Chapter 6

I looked at him for a long moment before I could get the words out.

"Thank you." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to, still raw from crying. "And I'm sorry. For showing up out of nowhere after two years and asking you just to drop everything."

Nate glanced at me in the rearview mirror, something soft moving behind his eyes.

"Anything for you."

Three words. He said them easily, as they cost him nothing, but I felt them land somewhere I wasn't ready for. The old Anna, the one who existed before Max, before any of this, would have known exactly what to do with a sentence like that. This version of me didn't know what to do with anything anymore.

We didn't talk much the rest of the drive.

I watched the city blur past the window, streetlights smearing gold across the glass, and let my mind wander back to the last time Nate and I had really spoken.

Three years ago. My kitchen, back when I still had my own kitchen, before Max and marriage and a brownstone that never once felt like mine no matter how long I lived in it. Nate had shown up unannounced, the way best friends do, and told me he loved me. Not casually. Not like it was easy for him to say.

I remembered the way his hands had shaken.

I remembered telling him I couldn't, that Max had already asked me to marry him, that I'd already said yes. I remembered the way something in his face had just closed, like a door swinging shut, and how he'd nodded once and walked out of my apartment without raising his voice at all.

We fought about it exactly once, weeks later, both of us saying things we didn't mean because it was easier than saying the things we did.

Then nothing. Two years of nothing.

Until three nights ago, when I'd typed six words into a phone at two in the morning, and he'd shown up anyway, no questions, no *I told you so*, nothing but a car and an open door.

I didn't deserve that kind of loyalty. I knew that. I was starting to think Nate had never once cared whether I deserved it or not.

---

The apartment he brought me to sat on the eighth floor of a building with a doorman who nodded at Nate like he already knew him well.

"It's not much," Nate said, unlocking the door and stepping back to let me in first. "But it's safe. Nobody knows about it but me."

It was clean. Simple. A couch, a bed I could see through an open doorway, floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a skyline I didn't recognize from this angle.

"Whose place is this?"

"Mine." He said it like it was nothing, setting my box down on the counter. "I don't use it much. Figured it'd be better than a hotel."

"Nate, I can't just…"

"You can." He cut me off gently, no heat in it at all. "Feel at home. Take whatever room you want. I'll figure out the rest."

I stood in the middle of that living room, arms wrapped around myself, feeling smaller than I had in years.

"What happened, Anna?"

The question came quiet. Careful. He wasn't looking at me when he asked it, busy pretending to check something on the stove, giving me an easy way out if I wanted it.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

How do you explain two years of your life collapsing into a hospital bed and a locked room and a slap you're still not sure you've forgiven, to someone who last knew you as a girl excited about her wedding dress?

"I can't." My voice broke on it. "Not yet. I'm sorry."

He looked at me then, and whatever he saw on my face made him nod slowly, like he understood something I hadn't said out loud.

"Okay." No push. No frustration. "Whenever you're ready. Or never, if that's what you need."

I could have cried again right there, just from the relief of not being pushed for once.

---

He left an hour later to get me things I hadn't thought to pack: a toothbrush, a phone charger, a few groceries, a set of pajamas that still had the tags on when he handed them to me, like he'd stood in a store trying to guess my size and gotten embarrassed about it.

"You didn't have to do all this," I told him at the door.

"I know."

He looked at me for a second too long before he asked it. "You gonna be okay tonight?"

"I think so."

"Call me if you're not." He hesitated on the threshold, hands in his pockets, looking like there was a hundred other things he wanted to say and had decided against every one of them. "I mean it, Anna. Any hour."

"Thank you." I meant it more than those two words could carry. "For everything. I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't picked up."

Something flickered across his face, old hurt, maybe, or something gentler than that. "I always would've picked up."

He left before I could figure out what to do with that sentence.

---

My phone started buzzing before the door had even fully closed behind him.

*Max.*

I stared at the screen as it rang out, then rang again almost immediately, his name lighting up over and over like something feral clawing to get through. I let it go to voicemail four times. On the fifth, sitting alone on the edge of a bed that wasn't mine in an apartment I had no right to be in, I finally picked up.

"Where are you?" His voice hit me before I'd even said hello, sharp and fast, none of last night's tears left in it. "Anna, where the hell are you?"

"I left, Max."

"You left." He said it like the words didn't make sense strung together. "You *left*? What is this, some kind of joke to make me jealous? Because it's not funny, Anna, come home right now."

"I'm not coming home." My hand tightened around the phone. "I filed for divorce. You signed the papers last night. I don't know if you remember that part or not, but you did. It's over."

Silence.

Then his voice came back low and colder than I'd ever heard it. "You think you can just walk out on this family? On me?"

"I already did."

"Come back, Anna." The threat under his voice was unmistakable now, no more pleading left in it at all. "Come back right now, or I swear to God, you're going to regret this."

I sat there for one long second, phone pressed to my ear, listening to the echo of a man who'd never once, in two years, spoken to me as if I mattered more than his own convenience.

I thought about the concrete floor.

I thought about the sound of my own knuckles against a locked door.

I thought about grapes, and laughter, and *at least the baby's fine.*

I pulled the phone away from my ear, pressed the side button, and watched the screen go black.

The apartment went silent around me.

For the first time in two years, so did I.