16. Noah
Chapter sixteen
Noah
It was supposed to end at noon.
The gym erupts.
Karissa grabs my arm.
I don't think she notices. I let her hand stay there.
We're in the parking lot after, the three of us, Theo still buzzing, replaying the shot with his hands like he can make it happen again if he describes it right.
Karissa's smiling the way she only does when she's not thinking about smiling.
Loose, unguarded, the kind that reaches her eyes before it reaches her mouth.
Theo stops mid-sentence.
"Hey." He looks at me. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Do you have kids?"
The air shifts.
The question sits there a beat too long before I find the words, and Theo, who notices everything in his particular fearless way, waits. Karissa goes very still beside him.
"I had a daughter," I say. "She died when she was three months old."
Theo's face changes. Not pity. Something more careful than that. "I'm sorry," he says. And then, because he is sixteen and has no filter and that makes him the most honest person in any room: "What was her name?"
"Claire."
He nods. He doesn't say anything else. That's exactly right.
We walk to the car.
Karissa drives. Theo sits in the back, headphones on, probably already texting his teammates. The city moves past the window.
I watch it.
There's a specific quality to the silence when something has just broken the surface. You spend six years keeping a thing submerged, you get very good at reading the seconds when it isn't. This is those seconds.
She would have been six in April.
I don't say it. I'm not going to say it. But the thought is there now, fully formed, the way it always is when Claire comes up, not gradual, not approaching. Just suddenly present, like a door opened in a room I keep locked.
April. Springtime. She would have been at the age where everything is a discovery.
I make myself focus on the window.
Karissa drops Theo off at the bakery entrance and tells him she'll be up in an hour. He gives me a look I can't entirely read before he goes, somewhere between gratitude and warning, and then the door closes and it's just us.
She doesn't start the car.
"You don't have to—" I start.
"I'm not doing anything." Her voice is quiet. "I'm just sitting here."
She is. Both hands in her lap. Not looking at me, not performing concern. Just present in the way she has that I've stopped being able to explain.
The silence sits.
"You don't have to talk about it," she says. "I'm not asking you to."
Something moves in my chest. Not comfortable. Not welcome.
"I was on the phone," I say.
She turns.
"When she stopped breathing." The words come out flat. Practiced. I've said them before, to lawyers, to doctors, to the one therapist I lasted four sessions with. "I had stepped out for eleven minutes. She'd been stable all morning. I thought—"
I stop.
I don't finish that sentence. There is no version of it that ends right.
"I had the best neonatologist in the country. Three specialists. Two nurses on overnight. I had every resource available." The edge in my voice is old, sharp, aimed inward. "And none of it—"
"Mattered," she says softly. Not completing my thought. Just acknowledging the shape of it.
"None of it mattered."
The quiet that follows is different from the one before. Heavier. Honest in the way quiet gets when someone has said the real thing.
Karissa doesn't reach for the easy words. She doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault. She doesn't offer the things people offer, the things that are technically true and land like nothing at all.
She just says, "I'm sorry. Not for you leaving the room. For Claire. For the fact that she was real and she died and that's a thing you carry."
My jaw tightens.
"That's all," she says. "That's the whole thing."
I look at her.
She means it. Steady, no flinching, no performance of softness. Just her eyes and the fact that she means it.
There is something I have never experienced before, which is the sensation of someone sitting with me in something without trying to fix it or frame it or move past it.
I have had sympathy. I have had managed concern.
I have had people look at me like the word grief was a problem to be solved and I was the variable.
Karissa looks at me like I'm a person.
"She had my mother's hands," I say. I don't know why I say it. I haven't said that to anyone. "That was the thing I kept thinking about after. At the time. Just these tiny hands, and they looked exactly like my mother's."
Karissa doesn't move.
"Mother held her once and I watched them together and I thought—"
My voice does something I don't let it do. I stop. I get it back. "I thought I had time."
The last word is the one that lands wrong. Always. Time. The specific lie of it.
"You did everything right," Karissa says, "and it still happened."
"Yes."
"And that's why the control thing—"
"Say it."
She looks at me. "That's why you can't stop. Why you build the walls and pull the strings and make sure everything is accounted for. Because you did all of that and it still wasn't enough, and you can't figure out how to live in a world where that's true."
The accuracy of it lands somewhere I wasn't prepared.
I don't answer.
"I'm not criticizing you," she says. "I understand it. I do the same thing, just — smaller scale." A beat. "I just think maybe you know that already."
I do.
That's the part that's hardest. I know exactly what I'm doing and why.
I know the walls are a response to a wound and not a solution to it.
I know all of it, and I build them anyway, because the alternative is standing in a parking lot six years later still not knowing what to do with eleven minutes.
"She would have been six in April," I say.
Karissa closes her eyes briefly. "Yeah."
One word. No pity in it. Just acknowledgment, clean and direct.
I look out the window.
The city is doing what it does, moving, indifferent, continuous. I've always found that useful. The scale of it. Nothing personal in the grid of it.
"You're the only person I've told that to," I say. "About April."
I feel her go still.
"I don't mean—"
I stop. I'm not sure what I mean. "I'm not explaining it. I'm just telling you."
"Okay," she says. Quiet. Careful with it.
I turn back. She's watching me the way she does, without the careful management of whatever I might do next. Just watching.
I should say something that closes this. Something structural, something that returns us to ground I understand.
I don't.
"Thank you," I say instead. "For sitting here."
The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something closer to recognition.
"You came to his game," she says. "I wasn't going to leave you alone in a parking lot."
I almost say that's not what I meant. I don't say it, because she knows it isn't what I meant, and she said it anyway, gently, deliberately, to give us both somewhere to land.
That's the thing about her. She always gives us somewhere to land.
She starts the car.
And for the first time in six years, I don't feel alone inside the thing I've been carrying.
I don't know what to do with that.
I know I'm not going to stop thinking about it.