My drawing table was clean for the first time in weeks.
I’d submitted the last batch of Barley illustrations two days ago, and my editor had sent back a note that read,These are stunning, Kayla. Exactly what we needed. Sit tight for review notes.Which meant I was in the strange, weightless space between finishing something and waiting to hear whether the world agreed it was finished.
The house had that particular calm that settled in when a deadline stopped breathing down your neck.
Ben and I had slept together three nights ago. I still wasn’t used to that sentence, even inside my own head. We hadn’t talked about what it meant or where it was going. We’d had one night and one quiet Saturday morning sitting on his front step with our shoulders touching, saying nothing, and that was the entire history of us. I was letting it be enough for now.
William was at the fence gap. As if he would be anywhere else.
I watched from the kitchen window while I waited for the kettle. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the opening. His library book was open in his lap, and he was reading aloud in the earnest, slightly halting cadence of a first grader who took storytelling seriously. On the other side, Jolly lay belly-down with his nose pushed through the gap, his eyes half closed, his tail sweeping the ground in slow, contented arcs.
This wasn’t the vigil from earlier weeks. Not the anxious crouching or the secret games or the tense stillness I’d misread as withdrawal. William was settled in. Comfortable. He’d moved past the novelty of having a friend on the other side of the fence and into the easy rhythm of two creatures who’d decided they belonged to each other.
Jolly’s ear twitched when William turned a page. William reached through the gap and scratched behind it without looking up from his book. The gesture was automatic. Routine.
I watched my kid be a kid. Then I poured my tea and let them be.
By the time I’d gotten William bathed, into his pajamas, and through two chapters of his new police dog book, the light had gone gold and then gray outside his bedroom window. William’s eyes were doing that slow blink where the lids stayed closed a beat longer each time.
“Can Jolly hear me when I read to him?” His voice was thick with sleep.
“I think so. Dogs have very good ears.”
“Better than people ears?”
“Much better.”
He turned this over. “Then he heard the whole story today. Even the quiet parts.”
“I’m sure he did.”
His eyes closed. I waited until his breathing deepened, then pulled the covers up over his shoulder and left the door cracked how he liked it.
The knock came at a little past eight.
I opened the front door, and Ben was on the porch, hands in the pockets of his jacket, the porch light highlighting part of his face.
“Hey.”
“Hey, you. Come in.”
He stepped inside and stood in the entryway the way he had every time he’d been here. Not uncertain. Aware. Taking in the space with that quiet attention he brought to everything, recalibrating the room in some way I couldn’t see but could feel. The house was different with him in it. The air pressure shifted. I was conscious of where my body was in relation to his, where my hands were, how close we were standing.
Two people who had slept together once and hadn’t figured out what they were yet. Not ease. Awareness. The charged quality of something that was still a beginning and knew it.
“William’s asleep?”
I nodded. “Just went down. Tea?”
“I’m good. Donovan would figure it out and somehow tease me all the way from Denver.”
He followed me into the kitchen. I leaned against the counter with my mug. He took the spot across from me, near the fridge with William’s crayon drawing of himself and Jolly still taped to the door. Ben glanced at it. His jaw softened.
“I noticed Donovan’s vehicle hasn’t been around,” I said. “Did he head out?”
“Yesterday morning. Back to Denver. Citadel’s got work waiting for him.”
“So it’s just you now.”
