Page 61 of Open Road

Then he kisses me.

Not a small kiss. Not careful, abbreviated, or the kind that keeps one eye on the surroundings. The full, deliberate kind, his hand warm at my waist, morning stubble, coffee, and the particular certainty of a man who has decided and doesn’t revisit his decisions.

Behind us, Rose makes a sound.

We separate. I turn.

She’s standing in the doorway with Mr. Rabbit in the crook of her arm and a piece of toast in her free hand, watching us with enormous eyes. Then her face breaks open into a laugh. It’s the full one, the one I’d bottle and keep if I could, unguarded, delighted, the laugh of a child who has encountered something she finds completely and specifically hilarious.

“You kissed Mom,” Rose tells Roam, with the gravity of a witness reporting to the court.

“Appears so,” he says.

Rose looks at me. Her expression has shifted into something more considered now. It’s the thinking face, the one she makes when she’s processing something that requires more of her. She looks back at Roam, then back at me. “Where’s my dad?”

The morning holds the question.

Gerald lifts his head from the grass.

“Dad isn’t part of our picture anymore,” I say. The words come out steady and honest, in the way she deserves honesty, shaped for her age without being so small as to become a lie. “It’s going to be you, me, and Roam from now on.” I watch her face. “Is that okay?”

Rose considers it.

She has her father’s stubbornness. I used to think about this with dread, the way the wrong things got inherited, the way she’d look up at me sometimes with that particular set to her jaw, and I’d see Craig’s face under it and feel the cold of it. I don’t see it that way now. The stubbornness is hers. She picked it up and made it her own thing, pointed it in her own direction, and she’s using it right now to think seriously about a serious question because she understands, on whatever frequency three-year-olds operate on, that it deserves her actual attention.

She looks at Roam.

He looks back at her. There’s no performance or any effort to influence the answer. He’s giving her the same eyes he gives everything—flat, patient, present, a mountain waiting for a question, content to wait as long as the question takes.

Rose nods.

One nod.

Definitive.

The motion of a person who has run the calculation and arrived at a conclusion they’re prepared to stand behind. Thenshe looks at me with the absolute focus of a child who has resolved one matter and moved cleanly to the next.

“Can I have Devil’s hidden cookies?”

The laugh comes up before I can manage it. Roam makes a sound beside me, low, the almost-sound he makes when something catches him, and he hasn’t decided yet whether to let it be funny.

“Have you asked Devil?” I ask.

Rose tips her head. The question does not merit a response. She has known about the hidden cookies since approximately her second day in this compound because Rose knows where everything is, always, in every building she occupies, and the back of Devil’s cabinet is not a mystery to a child who has been conducting a thorough survey of this kitchen since the morning she woke up on this side of a gate.

“Let me find Devil, and I’ll ask her,” I tell her.

“She’ll say yes,” Rose says with complete confidence. She turns and goes back inside with her toast, Mr. Rabbit swinging from the crook of her arm. Gerald moves away from me with the unhurried dedication he brings to all Rose-related activities and sits at the back door waiting for her.

The yard is quiet.

Roam is looking at the door she went through. There is something in his face, the almost-expression, the one I’ve been learning to read in the space between what he shows and what he holds back. Rose handed him something in that yard this morning with one nod and no ceremony, the same way she handed him the purple drawing before breakfast, the same way she wrapped both hands around his thumb on a moving bike at three in the morning on a dark highway.

She decided.

Rose has decided since the first night, since the highway and Mr. Rabbit, and the way she took his thumb and went to sleep on his chest without asking anyone’s permission.

He looks at me. The something in his face is still there.