CHAPTER 6

The kitchen smells like dinner and my mother's good mood. The radio is on. Something old and slow.

I am washing a dish that is already clean.

“You left before I could make you breakfast”.

I don't know why that's the thing I keep coming back to. Not the other things. Just that.

I scrubbed the plate."Caleb is lovely," my mother says from somewhere behind me. I can hear her moving, putting things away

“Mmm”I say

"Derek always spoke highly of him but you never know until you actually meet someone do you."

"You don't," I say.

You left before I could make you breakfast.

Six words. He said six words in a hallway and then walked out of the door like he hadn't just rearranged something fundamental in my chest and I am standing here washing a dish that has been clean for four minutes because I cannot trust myself to drive yet.

"He asked about you actually," my mother says.

I stop scrubbing.

"What?"

"Caleb." She appears beside me to put something in the cupboard above my head, completely unbothered. "Earlier, before dinner. He asked Derek how you were doing. What kind of work you did." She closes the cupboard. "I thought that was nice. Some of Derek's friends barely acknowledge you exist."

I turn the tap up slightly so she cannot hear whatever my face is doing.

"That is nice," I say.

"Are you sure you're alright? You've been quiet all evening."

"I told you I'm tired Mom."

She puts her hand on my back briefly, the way she usually does when she knows something is wrong and has decided not to push. "Go home and sleep. I'll finish these."

"I'm almost done."

"Maya."

"Two more minutes."

She makes a sound that is half exasperation and half love and moves back to the other side of the kitchen. I keep washing. The radio plays something I don't know the name of. Outside the kitchen window the garden is dark and still.

You left before I could make you breakfast.

The thing that is making me insane, the thing I cannot shake no matter how hard I scrub this already clean pot, is the way he said it. Not accusatory. Not loaded with anything obvious. Just quiet and even and almost gentle, like he was stating a simple fact that he had been sitting with for four days and had finally decided to say out loud.

I set the pot down.

"Okay," I say. "I'm going."

My mother looks up from the counter. "Drive safe. Text me when you're home."

"I always do."

"I know. Text me anyway."

I kiss her cheek. She smells like her perfume and the kitchen and Sunday and every safe thing I have ever known and for a reason I cannot explain right now that makes my chest ache a little.

"Night Mom."

"Goodnight baby."

The hallway is empty.

My father is in his armchair, glasses back on, book open, television murmuring. He raises a hand when I pass without looking up. I grab my bag from the table and I open the front door and I step out into the cold and I pull it shut behind me.

The porch is empty.

Of course it is empty. They left forty minutes ago. Derek's truck is gone. The driveway is just a driveway again, concrete and quiet under the porch light, my car sitting where I parked it looking completely ordinary.

I walk to it and get in and close the door.

And then I just sit there.

The street is quiet the way residential streets are quiet on Sunday nights. A dog barking somewhere far away. A light on in the house across the road. The porch light of my parents house throwing a warm yellow circle onto the driveway that almost reaches my car.

I didn't start the engine.

I just sit in the dark with my bag in my lap and my keys in my hand and I let myself have thirty seconds of not performing, not pretending, not holding my face in the right shape for anyone.

Thirty seconds of just.

Being,Completely undone.

He knew who I was. He stood on that rooftop and he looked at me and he already knew and he let the whole night happen anyway. Every conversation. Every quiet moment. Every time he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at. He did all of it knowing exactly who I was and he never once said a word.

And then he walked into my parents house and shook my hand and called me by my name like we were strangers and sat at my family's table for three hours without flinching.

And then he said six words in a hallway and walked away.

Who does that?

Who does any of that.

I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and closed my eyes and breathed and breathed until I felt like a person again.

Then I sat up. I put the key in the ignition.. I am going to make tea and have a shower and go to bed and tomorrow this will feel smaller because everything feels smaller in the morning and that is just a fact of life I have always been able to rely on.

I started the engine then my phone buzzed,

I glanced at the screen expecting Lena or my mother or literally anyone else and it is Derek and it is not a text, it is a voice note, which is so Derek that under any other circumstances it would make me smile because he has never once in his life understood that voice notes are for people who are driving and not for people you send eleven second messages to at nine thirty on a Sunday night.

I pressed play.

His voice fills the car, easy and relaxed, the familiar cadence of him that I have known my whole life.

"Hey just checking you got off okay. You seemed weird at dinner. Don't tell me you're coming down with something because I cannot deal with you sick right now, you're an absolute nightmare when you're sick. Anyway, Call me tomorrow. Oh and hey …..A pause.

The kind of pause that is just long enough to make you hold your breath without knowing why.

"Don't get too friendly with Caleb."

He laughs after he says it. Short and easy. Like it is a joke.

Then the note ends.

I sat in my parents driveway with the engine running and the heater coming on and Derek's voice still sitting in the air of my car and I stared at the phone in my hand.It sounded like a joke But didn't feel like it