3. Rye
RYE
She’s home.
I didn’t tell her about the cameras.
I wasn’t going to tell her about the cameras at table twelve in a restaurant where she could stand up and walk away and have a version of this story she could tell people.
The cameras are a different conversation.
The cameras are the conversation that happens when she already knows the rest of it and has decided to stay anyway, because the cameras are the thing a person can only receive in the right context.
She took the information I gave her the way she takes most things—quietly, precisely, reading it in real time.
Asking the questions that needed asking.
Then she paid for her half of the drinks (she wouldn’t let me get it, which tells me she’s maintaining the option to be angry) and she drove home and now she’s standing at the kitchen sink not drinking water.
She hasn’t showered.
It’s been two hours and she hasn’t showered.
I know what that means, because I know everything about how she moves through her apartment.
Post-shower Aster has damp hair pulled to one side and a set to her shoulders that says the day’s been put away.
She doesn’t have that set. She’s still carrying everything.
She’s still carrying me.
I put that there. An hour and forty minutes ago, a parking lot eight blocks from here—her back against the driver’s side door, the overhead light catching her face, her saying stop while her hips moved against me and her hands stayed in my shirt.
Eight years: watching her sleep, watching her sign the papers, watching her rebuild herself through the spring.
It ends with her coming against the side of her car with my name in her mouth and her nails in my shoulders.
She walked back into the restaurant full of me and asked coherent questions for forty minutes.
That’s the woman I’ve been watching for eight years. I knew her. I still wasn’t prepared.
My cock is hard right now—not from watching, though I’ve come to the footage more nights than she’ll ever know.
From memory. An hour ago. The burn of finally having her, the sounds she made when words stopped working, the way she said my name when it mattered.
I’ve run that moment in this car and in the server room and in every quiet place I’ve ever had to myself.
The real thing: nothing I imagined was adequate.
The weight of her. The heat. The parking lot silent around us while she shook.
I’m in my car outside her building. I’ve been here for twenty-three minutes. I told myself I was going to give her the night—let her process, let the information settle, let her decide in the morning what she does with it. I’ve been patient for eight years. One night shouldn’t be a problem.
The live feed is on my phone. She sets the water glass down. Walks to the kitchen table. Sits in the left chair—her chair, always her chair—and puts both hands flat on the table and stares at them.
She shifts in the chair.
I watch her shift and I know—the way I know everything about how her body works, every tell documented across years of footage—exactly what that small shift means. What she’s still feeling. The proof of the parking lot.
My patience, which has held for eight years, lasts approximately four more minutes.
I have the key that was cut from Connor’s copy. I’ve had it for four years. I’ve used it once—that Tuesday in April, two weeks post-divorce, when I stood in her kitchen for twenty minutes and put my hand on her chair.
I let myself in. Lock the door behind me.
The living room angle is different in person. I’ve watched her from this approximate position—hallway to doorway, couch in the left third of the frame—for three years. In the footage it’s flat. A woman and a room, flattened to a single fixed lens.
In person: the scale of her. The weight of the air in an apartment where someone is breathing. The navy dress dark against the couch cushions. Her hair loose.
She hasn’t heard me.
She’s on the couch with her feet tucked under her and she’s doing what I’ve watched her do a hundred times—turned inward, still carrying everything, not yet filed.
I know this stillness. I have it time-stamped across three years of footage.
The set of her shoulders, the jaw, the way her hands rest in her lap when she’s working something through and hasn’t arrived at the answer.
From the doorway, four feet away, that jaw is devastating.
I don’t move. I give her the moment—give myself the moment—because I have waited eight years for this angle in this room without a lens between us, and I am not going to rush it.
Then her head comes up.
Not toward me—toward the window, some animal alertness, the air having shifted without her knowing how. She goes still in a different way. Not processing. Listening.
She turns.
The sound she makes is short and sharp and not a word.
Her feet come off the couch. She gets halfway to standing before she registers that it’s me.
I watch the sequence move across her face: fear, then the recalibration, then something more complicated—fear and relief and want all at once, none of them winning.
I let her have the moment. I don’t move. I stand in the doorway where the camera angle would be and I watch her decide what to do with what she’s feeling.
“I knew you’d come back,” she says.
A beat too late. I heard the fear first. She knows I heard it—it’s there too, in the set of her shoulders, the way she’s holding her voice steady at the exact pitch of composure. She’s giving me the version where she was always in control of this moment.
I’m going to let her have it.
She’s looking at me the way she looked at me at table twelve—working it, checking her own responses against what she thinks she should be feeling.
“How did you get in?”
“Key.”
“Connor’s key.”
“He left a copy on the counter in 2022. He never noticed it was gone.”
She absorbs this. “How many times have you been in here?”
“Twice.” I hold her gaze. “The night I installed the—” I stop. Not yet. “Once. After the divorce finalized.”
“What did you do?”
“Put my hand on your kitchen chair. Left.”
Silence. She’s studying me, careful. I know what she’s doing—she’s measuring my answers against the version of events she’s been constructing since the restaurant, checking for gaps, for things that don’t align.
“You should leave,” she says.
“Tell me to mean it.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Two seconds. Three.
She doesn’t tell me to mean it.
I cross the room and sit beside her on the couch—not touching, close enough that she can feel the heat of me—and she turns toward me the way she turns toward things she’s still deciding about. Her shoulder almost touching mine.
“Eight years,” she says. “You’ve been?—”
“Watching.” The word lands between us. Clean. I don’t soften it.
“From where?”
“Everywhere you went. And here.” I pause. “The cameras are still here. They’re the part I need to tell you tomorrow.”
She makes a sound. “The cameras.”
“Tomorrow. I’ll show you everything.” I look at her profile—the jaw, the set of her shoulders, the small tension she carries between her eyes when she’s deciding something difficult.
I know that expression. I have it on file from a hundred different nights.
In person it’s different. In person it’s close enough to do something about. “Tonight I just want to be here.”
She turns her head. We’re close enough now that turning her head means she’s looking at me from a foot away, which means she can see whatever is on my face and I’ve stopped trying to be careful about it.
“You built me a man who was everything I actually wanted,” she says.
“I built you myself.”
“You manipulated me into telling you things I’ve never told anyone.”
“I gave you a space to say the true thing. You said it.” My eyes stay on hers. “You don’t want to take it back.”
She says nothing. Which is not silence. It’s everything.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this,” she says finally.
“You don’t have to do anything.” My hand finds the back of her neck—slow, giving her time to move away.
She doesn’t move away. Her eyes close. “You’ve been carrying me for two hours.
I know because I was watching.” The back of her neck under my hand, warm, and she makes a small sound that isn’t language. “I can feel it in how you’re sitting.”
“Stop knowing things about me.”
“I can’t.” I lean in. My mouth on the side of her neck, her hair against my face, the parking lot still on her skin—something that belongs to both of us now. “I’ve been doing it for eight years. I can’t stop.”
“Rye—”
“I know.” My other hand finds her waist. She’s already turned toward me, her knee coming up, her body doing the thing it did in the parking lot—making decisions before her mind catches up. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“What am I going to say?”
“That this is too fast. That you don’t know me. That you just got out of an eight-year marriage.” My mouth finds the curve of her shoulder. “All of those things are true.”
“And?”
“And you’re not asking me to stop.”
She isn’t asking me to stop. Her hands find my shirt—same grip as the parking lot, twisted in the fabric, pulling.
I move over her. She lies back into the couch cushions and looks up at me with the expression I’ve been watching on camera for eight years.
Different up close. Devastatingly different.
She’s real and present, looking at me like she’s recognizing something she didn’t know she was missing.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh. “You know what I want. Apparently you’ve known for years.”
“Say it.”
Her hands pull harder on my shirt. “I want you to stop asking and do something about it.”
I do something about it.