Chapter 6: The Kitchen Window

(Amara's POV)

I didn't sleep.

I lay in my childhood bed, staring at the same ceiling I'd memorized at sixteen, and replayed it on a loop until the words lost their shape. No one. Two syllables, and somehow they'd undone five years of careful, deliberate healing in under a second.

Around three in the morning I gave up pretending and went downstairs for water I didn't actually want, just an excuse to move. Maya was still on the couch, she'd insisted on staying over, claiming she didn't trust me alone on my first night back, which we both knew was really about not trusting Damon to stay away.

"You're awake," she said, not opening her eyes.

"How can you tell?"

"You walk differently when you're not sleeping. Heavier. Like your feet are mad at the floor." She sat up, haired a purple-streaked disaster, and patted the cushion beside her. "Come here."

I sat. She pulled a blanket over both of us without asking.

"I keep hearing it," I said. "'No one.' Over and over."

"I know."

"I don't even know why it's that specific thing that's wrecking me. He's done worse. He chose her. He's with her, and has been for two years. Why does 'no one' feel like the thing that actually broke something?"

Maya considered it, which I appreciated, she could have just hugged me and said something comforting and empty, and instead she actually thought about it.

"Because the rest of it, you'd already braced for," she said finally. "You knew about Valerie before you landed. You had hours to get used to the idea. But 'no one' that was new information, delivered in front of an audience, with no warning. That's not grief. That's a fresh wound on top of an old one."

"When did you get so smart?"

"I've always been smart. You've just been too busy saving lives to notice." She bumped her shoulder against mine. "You're going to be okay?"

"Eventually. Not tonight."

"Tonight you don't have to be anything. Tonight you just have to exist until the sun comes up."

I let my head fall against her shoulder, and somewhere past four in the morning, I finally slept.

I woke up to the smell of my mother's coffee and the sound of voices in the kitchen low, careful, the particular tone adults used when they thought you were still asleep and didn't want to wake you with bad news.

"shouldn't be here," my mother was saying. "Not after last night. Not after what he said."

"I just want to talk to her."

My whole body went still.

Damon's voice. In my parents' kitchen. At I checked the clock on my nightstand, eight in the morning, like this was a reasonable hour to show up uninvited after humiliating someone in front of an entire pack twelve hours earlier.

I crept to the top of the stairs, out of sight, close enough to hear.

"She's sleeping," my mother said, which was generous of her, considering I'd been awake for the better part of an hour by then.

"I can't wait."

"You've waited two years, Damon. I think she can survive you waiting a little longer, or honestly, not at all."

A pause. I could picture his face that particular stricken look he got when someone told him a truth he didn't want.

"I made a mistake last night," he said. "I panicked. I need to explain."

"To who? Her, or yourself?"

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Both, probably."

My mother's voice softened, just slightly, which surprised me more than anything else in that whole exchange. "I like you, Damon. I always have. Your mother's one of my dearest friends. That doesn't change the fact that my daughter came home for the first time in five years and you stood in front of our entire pack and called her nothing."

"I know."

"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, you're on my porch at eight in the morning asking for another chance to get it right, and I'm not sure you've earned the first one yet."

Downstairs, a chair scraped. Footsteps. I pressed myself flat against the hallway wall, heart hammering, half-convinced he'd somehow sense me through the ceiling.

"Can you just tell her I came by?" His voice had gone quieter. Smaller. "That's all I'm asking. I'm not trying to force anything."

"I'll tell her."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. I haven't decided if I'm doing you a favor or giving her one more thing to be angry about."

I made it to the kitchen window just in time to watch him walk back down the driveway, shoulders hunched, hands shoved in his pockets, the particular slow, defeated walk of someone who'd expected rejection and gotten it anyway. For one traitorous second, watching him go, something in my chest twisted that had nothing to do with anger.

I hated that second. I hated it immediately and completely.

"You're up," my mother said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with the kind of carefully neutral expression she used to wear when delivering report cards she suspected I wouldn't like.

"I heard."

"All of it?"

"Most of it."

She crossed to the counter, poured a second cup of coffee, and set it in front of me without asking if I wanted it, which was its own kind of love language.

"I wasn't going to wake you to tell you he came by," she said. "I was hoping you'd sleep through it entirely and I could decide later whether mentioning it was even worth the trouble."

"Why didn't you just send him away the second he showed up?"

"I tried. He's stubborn. Wonder where he gets that." She sat across from me, wrapping both hands around her own mug. "For what it's worth, he looked wrecked. Like he hadn't slept either."

"Good."

"Amara."

"I mean it, Mom. Good. Let him not sleep. Let him stand on our porch at eight in the morning feeling like garbage. I spent most of last night doing the same thing, so it seems only fair."

She studied me a long moment, and I braced for a lecture about forgiveness, about grace, about all the things mothers were supposed to say in moments like this.

"Drink your coffee," she said instead. "You'll want the caffeine. Maya told me you're going by the clinic today to see about picking up shifts."

"I was going to wait a few days."

"Were you?" My mother raised an eyebrow, the universal mother expression for I don't believe you and neither do you. "Or were you going to throw yourself into work so fast you don't have time to think about any of this?"

"...The second one."

"That's what I thought." She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "For what it's worth, I think that's not the worst plan you've ever had. Just don't forget to actually feel things somewhere in between the twelve-hour shifts."

"I'll try."

"That's all I'm asking."

Maya found me an hour later, dressed and ready to walk to the clinic, standing at the same kitchen window Damon had been turned away from.

"You heard he came by," she said. Not a question.

"I heard."

"And?"

I watched a bird land on the porch railing, exactly where he'd been standing a few hours before, and thought about how strange it was that a place could hold two completely different moments inside it and somehow show no trace of either one.

"And nothing," I said. "I'm not ready to hear whatever he thinks he needs to explain. Maybe I won't ever be. But I'm also not going to spend my first week home hiding in this house waiting for him to try again."

"So what's the plan?"

"The plan is I go to the clinic. I ask about shifts. I build something that's mine, that has nothing to do with him, and if he shows up at the door again"

"Which he will."

"Which he will," I agreed, "then my mother turns him away again, and eventually, hopefully, he gets the message."

Maya looked unconvinced, in the specific way she always looked unconvinced right before she was about to be proven right about something.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. It's just Damon doesn't really do 'getting the message.' Never has. Not once in his whole life has that man taken no for an answer and actually stayed away."

"He's going to have to learn how, then."

"Maybe." She grabbed her keys off the counter, tossing me a look that was equal parts fond and worried. "I just don't think you've got any idea yet how hard that man is about to try."