Chapter 13: The Dock

After dinner, he finds her in the kitchen alone.

She's standing at the sink with her hands submerged in water that's long gone cold. The window above the sink reflects the darkening lake, and her reflection in the glass looks half-transparent—half here, half somewhere else. She looks smaller than she does in the office. Smaller than she's looked all weekend.

"Hey," he says.

She startles. Her hands jerk, water splashes over the edge onto the tile floor. It's like she didn't know he was there—or worse, like she did and had hoped he wouldn't come in. Had hoped she could avoid this until the car ride tomorrow, when there would be miles of highway between them and the pretense could finally dissolve.

"Hi," she says, already turning back to the window.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine. Great. The reunion's going really well. Your family is wonderful." Her voice has the sheen of enamel. Waterproof.

"Nadia."

"What?"

He takes a step closer. The space between them feels like something physical now, something with weight. "Look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"No, you're not."

She goes quiet for long enough that he can hear the dishwasher humming somewhere down the hall, Eleanor's voice in the living room, Emma's high laugh from upstairs. The normal sounds of a family doing its ordinary evening things, indifferent to what's happening in this kitchen.

Then she turns her head, and their eyes meet, and he sees it—the exact thing she's been performing away all day. The ache beneath the brightness. The fracture in the careful architecture of distance she's been constructing since this morning. The moment where she realizes that something that was never supposed to happen has happened anyway.

She looks at him. Really looks.

Their eyes hold. He can see the exact shade of her irises in the fading kitchen light—brown-black, direct, the eyes she uses in client meetings when she's already solved the problem and is waiting for everyone else to catch up. Except right now they're doing something else. Something she can't perform away.

Then she looks back toward the window. Back to the trees going dark against the sky, toward the safe geography of things that aren't his face.

But the damage is done. He saw it. She knows he saw it.

"We should probably start packing," she says quietly. Her voice has a tremor she can't quite control. "Tomorrow's the drive back."

James doesn't move. He's looking at the side of her face, at the pulse visible in her throat that's beating faster than it should.

"Nadia."

"Don't," she says, and the word breaks slightly. "Please don't."

He doesn't know exactly what he was going to say. He only knows he can't leave it like this. He reaches out, his hand almost to her arm—almost touching the fabric of his sweatshirt that she's still wearing—but she steps away, and he lets his hand drop.

"I have to finish packing," she says, and she walks past him toward the stairs. Quick, purposeful, like she's afraid if she slows down she'll break. He stands alone in the kitchen listening to her footsteps fade, and through the window the lake is very blue and very still.

He stands there for a long time.

---

The morning is something to get through.

He wakes early and lies in the gray light listening to the house. He can hear Nadia in the guest bathroom—water running, deliberate, purposeful. She's been up already. He can tell by the absence of her on her side of the bed, the way the sheets have gone cool. He'd woken once in the night to find her turned completely away, her spine a straight line against the dark.

He gets up. Gets dressed. He's not going to spend this last morning in this room.

The family convenes for a late breakfast, which Eleanor has orchestrated with the thoroughness she brings to all things. Eggs from somewhere local. Jam from the preserve shelf. Richard's knee is better today, or he's pretending it is, and he makes his standard joke about stairs and everyone laughs the standard amount.

Nadia is brilliant at breakfast. She asks Emma which rocks she's keeping. She commiserates with Caroline about Sophie's phone usage. She helps clear plates without being asked and refills coffee cups like she's been doing it her whole life. From across the table, James watches a woman run a performance so flawlessly that only someone who knew the seams would see them.

He knows the seams.

He can see the slight flatness behind the warmth. The way she never quite looks at him while seeming to include him. The way her hand reaches for the jam and then doesn't take it, like she caught herself doing something automatic.

Eleanor takes her aside at the door when they're loading the car. He can't hear what she's saying, but Eleanor holds Nadia's hands in both of hers for a moment and says something careful, and Nadia nods and says something back, and then Eleanor pulls her in for a proper hug. The kind of hug you give people you're going to miss.

Then Eleanor holds James the way she always does—both hands at his face.

"Be good to yourself," she tells him.

Not drive safe. Not call when you get home. Something else. Something that means she's seen everything and is choosing not to say more than she's decided to say.

"I will," he says.

He doesn't think she believes him.

They load the car with the efficiency of people who've already worked out a system without discussing it. Her bags on the right side of the trunk, his on the left. The arrangement falls into place the way their patterns have all weekend—without negotiation, without argument.

The lake house recedes in the passenger-side mirror.

Nadia turns to look out her window. He turns the radio off.

He drives. Miles go by. And somewhere past the county line, with nothing but road ahead and Nadia's reflection faint in the glass beside him, he finds himself turning it over again: what his mother had said to her at the door. The careful thing. The thing that made Nadia nod once and not speak. He'd been standing close enough to watch their faces. He still doesn't know what the words were.