He slept until almost eleven, and I let him. I'd been up since seven doing the things that needed doing — grocery run, washing the spare set of sheets I'd put on the bed, makingsure the heating was set right because the coast got cold in the evenings and the last thing he needed was to wake up shivering. When he finally appeared in the kitchen doorway in yesterday's sweats with his hair going six directions, I had eggs going on the stovetop and didn't comment on any of it.
“Morning,” I said.
“What time is it?”
“Doesn't matter. Sit down.”
He pulled out a stool at the counter and sat, and I slid a coffee across to him without being asked. He wrapped both hands around the mug and drank half of it in silence while I finished the eggs, and then I put a plate down in front of him and sat across from him with my own.
He looked at the eggs. Then at me. “You cooked.”
“That's what happens when there's a kitchen. I've seen your fridge at your apartment. There's never any food in it. Go ahead and eat.”
He ate, and didn't make a thing of it, which was the right call. I wasn't going to tell him I'd stood in the grocery store for twenty minutes trying to remember what I'd seen in his fridge the few times I'd been to his apartment, what he actually liked versus what he bought because it was cheap. I'd probably gotten half of it wrong. He ate everything on the plate without complaint.
After breakfast he sat on the couch with his coffee and I sat in the armchair across from him, and we didn't fill the silence with anything. The ocean moved outside the windows. He'd found one of the books from the shelf beside the fireplace at some point, an old thriller with a cracked spine, and he read about four pages and then set it down and just looked at the water instead.
“You're staring at me,” he said, without turning around.
“I'm looking at the ocean.”
“I'm between you and the ocean.”
“Coincidence.”
He turned his head and looked at me with the dry, tired version of that expression I'd learned to read as fond. “You can relax, Rook. I'm not going to do anything.”
“I know that.”
“You look like you're expecting me to spontaneously combust.”
“I don't look like that.”
“You're sitting on the absolute front edge of that chair.” He raised an eyebrow. “You've been up since before I woke up and you've barely sat down. I can see you calculating whether I've eaten enough and slept enough and breathed enough and it's very sweet but also a little bit intense.”
I leaned back in the chair. Made myself take up the full seat instead of perching like I was ready to move at half a second's notice.
“Better?” I asked.
“Marginally.” He turned back to the window. After a pause: “Thank you. For all of it. Not just today.”
I didn't say anything, because I didn't have words that were big enough and small enough at the same time, so I just sat there and let him have the acknowledgement and hoped he could feel the weight of what I meant behind it.
By the secondevening we'd found a rhythm.
He slept a lot, which I'd expected. Not the collapsed, unconscious sleep of the hospital, but long stretches of genuine rest in the late morning and again for an hour or two in the afternoon, and I worked around them without comment. When he was awake we talked, or didn't, and both felt easy.
He asked me things I hadn't been asked in a long time. Not about hockey, not about the playoffs or the team or anything that lived in my public life. He asked me what I listened to when I was on the ice at dawn before anyone else got there, what I'd wanted to be before hockey made the decision for me, what the worst injury I'd had was and whether I'd been scared. He asked about my parents in the way he always had, with genuine warmth and a kind of wistful affection that told me he'd liked them and still remembered liking them.
I asked him things too. About the band and how they'd started, about the years between graduation and finding the coast again, about Poppy's first drum lesson and what Micah was studying and whether Talia had ever forgiven him for anything in particular or just held it indefinitely as tactical leverage.
“Both,” he said, and the laugh that came with it was the most unguarded thing he'd produced since I'd picked him up from the hospital. “She holds everything. She's an archive. She could tell me exactly what I said on the seventeenth of March three years ago and whether it was an apology or just an acknowledgement and why the distinction mattered.”
“She sounds terrifying.”
“She's the best person I know.” He said it simply, with the particular flatness of total truth. “After everything. The things she had to watch me go through, the things I put her through. She never once left.”
I held that for a second. “Neither did Poppy. Or Micah.”
