“Did he find out?”

“He said it tasted like a mistake.”

That made her laugh for the first time all day, and the laugh came out a little unsteady, and Avery looked at her with those sharp green eyes — his eyes, always his eyes, though Avery had never seen the man she got them from — and Noelle felt the laugh crack in half.

At home it was Tuesday, and Tuesdays belonged to boxed macaroni. Avery narrated her entire day into the steam rising off the pot: a spelling test, a class guinea pig named Biscuit, a glitter-glue incident of legendary proportions. After her bath, Noelle read two chapters of the library book about a dragon who was afraid of heights, and she sat outside Avery’s door until the breathing on the other side went slow and even.

Then she listened to the landlord’s voicemail. Thirty days. New lease at the new rate, or leave.

She opened her banking app, looked at the number, and closed it. She opened the freezer and looked at the little white envelope, and closed the freezer.

She fell asleep on the couch, still in her scrubs.

She dreamed of the parking lot behind Birchwood Market. In the dream, Landon was holding both her hands and telling her he was sorry, over and over, and she kept asking him what he was sorry for, and he never answered, and his hands were covered in something dark that she couldn’t see clearly.

She woke with a start at 11:58 p.m. to the phone glowing on the coffee table.

An unknown number. A message.

Nell. It’s Landon. I got your number from the hospital directory. I know I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry — that’s twice now, and it isn’t nearly enough.

She read it three times. Her thumb hovered over the delete button.

She set the phone face-down and lay back against the couch cushions, staring at the ceiling, and the silence of the apartment pressed in around her like a held breath.

Somewhere out there, the man she had spent six years teaching herself to stop loving was waiting for her to answer. And the whole house of carefully built walls she had raised around her daughter — around her heart, around the life she had made without him — had just developed a crack the width of a phone screen.

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