Page 46 of Power Play

“He’s considerate,” I said. “He’s direct about what he needs. He says thank you when he means it and doesn’t when he doesn’t. Those are professional observations.”

“They’re accurate,” Maren said, “and you have made eleven of them to me since August, and not one of them has been about how the man skates.” She turned her face to the red rock. “I’m going to ask you the actual question one time. Then I’ll never ask it again. Are you in trouble?”

I let the silence run until not answering became the answer. I had my thumbnail against the rim of the mug, pressing until it squeaked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Okay.” Maren picked up her cup. “That’s the first true thing you have said to me about it since you moved in.”

She paid the check and on the way to the car said one more thing about the cat.

“You know that cat’s not going to sit there, right? My cousin fosters. They go in days, not weeks, and that one’s already been up six. Whatever’s keeping her there is going to stop keeping her there.”

“He knows that,” I said. “He does the math on everything, Maren. He knows to the day.”

Maren watched me for slightly too long. “You know him pretty well,” she said.

I didn’t answer that, and she let me not answer it, which was worse than if she’d pushed.

The sentence I’d nearly said to her, right before I listed his professional qualities instead, was it’s the best part of my day. I’d stopped because a sentence said out loud became a fact, and I had a checking account that had only started climbing in August, every dollar of it his, a job I was good at, a little girl who counted her banana, and a bed on the other side of his kitchen.

The nightmare came the next night.

I was awake and halfway across the casita before I knew why. Iris’s night noise sat at a different pitch than her day noise, and my body had learned it before my brain had.

The hall nightlight put a low amber stripe along the floor. I pushed her door open.

She was sitting up with Gerald crushed against her front, eyes open and aimed at nothing, still most of the way inside the dream.

I didn’t say a word. Eli had told me in the interview that talking woke her further up, so I sat on the edge of the bed and opened my arms.

She pitched into me the second I was within reach. She didn’t hesitate or check. She put her face into my shoulder and the sound stopped. Gerald was between us, as regulations required, and I left him there.

I didn’t ask about the dream, or whether Gerald was all right. I held her and kept my mouth shut, which went against every instinct I’d built in fourteen years of kindergarten, and her breathing slowed against my collarbone.

She started sliding back under. Her weight shifted onto my forearm and the arm started to ache at the elbow, and I kept it where it was. I rubbed her back in slow circles. I’d picked it up from Eli at bedtime, and by now I didn’t have to think about it.

She was almost gone when the floorboard creaked.

He was in the door. He’d pulled a shirt on for the trip down the hall and done it fast. The collar was twisted at the back of his neck and the hem was still rucked up on one side. His feet were bare and his sleep pants rode low on his hips.

He checked Iris first, the scan over before I could draw a breath, and his shoulders dropped a full inch. Then he turned his face to me.

Her nightlight laid a low orange band across the floorboards. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. The only noise in the room was Iris breathing against my collarbone and my own pulse up under my jaw. He had one hand braced high on the frame above his head, his forearm bare and a strip of his stomach showing where the shirt hadn’t fallen back down.

He could have said one word, come, and I’d have laid his sleeping daughter down on her pillow and followed him down the hall barefoot.

He didn’t cross the threshold. He reached one arm around the frame, turned the dial on the nightlight up a fraction, and then he was off down the hall without a sound. The orange band on the floorboards widened by an inch and warmed a shade, and the new edge of it reached the toes of my left foot.

I stayed until her weight had turned into the dead weight of a sleeping kid, and put Gerald back on his side with his head toward the door so he could see what was coming.

Then I walked back up the hall, through the kitchen, and through my own door. I sat at the desk and didn’t open the laptop for a long while. I wanted to go back the way I’d come and keep going until I found his door. I knew what I wanted and what I stood to lose, and I’d done the arithmetic twice.

What I finally opened the laptop to was the scene I’d been circling for days. It had the heroine in the dark, the hero at the door, and the child asleep between them. I’d been avoiding it because I knew it would be the truest thing in the document.

I had it in one pass. Then I wrote his dialogue and stopped, because I’d given him a line I hadn’t invented.

That’s not an answer.