The door closes behind her with a sound that is perfectly ordinary and seems, in the silence of the house, very loud.
Baxter walks to the door and sits in front of it, looking back at me with an expression I choose not to interpret.
I rinse both mugs in the sink and watch the water run. The bed is still by the window. I leave it there.
I stand in the quiet kitchen and let the weekend settle around me like sediment. What it has proved, with uncomfortableclarity, is that I am more attached to Tessa than I intended to be. I know how situations like this resolve. I have the data. I have, in fact, built an entire company on the predictive validity of that data.
It isn't that I'm not choosing her.
I'm choosing not to put myself in the path of something I already know the ending to.
I dry my hands on the dish towel and hang it back on the oven handle, precisely where it belongs, and tell myself that keeping a little more distance is the only sensible option.
Baxter doesn't move from the door.
