“Not our best Monday, huh?” she asked Leo.
He lifted his chin a little higher on her knee and looked at her like he had been told a secret. His eyes were too much. She gave him the last bit of shell and listened to his careful crunches until the sound finished and the apartment was quiet again.
Her phone rang from the coffee table. It had been quiet all afternoon, which she had told herself was a good sign. The screen flashed once. Jamie. Erin looked away, then looked back as if the screen itself had tugged her. The call ended. A text followed that she didn’t read. Another call began.
She reached for the phone and stopped with her hand hovering over it. The metal frame threw a narrow strip of light across her fingertips. She closedher hand into a fist and set it on her thigh.
If she answered, Jamie would speak and the ground would tilt. That was how it always felt when Jamie decided to be gentle. It was worse than when she was sharp. Erin didn’t trust herself with gentle. She didn’t trust herself to hear an apology or an explanation or anything that sounded like hope. She had not earned any of that. She had been careless with her own rules. She had been careless with Jamie.
The call ended. The apartment returned to quiet. Leo shifted and sighed like an old man. Erin rubbed the fur between his eyes with her knuckle.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “We are fine.”
Her voice rasped on the last word. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“We are fine.”
The knock came while her final word was still in the room. It was not a loud knock. It was the kind of knock a person used when they weren’t sure if they should be there. Erin went still, hand paused on Leo’s head. She felt him tense under her palm, not with fear, only alertness. He turned his face toward the door and listened like he had been trained to this very purpose.
A second knock followed, then a third. Erin looked at the phone and saw no delivery notice. No neighbor text. No building alert. The phone buzzed once like it had a thought and then it went still.
“Erin?”
Her name arrived through the door and into her chest. The voice was easy to know. She had no trouble placing it even when it softened like that. She closed her eyes and opened them again. The apartment had not changed.
Leo stood and shook out his coat. He trotted to the door and wagged at the exact angle that suggested moral certainty.
“Traitor,” Erin said, but the word didn’t have heat.
Her body moved before her mind endorsed the plan. She stood on stiff legs and wiped her hands on her joggers like there was something to clean. She caught her reflection in the dark TV screen and decided not to look a second time. She took two steps and then two more. Her heart worked like it was new to the job. She told herself she could ignore the door and wait it out. She told herself it would be kind to both of them to pretend she was not home.
Another knock. Softer. Not a rhythm of impatience. A rhythm ofplease.
“Please,” Jamie said through the wood. “Will you let me talk to you?”
Erin put her hand flat on the door and felt the faint vibration of a city that kept moving whether people inside their apartments wanted it to or not. She let her forehead rest there too. The cool paint was steady. She stayed like that and let thirty seconds pass. Then thirty more. Leo sat at her feet so close that his shoulder touched her ankle. He pressed closer as if to remind her that her body had weight and her choices did too.
In that minute she tried on three versions of tomorrow. In the first she didn’t open the door, and Jamie left, and the next time they saw each other it would be under fluorescent lights where Erin knew exactly how to keep her voice even. In the second she opened the door and told Jamie she was right to say she couldn’t, and the conversation would be clean and boring, and then Erin would close the door and feel like a hallway without pictures. In the third she opened the door and didn’t know what would happen next, which was the same as saying anything could happen. That was the part that made her breath go thin.
She thought of the rain on Friday night, the way it had plastered hair to skin and softened edges that didn’t need softening. She thought of her own hand raised in the wet air, hanging there longer than it should have. She thought of Jamie’s face when she stepped back and the way regret can look like fear if you glance at it wrong.
Leo bumped her ankle again. He didn’t whine. He never did when she needed him to be a wall.
“All right,” she whispered. She didn’t know which future she had chosen.
She lifted the chain. She turned the deadbolt. The metal sounded bright in the small entryway. She wrapped her fingers around the knob and counted to four.
Then she opened the door.
Twenty
Rain blurred the hallway window into a smear of city lights. Water ran off the awning and still found the back of Jamie’s neck, cold as a warning. Her jacket had given up pretending it was waterproof. She knocked anyway, light at first, then harder because the quiet felt like it might swallow her whole.
“Erin?” Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again. “It’s me.”
For a long breath nothing happened. Jamie pressed her palm to the wood and felt only the thud of her own pulse. She heard a soft skitter of nails on the other side, then stillness. When the deadbolt finally slid, her breath caught like she’d been running.
The door opened four inches, then six. Erin stood there with her hand on the edge, hoodie strings loose, Leo tucked to her calf like he was holding her up. She looked tired in the way that doesn’t show until you’re very close. Eyes rimmed. Shoulders curled in. Jamie felt guilt climb straight up her throat.
