"Sorry," he says, not sounding particularly sorry.
"It’s fine." I move left, give him space on the right, and we work in opposite directions for a moment until I need the cupboard he's just closed, and I have to wait, a bag of pasta in my hands, while he shifts.
He looks at me. He knows I'm waiting. He takes a small step back, and I step forward, and there are about four inches between us as I open the door, and I am concentrating very hard on the shelf in front of me.
"You know there's a perfectly good cupboard on the other side," he says.
"This one's at the right height."
I hear something in his exhale that might be amusement.
We find a rhythm eventually. He takes the high cupboards, I take the lower ones, and we stop crossing paths so much, but the kitchen is still only a kitchen, and he is still very much the size he is, and every time I turn around, he is closer than I expect. Not doing anything. Just there. Just present.
My heart hasn't received the update that we are simply putting away groceries.
When the bags are empty, he folds them and sets them under the sink and leans back against the counter with his arms loosely folded. I lean against the opposite one. Three feet of space between us. In this kitchen, it feels like almost nothing.
"I'll take the couch," he says.
"You don't have to…"
"I'll take the couch, Aoife."
I don't argue.
I walk through the house after he leaves the kitchen. Check the exits, the back bolt, the latch on the window I already heard him test. Then I sit in one of the chairs in the sitting room and breathe. In, out.
We're alive. We're here. Nobody is trying to kill us right at this moment.
I add the chair to my count. Steady on all four legs. Everything in here is functional and fine. Small mercies.
The next morning, he's already up when I wake. I hear him before I see him, the low sound of the kettle, the small movements of someone trying not to make noise. I lie still for a moment listening to it, this ordinary domestic sound, and something about it settles in my chest in a way I don't entirely examine.
He's at the kitchen table when I come out, a mug in front of him, looking out at the strip of gray sky through the window. He looks better than yesterday. Still pale, still careful in how he moves, but the worst of it has passed. His eyes aren't glassy anymore. He's here.
I find myself a mug.
"You don't have to keep doing that," he says. Not unkindly.
"Making tea?"
"Watching me."
I turn around. He's looking at me now, and there's something careful in it, something self-conscious. Like he's waiting for me to flinch from what he showed me during those three days.
"I'm not watching you," I say. "I'm making tea because I want tea."
He looks at me for a moment longer, then back at the window.
I make my tea.
On the fourth day, I get a pack of pasta out of the cupboard and a tin of chopped tomatoes, and I make something that's technically a meal. It's not good. The pasta is the wrong shape for the sauce, and I put too much dried basil in it, and William stares at his bowl for a moment before he says, very seriously, "What did the pasta do to you?"
I laugh. It comes out sharp and surprised, and then it keeps going for longer than it should, and when I finally stop, I realize my eyes are stinging.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't apologize for laughing." He's watching me again. "You don't do it much."
