He was just pleased. “There’s one more line item.”
“There are several more, but go on.”
“My gear does not go in the house.”
She blinked. “That’s my line. I was going to say that.”
“You were thinking it, I got there first. The gear does not go in the house. I’ve smelled the gear. The gear has a personality now, the gear has done things—”
“Where does your gear go?”
“There is a garage,” he said, with the solemnity of a male delivering a eulogy.
“It has been waiting its entire life for this. That garage has spent a year pretending to be a garage while it was really a locker room, and its purpose is my gear, and the two of them are going to be very happy together, far away from the room where my daughter sleeps and the room where you count things.”