I think about it constantly for the rest of the afternoon.
We're in the same room, and I'm aware of her. The way she moves through the house. The sound of her voice when she's talking to Harper, low and warm, is completely different from the professional register she uses with me. The way her hair catches the afternoon light when she leans forward. The way she folds Harper's onesies.
She's myemployee. She lives in my house. Whatever I'm feelingwhen she reaches past me in the kitchen, and her arm brushes mine, it goes nowhere. It has to go nowhere.
I wasn't always like this. There was a version of me that knew how to be around people without calculating the damage first. But I buried that somewhere in Pinewood, and what's left has a specific and recent track record of ruining things. I don't want to ruin her, too.
Bath time comes along quickly—which is mostly solo now—with Nora in the doorway. I support Harper's head with one hand and wash with the other, and Harper endures it with the martyred patience of someone who finds injustice upsetting but inevitable.
"You're getting good at this," Nora says.
"Haven't dropped her. That's the bar."
She laughs, quick and unguarded, and it hits me somewhere in the chest before I can prepare for it. She doesn't laugh like that with me very often, not the real kind, and I feel it the way you feel something you've been waiting for without knowing you were waiting for it.
We move to the nursery for pajamas and the final bottle. The room is small, and we're both in it, moving in the choreography we've worked out over nine days. She takes burp cloths from the changing table, and I get pajamas from the drawer. She makes the bottle, while I wrestle Harper into the moon-and-stars sleeper.
Every time we get close, I'm aware of it. When she reaches past me, her sleeve brushes my arm. When I turn and find us suddenly inches apart, close enough to see the green in her hazel eyes, the air between us goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with the room being small. For one moment, neither of us moves.
I clear my throat and step back. "Sorry."
"It's fine." But our voices say otherwise.
I settle into the glider with Harper and her bottle. Nora stands by the crib, folding tiny onesies by size, her hair falling out of its bun again, and I watch her because I'm sitting, and she's there, and I've given up pretending I'm not going to look.
She catches me.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing. Just—thanks. For everything."
"It's what I do, West."
West. Still West.Nine days of the same house and the same baby and midnights on the couch, and she still puts that word between us like a door she wants to keep locked. I told myself early on that being professional was the right call, that I wasn't in any position to be feeling whatever this was, and I meant it. I still mean it.
The thing is, Reaper has been calling me West since day one. He spits it across the ice like something he's scraped off his skate. The name followed me out of Pinewood and into every locker room silence and every deliberate non-pass in this city. I'd started to hate the sound of it. And then she said it on the nursery floor in the middle of the night, and it was somehow completely different, like the same word in a different language. I don't have an explanation for that. I just know that when it comes from her, it doesn't feel like the thing it used to be.
But nine days of meaning it hasn't stopped the feeling from showing up anyway, louder each time, and I don't know what to do with that except keep pretending I don't notice it. I should be grateful for the word. I know the reasons for it. Right now, I just kind of hate it.
Harper finishes her bottle and passes out. I transfer her to the crib with the careful precision of someone who has learned that the last few inches are what matter, and she doesn't stir.
"Good job," Nora whispers.
We stand side by side looking at her. The white noise machine hums low in the corner, the nightlight casting everything in a soft amber glow, and Harper breathes steadily between us. Something about Nora saying that, two quiet words in the dark, lands differently than I expected. Like I needed to hear it from her specifically and didn't know that until just now.
"Nine days," Isay quietly.
"Feels longer."
"In a good way?"
She glances at me, something in her expression I get for one second before she puts it away.
"In a good way," she says.
We leave together and pull the door mostly closed. The hallway is narrow, and we're standing close, that same awareness from the afternoon pressing in.
"Goodnight, West," she says.