I made eggs. Terrible, as usual. Ate them standing at the island because sitting at the table felt like agreeing the chair across from me would stay empty.
My phone was on the counter. I didn’t check it.
That was the new discipline—not the bourbon, not the work. The phone. I’d sent the Shaw report the day she left. The military contract notifications would’ve hit the SEAS admin system last week. Cheryl confirmed the autonomy documents were couriered Thursday. And the compass—Keiko’s tracking said delivered yesterday.
Four things. Four chances to reach for my phone and follow up. Confirm receipt. Ask if she’d opened them. Ask if she understood.
I hadn’t.
Because that was the whole point, and if I had to explain the point, I’d already missed it.
So, I stood in my clean kitchen eating bad eggs and not checking my phone. The mountains through the windows were doing that thing they did in late morning where the light hit the snowline and everything looked like it had been painted by someone showing off. Charlie would’ve said something about the light. Something specific—wavelength or angle or the way snow crystals fracture differently at altitude. Something I’d pretend to understand and then think about for hours afterward.
I rinsed my plate. Set it in the rack. Wiped the counter a fourth time.
The compass was gone. That was the thing I kept circling back to. For weeks it had sat on my nightstand—first as a broken thing I didn’t know how to fix, then as a fixed thing I didn’t know how to give, then as an absence. A small empty circle in the dust where something important used to be. I’d packed it in Portlandtissue paper and sent it to Denver and now there was just the dust circle, and I didn’t wipe that. Couldn’t.
Shane called at noon.I let it ring twice before answering because answering on the first ring had become a tell.
“You eating?”
“Eggs.”
“You can’t cook eggs, Ash.”
“I’m aware.”
A pause. Shane’s pauses were architectural—they had weight-bearing function. This one was holding up whatever he wanted to say next.
“Mom wants to know if you’re coming to dinner Sunday.”
“Is that what Mom wants to know, or is that what you want to know wrapped in Mom?”
“Both.” He didn’t even hesitate. “You sound better.”
“I sound like a person who cleaned his house four times and ate eggs he can’t cook.”
“Yeah.” I could hear him smiling. “That’s what better sounds like on you.”
After we hung up, I stood on the back deck with coffee that had gone lukewarm. The air smelled like pine and the particular mineral sharpness that meant the snow was melting somewhere higher up. Spring was doing its slow patient thing—showing up an inch at a time, not asking permission.
I thought about what Shane had said on the kitchen floor that night. That I wasn’t God. That I was responsible for what I did with the guilt. I’d been turning it over for eleven days, wearing the edges smooth, and I still didn’t have an answer. But I had something adjacent to an answer, which was this: I was standingon my deck with bad coffee, and I wasn’t making a plan. I wasn’t fixing anything. I was just standing here.
It was the most terrifying thing I’d done in my adult life, and that included the morning I’d signed those military contracts with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
The soundof tires on gravel.
I knew the sound of every car that used that road. Delivery trucks sat heavier—the gravel crunched low and even. Jax’s SUV had a particular aggressive bite. Shane’s Tesla barely registered.
This was a Range Rover. Her Range Rover. The one I’d had detailed and returned to her Denver apartment through Reid, because even in the middle of falling apart I couldn’t stop solving problems nobody asked me to solve.
I set down the coffee.
I did not go to the window. I did not open the door. I stood in my kitchen with my hands at my sides and waited while every cell in my body was screaming at me to move, to go, to do something—open the door, walk outside, meet her halfway. Manage the moment.
I stayed where I was.
The car door closed. One set of footsteps on the gravel—just hers, no one else. She’d driven herself. The footsteps paused at the base of the porch steps. Started again. Crossed the deck.
