He fixed the circuit breaker at midnight, ate cold soup standing over the kitchen sink, went to bed at 1:00, 0 inches the morning, and stared at the ceiling for a very long time.
And when sleep finally came, it brought with it the memory of gray-green eyes looking up at him from a cold sidewalk curb, lost and glassy and heartbreakingly familiar. He woke up at 7:13 to a sound he wasn’t expecting.
Someone was knocking on his door. Daniel didn’t move at first. He lay in bed and listened to the knocking like a man trying to decide whether a sound was real or leftover from a dream.
Three knocks, a pause, then three more hesitant, like whoever was on the other side wasn’t entirely sure they had the right to be there. He checked his phone. 7:13 a.m.
He pulled on a gray shirt, ran a hand over his face, and went to the door. He opened it, and the air left his body. Claire was standing in the hallway in the same clothes from last night, her coat wrinkled, her hair loose and uncombed, both hands pressed together in front of her like she was trying to hold herself in one piece.
She wasn’t wearing shoes, just socks, one slightly lower than the other, and that small, unguarded detail undid him more than anything else. But it was her face that stopped him completely.
She had been crying. Not recently crying, the fresh kind with red eyes and wet cheeks. This was the deep kind, the kind that happens after everything else runs out. Her eyes were swollen.
Her jaw was tight. She looked like a woman who had been up all night sitting with something she could no longer outrun. She looked at him and her chin trembled.
« Daniel, » she said. And then she stopped, like the sentence she’d rehearsed in the elevator had dissolved the moment she saw his face. He stepped back from the door without a word and let her in.
She came inside slowly, looking around his apartment the way people look at places they thought they knew. His kitchen table was the same one from their old house, she recognized it immediately.
