I looked at her.
“You went somewhere.”
“Logistics,” I said. “Just thinking about logistics.”
She studied me for a moment with the sharp eyes of a woman who’d known me since the third grade and was therefore difficult to fool. Then she appeared to decide to let it go, which I was grateful for, and reached for another slice of pizza.
“Okay,” she said. “We move in together. We keep up appearances. We figure out the annulment when—“ She stopped. “When things settle down.”
When things settled down. When Gus came home and got better, or didn’t. When the plan ran its course. When we ended.
“Yeah,” I said. “When things settle down.”
We ate the rest of the pizza in the comfortable quiet that had always lived between us, the familiar rhythm of two people who understood how to share a space. It was fine. It was exactly what it had always been.
Except that it wasn’t. I was the only one sitting with that. I’d made myself a promise, and I intended to keep it.
I looked at the ring on her finger and looked away.
April. Lease through April.
That was the plan.
ELEVEN
ELLIE
The logistics of moving Daniel Costello into my house took the better part of a Saturday and two trucks.
His own truck, which did most of the heavy lifting, and Cord’s, which was recruited for the second run when it became apparent that Daniel’s definition of traveling light was relative and had more to do with not being sentimental about things than with actually not owning much. He brought furniture. Not a lot, but some. The pieces that were his that he’d accumulated over years of living alone with the practical selectiveness of a man who only kept what worked. A good armchair. A solid bookshelf. The ancient and apparently sacred cast-iron skillet that he carried into my kitchen with the careful reverence of a man installing something load-bearing.
“I need a drawer,” he said.
“You have a drawer. You have three.” The little dresser in his room wasn’t huge, but it was something.
“For my coffee situation.”
I looked at the burr grinder and the pour-over equipment he was unpacking onto my counter. “Daniel. That’s not a drawer situation. That’s a counter situation.”
“I can work with counter.”
Cord, who’d been ferrying boxes from the truck with smirk that told me he found the entire enterprise deeply entertaining, set a box down on the kitchen table and looked around with an air of satisfaction. “This is very domestic,” he said.
“Thank you, Cord,” I said.
“Very married.”
“Cord.”
“I’m just saying it looks right is all.” He held up both hands in innocence and went back out for another box.
It took until early afternoon to get everything inside and distributed. The guest bedroom—the tiny one downstairs that I’d cleared out and put fresh sheets on and tried hard not to overthink—absorbed Daniel’s clothes and his nightstand and the bookshelf, which fit against the far wall like it had always been there. We put his armchair in the living room, angled toward the television, and within twenty minutes Chairman Meow claimed it, which Daniel seemed to take as a compliment.
Cord left with a generous slice of the coffee cake I’d made that morning. Then it was just the two of us in the house, which was hardly an unusual occurrence. And yet, it felt entirely different now.
We spent the rest of the afternoon doing ordinary things, which was its own kind of disorienting. I did inventory paperwork at the kitchen table while Daniel finished setting up his coffee station with the focused attention of a man calibrating something important. Grandpa called at two, sounding more like himself than he had since before the hospital. Full of opinions about the weather, a documentary he’d watched, and a running update on his ongoing rummy war with Sandra, which had escalated to a best-of-seven series.
“He sounds good,” Daniel said after I’d hung up.
