The Spare Room

Ashley's goodbye was one of the finest performances I had witnessed in six years of knowing her up close.

She stood outside my building with Evan's duffel at her feet and her sunglasses on, and she held him for what I counted as a full forty seconds. She whispered something against his hair. He patted her back with the slightly stiff patience of a young man who loves his mother and also needs her to release him.

I watched from the lobby doorway with my coffee. I had come downstairs to help with bags. At least, that was the reason I had given myself.

"Call me the minute you're settled," Ashley said, pulling back to look at his face, her hands still framing it.

"I'll call you," he said.

She nodded. Then looked up. Saw me in the doorway and something moved through her expression — there and gone in under a second. She lifted one hand in a small wave.

I raised my coffee cup back at her.

She got in her car. Evan watched until it turned the corner, then picked up his bag and crossed the sidewalk, and I held the door open.

"Welcome," I said.

He walked past me into the lobby. "Thank you for doing this."

"Don't thank me yet. Wait until you see the water pressure upstairs."

That got almost a smile.

I took him through the apartment properly — the kind of tour I had given exactly nobody since moving in, because Rhett had bought it and arranged it and decided things about it until I had gradually stopped thinking of it as mine. Showing someone else around reminded me that I actually knew where everything lived.

"Living room," I said, opening off the entrance hall. The afternoon light came through the full-length windows onto the rug and the bookshelves that Rhett had purchased for their appearance and never opened. "Kitchen is through there. The terrace door sticks in humid weather — you have to lift the handle slightly. Upstairs, the bedrooms — yours is at the end of the hall on the right, next to the study. The study is mine. Knock before you open it."

He looked around with a particular quality of attention I had noticed the night before — not the polite looking of a guest, but the deliberate cataloging of someone who wanted to understand a space rather than simply exist inside it.

"And I should tell you now," I said, because I am a direct person and it was better stated plainly, "the downstairs bathroom has been out of commission for two weeks. Someone is coming to fix it, but not before Friday. So until then, we are sharing the one upstairs."

He looked at me. "That's fine."

"Good." I moved through to the kitchen. "I stocked the fridge last week. Enough for both of us for a while. I told your mother I'd feed you properly and I keep my word — whatever she may have told you about me."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. "She mostly says you were the best lawyer in the city."

"Mostly?"

"She also says you're intimidating."

"She's right on both counts." I opened the refrigerator and looked into it rather than at him. "I have one rule about this arrangement. This is my home. I run it on my own schedule. I get comfortable here in a way I will not perform otherwise for anyone, including you. If that becomes a problem at any point, say so."

"It won't be a problem," he said.

I closed the fridge and turned around.

He was leaning against the kitchen doorway with his bag at his feet, watching me with that same complete, unhurried attention. It was the kind of attention that did not ask anything from you and was somehow more unsettling because of it.

"You knew I was going to be coming here," he said. Conversational, not accusatory. "This whole time. The room was already ready."

I looked at him across the counter. He had said it the way someone states a fact they have already confirmed and are simply choosing to name out loud.

"I keep a spare room ready," I said. "Good habit."

He nodded slowly. Filing that answer away, I could see, right next to all the others.

"What are you expecting from me, Nicole?"

My first name in his mouth landed differently than I had anticipated. Most people called me Mrs. Anderson. The ones who had known me longer called me Nicole Anderson, which had always sounded to me like a name belonging to someone else. He said it as though it was specifically and only mine.

"A reasonable houseguest," I said. "No dishes in the sink past midnight. No music after eleven. Don't bring anyone back here without telling me first."

"That's not what I mean."

I looked at him.

He looked back.

"Get settled in," I said. "Dinner is at seven."

I walked out of the kitchen before he could say anything further, which was — I noted with some irritation — the first time in six years I had left a conversation because I was uncertain of myself rather than because I had finished making my point.

I stood in the hallway for three seconds.

Revenge, I reminded myself. This was for revenge.

I was reasonably confident I still believed that.