The library closed at four today. It closes at four most days now, since the funding vote: a fact Fiona has stopped being surprised by and started simply absorbing, the way you absorb weather. She used to stay open until seven. Now she's home by half past four, standing in her own kitchen at an hour that used to belong to someone else's shift, not sure what to do with the extra light.
She waters the plant on the windowsill that doesn't need watering yet. She does it anyway. It gives her hands something.
It's Tuesday. An ordinary one, which is its own kind of strange thing to notice; that a day can be ordinary while something enormous might be happening somewhere she can't see, and she'd have no way of knowing, no mechanism for knowing, nothing but the same kettle, the same window, the same slant of afternoon light that's been coming through this kitchen for years.
She checks her phone. Not for anything specific. Just the reflex.
No missed calls.
That isn't new. It's been weeks of no missed calls, which used to be the kind of silence she could talk herself out of and has slowly, quietly, become the kind she can't. He calls on Sundays. He has called on Sundays for as long as she's stopped counting the ones that mattered, because counting makes it a number and a number makes it real in a way she isn't ready for. He always picks up, too, if she calls him instead; always, even mid-something, even at strange hours in strange time zones, some part of him apparently unwilling to let a call from her ring out.
Three Sundays now.
She'd told herself, the first one, that it was nothing. Reception somewhere, a flight, a bad week. The second, she'd made herself busy on purpose, alphabetized a shelf that didn't need it, anything to keep from watching the clock. The third, she stopped pretending the busyness was about the shelf.
She doesn't let herself think the word that wants to come after three Sundays. She's gotten very good, over the years, at redirecting a thought half a second before it becomes a sentence. It's practically a skill by now. She could probably teach it.
The kettle clicks off.
She makes the tea she doesn't really want and carries it to the small table by the window, and sits, and looks at a phone that isn't ringing, in a kitchen that gets sun until nearly six now that the season's turning, in a life that has quietly rearranged itself around an absence she still doesn't have a name for.
Gregoir comes in from the garden, dirt on his knees, and sets a small bowl of clementines on the counter without a word; he's noticed the phone-checking too, she knows, though neither of them names it out loud. He just leaves the bowl and touches her shoulder on his way past, the way he does, the way that says I see it, I'm not going to make you talk about it, I'm just here.
She picks the phone up once, turns it over in her hand, and doesn't call.
Not yet, she tells herself, the way she's told herself for three weeks. Give it till Sunday. He always picks up.
She's setting it back down, screen up, in case, when it rings.
✻ ✻ ✻
She doesn't recognize the moment for what it is at first. There's a half-second where the sound is just sound, an ordinary interruption of an ordinary afternoon, and her hand moves toward it the way a hand moves toward any ringing phone.
Then she sees the name.
No last name. Just his. The one she gave him, existing in her phone and her mouth and nowhere else in the world she's aware of.
Her whole chest does something at once; relief and fear arriving so close together they're almost the same sensation, the way they've been the same sensation for three Sundays now, indistinguishable, both of them just him, finally, him, and she almost doesn't answer fast enough because her hands have forgotten, in the space of one ring, how a phone works.
"Hello?" Too fast. Too much air behind it.
"Hey." His voice. Not compressed, not recorded, not the shortened version that lives in the infrastructure of a phone company somewhere. His actual voice, tired in the specific way of someone who's been travelling, warm in the specific way of someone who's about to apologize for something. "Sorry. I know it's not Sunday."
She sits down without deciding to. Gregoir, across the kitchen, goes very still with a clementine half-peeled in his hand, watching her face do whatever it's doing.
"You're—" She stops. Starts again, steadier. "You're all right!"
"I'm all right." A pause, small, the kind he takes when he's deciding how much of the truth to give her, the same pause she's heard in a hundred other conversations across a hundred other cities. "It's been a lot the last few weeks. I couldn't really; I wasn't in a place where a phone call was going to be a good phone call, if that makes sense. I didn't want you to have that instead of nothing."
"You could have had a bad phone call with me." Her voice catches on it, gentler than the words. "That's allowed too."
"I know." Quiet. Genuine. "I know that now."
She hears something behind him; an announcement, distant, the specific flat tone of an airport intercom, gate numbers dissolving into echo before she can catch them.
"Where are you?"
"O'Hare." A small, almost surprised laugh, like he's still getting used to saying it. "I just landed."
"O'Hare." She repeats it carefully, like the word might mean something different if she says it wrong. "You're— you're here. You're in Chicago."
"I'm home." He says it simply, like it costs him nothing, though she can hear, underneath the simplicity, that it costs him everything. "I'm going to see Elena. And Raul. I wanted to call you before I did, because I didn't want you finding out secondhand that I'd resurfaced and gone quiet on you again in the same week. That felt like a version of this you didn't deserve."
Fiona presses her free hand flat against the kitchen table, grounding herself against wood that's been there longer than either of them.
"I watered a plant that didn't need it about eleven times this month," she says, and it comes out as something between a laugh and the thing right before crying. "I want you to know that. That's what three Sundays does to a person."
"I'm sorry."
"I know." She looks at Gregoir, who has abandoned the clementine entirely now, who is watching her with the particular careful hope of a man who has spent three weeks not saying I'm sure he's fine out loud, because he knew she needed to be allowed to not be sure. "I'm not asking you to explain the weeks. I just needed to hear you say the sentence. I'm home. That's enough. That's always been enough."
"I know it has." Another announcement behind him, closer this time. "I have to go find a bag carousel that apparently hates me. But I'll call you properly. Soon. Not Sunday-soon. Actually soon."
"Go," she says, and means it, and doesn't want to hang up at all. "Go see them. Tell Elena I want to hear about the painting."
"I will."
"And—" She stops herself before the next thing, the old habit, the redirect she's practiced for years, the line she's never quite let herself cross in either direction. Then, for the first time in longer than she can name, she doesn't redirect it.
"I love you. However that lands for you. I just needed to say it out loud today."
A silence on the line. Not empty. Full, the way certain silences are fuller than words.
"I know," he says, and his voice has gone rough in a way it wasn't a minute ago. "I know that. Thank you for saying it anyway."
The call ends gently, the way calls end when neither person wants to be the one to end them.
Fiona sets the phone down on the table, next to the untouched tea, next to Gregoir's bowl of clementines, and for a moment just sits there, in a kitchen with sun still coming through it, in a life that has quietly rearranged itself back into shape without her needing to ask how.
Gregoir crosses the kitchen and puts both hands on her shoulders from behind, doesn't ask, doesn't need to.
"He's home," she tells him, and the word does something new in her mouth this time, something solid, something that doesn't need three Sundays of counting to make it real anymore.
He's home.