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“Sunny.”

“I’ll stand, Brody. If I sit on that bed I won’t say it.” She put the shoes down by the door. She’d never done that either. “I’m going back to Indiana. After Thanksgiving. I gave John my word I’d stay till Helen’s home and she’s home the Monday after, and I’ll cook Thanksgiving and I’ll hand her the kitchen and I’ll go.”

He sat there.

“You told Lara till the baby was walking.”

“I know what I told Lara. I’ll tell her different.”

“You told the team.”

“I’ll call the team. They’ll take me back.” She had her arms folded. “It’s a job. It’s a house. There’s a dresser in it I’ve never used and I’d like to find out what that’s like, and the season starts in February, and I’m thirty-one in March, Brody, I can’t cook for a man’s father in Texas because I like the way the light comes in his kitchen.”

“That’s not why.”

“It’s why.”

“That’s the reason you’d give Pearl.” He got up off the bed. He didn’t go to her. He stood at the end of it with the lamp behind him and his hands at his sides. “You’ve been going since Sunday. Since the yard. You stood on that porch till dark and Lara said you were watching the road and I stood in the kitchen and knew you weren’t, and I’ve waited a week for you to come in here and say what you were doing out there, and that’s not it. A dresser. Say the other thing.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Say it, Sunny. You’re standing at my door with your shoes off. You didn’t come in here to tell me about a job.”

“No.”

“Then say it.”

She looked at him. Her arms came unfolded. She put her hands flat against the door behind her, and she looked at him across the room with the lamp on the side of her face, and the nothing went out of her face, all of it, and what was under it was the face from the night before Odessa, the one he’d only ever had with her hands on his.

“I don’t love you,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“I don’t. I’ve tried to figure out how to say it so it lands soft and there isn’t a way, so I’m saying it plain, because you’d know if I didn’t.” Quiet. In the voice. “It was the summer. It was this house, and a kitchen with nine people in it, and a county that’s kind to strangers and a man who was kind to me on a county road, and I’d been on my own a long time, Brody, and I got it wrong. I thought it was you. It was never you. It was all of it, and you were in it, and I let you think you were the whole of it because it was easier than telling you. That’s what I’ve been doing on the porch. Figuring out how to say that.”

“You’re lying.”

“No.”

“You’re lying to me in the voice. You did it before Odessa. You told me nobody in that voice and I sat on a step and found out it could lie, and you’re doing it again, and I can hear you doing it⁠—”

“You can’t.” She said it very gently. “That’s the thing. You can’t hear it. You told me on the step. You said, I’d have believed that voice if it told me the sun came up in the west. You can’t tell, Brody. You’ve never been able to tell with me. That’s how I did it before, and it’s how you know I’m not doing it now, because I’ve just told you I could and you still can’t hear the difference.” Her hands were flat on the door. “I don’t love you. I’m sorry. I’m going in December.”

He stood there.

He’d been in a lot of rooms. He’d talked his way out of every one of them. Clay’s office, Greene’s office, a Houston conference room with a man’s name on the door, Carla’s, a fence line with Dean. He’d never once in his life stood in a room and not had the next thing to say. He stood in his own room in his father’s house with a woman against the door and didn’t have it.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Brody—”

“Don’t do this. I’m asking you.” His voice had gone somewhere. “I’ve never asked anybody for a thing in my life. I asked you once, before Odessa, and I said I’d never ask again, and I’m breaking that, I’m asking. Don’t do this. Whatever it is you’re doing. Stay in this house. Don’t say that to me again and go down that hall.”

She looked at him. Her eyes had gone bright and she didn’t let them go further than that.

“I’m asking,” he said again. “Plain. The only way I know. Don’t.”

“I’m going in December,” she said, and picked up her shoes. “Don’t come after me.” She opened the door and went.