She sets the mug down. "Troy and I were together. In Toronto. Two years." She says it flat, like something she's recited before and stopped expecting to feel. "He's very good at knowing when someone's almost out of options."
I set the bag down.
She turns around then. Eyes dry, chin up, looking like someone who has been underestimated by this particular person before and is tired of it, and is also, underneath all of that, not nearly as steady as she's standing.
"I'm not almost out of options," she says. Like she's telling herself as much as me.
"No," I say. "You're not."
She looks at me for a long moment. Something in her face shifts — not relief exactly. More like someone who braced for an argument and didn't get one and doesn't quite know what to do with the space that leaves.
Rivet gets up from the radiator and walks to Maple and sits on her foot. Maple looks down at her. Then back at me. The corner of her mouth moves.
"She does that when she thinks someone needs it," I say.
"Does it work?"
"Usually."
She looks down at Rivet again and some of the held-together quality in her shoulders eases, just slightly, just enough. Her hand drops to Rivet's head. Rivet leans into it and closes her eyes with the satisfaction of a dog whose plan is coming together.
I should go. The job is done, she's told me what she needed to tell me, and anything else I do right now is going to be too much in the wrong direction.
I pick up my bag. I go to the door.
"Nash." Quieter this time.
"Yeah."
A pause. "The back parlour." She's looking at the window again, the mountain going dark behind the glass. "I didn't step away because I didn't want to."
I stand in her kitchen doorway with the cold coming in and I don't say anything because there isn't anything to say that wouldn't be too much too fast.
I drive home in the dark. Rivet rides with her nose against the glass the whole way, watching the road behind us, and I let her, because one of us should.
I don't sleep that night either. But it's a different kind of not sleeping — less like a man who went too far, more like a man who knows exactly where he's going and is trying to be patient about getting there.
I'm stubborn. But for her, I’ll make an exception.
five
Maple
Theboilerisfine.I checked.
I'm standing at the kitchen window in my vintage nightgown, looking at the mountain and thinking about Monday. He said Monday. It's been four days since Troy left and four days since Nash stood in my doorway and said you're not almost out of options like it was the simplest fact in the world, and I have been waiting with a patience I fundamentally do not possess.
He kissed me in the back parlour and I stepped away like a coward. I have been regretting it in a very specific and physical way ever since.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Look at the mountain for thirty seconds like it's going to offer an opinion.
Pick it back up.
He answers on the second ring.
"Brennan."
"It's Maple." A pause. "I think there's something wrong with the boiler."
