Page 337 of Wild Card 13

LUCY - ONE YEAR LATER

The lake was waking under a breathtaking sky. A ripple over another ripple, gold breaking over blue, the breeze catching the surface and turning it loose again. The dock shifted beneath me with the smallest creak, familiar now in the way floorboards became familiar when a person stopped noticing they were learning them. Somewhere across the water, a boat lift clanked once. A bird called from the trees near the shore. The air smelled like sun-warmed pine beginning to wake up, damp wood, lake water, and coffee that had gone lukewarm because I kept forgetting to drink it.

Dottie slept beside my hip, her front paws stretched toward the edge of the dock, and her nose pointed into the breeze as if she could smell every secret the lake had ever kept. She was older by a year, which had not made her calmer so much as more confident in her authority. The house was hers. The dock was hers. The strip of grass between the porch and the water was hers. The two squirrels who lived in the maple by the driveway were hers, at least spiritually, though they had not yet agreed to be governed.

Ty said she had matured.

I said she had expanded her jurisdiction.

My notebook was open across my knees, the paper held flat under my left hand while my right hovered over a half-finishedsentence. I had written the same three words twice and crossed them out both times.

The heroine knows.

That was all I had.

I had started writing again in pieces that year. In margins. On receipts. In the back pages of work notebooks where no one would think to look unless they wanted to know why a player housing checklist turned into a scene about a woman standing in a kitchen and realizing she had stopped planning exits.

The house behind me was quiet, but not empty.

It had not become mine by becoming less his.

I had not come in and scrubbed Ty Burns out of the corners. His old hoodie still lived on the hook by the back door. His running shoes still ended up in places that suggested he had survived some kind of shoe-related emergency. His battered lake maps were still folded into the drawer by the fireplace, and the same slightly ugly lamp he loved for reasons known only to him still sat in the living room.

But my books had found shelves. My coffee lived beside his protein powder in an uneasy but committed truce. There were blankets over the back of the couch because I was always cold, a plant in the kitchen window that had somehow survived both of us, Dottie’s leash hanging beside Ty’s keys, and two pairs of my glasses in places I had no memory of abandoning them.

In the entryway, framed in simple oak, was the pencil sketch I had made of the lake house before I ever let myself call it home. Ty had hung it there one afternoon while I was at work. When I came home, it was the first thing I saw.

I had stood under it for a long time with my bag still on my shoulder and Dottie nosing impatiently at my knee, and Ty had appeared from the kitchen looking almost too casual.

“Too much?” he had asked.

I had shaken my head because I could not speak.

It was still there now, catching morning light through the front windows. My lines. His house. Our home.

Dottie huffed in her sleep and pressed one paw against my thigh.

“Yes,” I murmured, writing the words down before they slipped away. “You’re a very important creative consultant.”

Her tail thumped once against the dock.

I smiled down at the notebook. I stared at it a little longer, then added:

because she has finally stopped being afraid of the answer.

The dock shifted behind me.

I did not turn right away.

Ty was always awake before me.

Even on mornings when he said he was sleeping in, he had a very generous definition of in that seemed to end somewhere around six fifteen. In August, the season had not started yet, not really. Training camp was still far enough away that the days felt softer around the edges, but close enough that his body had already begun preparing for it. Morning runs. Weight sessions. Skates tucked between obligations. The quiet discipline of a life that belonged partly to him and partly to the game.

This morning, apparently, had started with a run.

“Morning.” Ty stood a few feet away in running shorts and a faded gray T-shirt damp at the collar, his hair a mess from sweat and wind, his cheeks flushed from the miles. The sunrise caught on the edges of him, turning his blond hair bright and his blue eyes softer than they had any right to be. He looked like August. Like motion and warmth and the kind of quiet that only came after a person had chosen where to land.

“Morning,” I said. “You ran.”