Ross listens the way he does everything: completely, without performing it.
When I stop talking, the silence doesn't feel like an absence. It feels like he's waiting until he has the right thing.
"Three years ago I was working a platform in the North Sea," he says finally. "Sixteen months into the posting. My closest friend on that rig was a man named Pete Galloway. Funny, loud, the kind of person who could get anyone talking. We'd worked together long enough that I trusted him without thinking about it." He stops. Picks up his coffee. "There was an explosion in the lower deck. Fire suppression failure. Pete was working down there."
He doesn't say what happened next.
"I pulled him out," he says. "That's the part people always want to know — did I try?I did.It wasn't enough." A pause. "The part nobody asks about is the six months after. What it does to you when the person you trusted to always be there isn't there anymore. When you've built a whole way of working, a whole life on a platform, around the assumption that he's in it with you."
The kitchen is quiet.
"It's not the same as what you went through," he says. "What he did to you is a different thing. But the trusting completely — and then having to figure out what you do after."
"Yeah," I say. "The shape of it."
We work until dark. The rewire session runs long — a junction box in the utility room that needs more time than either of us planned — and by the time he's packing up, the kitchen light is the only warm thing in the house. He snaps his toolbag shut and straightens and turns, and I'm right there because I'd come to tell him I'd made tea, and the distance between us is about eighteen inches and then it isn't.
He goes still. I go still.
He looks at me the way he looked at that junction box in the crawlspace — like he's taking a reading. Like he needs to know exactly what he's working with before he touches anything.
Then he raises one hand and puts his thumb along my cheekbone. Just that. Just his thumb, slow and deliberate, tracing the line of it. His eyes on my face. Not my mouth — my eyes, the whole time, like he's asking something that doesn't have words.
I don't move. I don't breathe particularly well.
He takes his hand back.
"Lock up," he says. And he goes.
I stand in the kitchen for a full minute after his truck pulls out. The spot where his thumb was is still warm. I press two fingers to my own cheekbone like I'm checking a circuit, which is possibly the most Celeste thing I've ever done, and then I make tea I don't drink and sit at my desk and think about the shape ofhis hand and the fact that he looked at my eyes, not my mouth, and what the difference means.
He trusted someone completely and it cost him everything. So did I. We've both been careful since then. We're both being careful right now.
four
Ross
Shedoesn'tanswerwhenI knock.
Lights on. Her truck in the driveway. I try the door.
It opens.
She's face-down on her desk, arms folded under her head, laptop open beside her. Three empty coffee mugs in a line. Her notes spread across every inch of the desk — printed maps, handwritten data, index cards pinned in clusters.
I step back and look at the desk. She's been working straight through — the coffee mugs, the notes, the map on the wall with new pins up near the north ridge. She's been driving out to record data and coming home and working through the night.
I fill a glass of water and put it on the desk. Then I go to the kitchen. There's not much — the week's groceries are running low. Eggs, bread, half a block of cheese. I make eggs and toast and bring the plate to the desk.
The smell wakes her.
She sits up slowly, hair flattened on one side, eyes not quite tracking.
"I made food," I say.
She looks at the plate. At me. At the plate.
"What time is it?”
