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“Come here, then.”

She crossed the kitchen and I took her face in both hands and kissed her slow, no clock on it, which I’d never once had with her. Every other time there’d been a bath running or a kid an hour from a nightmare or a cat scratching at the door, and I’d learned her in stolen minutes with half my attention on the hall. Tonight the hall was mine. I walked her backward out of the kitchen and down it to my room and took the time I’d never been allowed to take, got her out of the game clothes one piece at a time and put my mouth everywhere I’d had to hurry past before, and she said my name once, low, and I stopped and lifted my head.

“You don’t have to be quiet,” I said. “There’s no one in the house. I want to hear it.”

She looked at me like that hadn’t occurred to her, that it was allowed, and I kept my eyes on her face and slid my hand down between her legs and found her wet for me, and worked her slow until her hips lifted off the bed to chase it. The first real sound broke out of her before she thought to catch it, not the bitten-off sound she’d handed me in stolen minutes all fall but her own voice, open and loud in a quiet room, and it went straight through me.

“There it is,” I said. “That’s what you’ve been keeping from me all this time.”

“I didn’t know I was allowed to⁠—”

“You’re allowed. Let me hear it.” I curled my fingers into her and she gave it to me, a moan with no palm clamped over it and no wall to swallow it, and it was the best sound I’d heard in that house since I’d moved in, better than any goal horn. I got the drawer open and the condom on with her watching me do it, because we hadn’t had the other conversation yet and I wasn’t going to be careless with her even now, and then I was over her and pushing in slow and holding still to feel her go loose all the way down.

“Eli.” It wasn’t a question this time.

“I’ve got you.”

I took it slow because for once slow was on the table. There was no hall to listen to and no reason to hush her, and she stopped holding any of it back. Every stroke pulled a sound up out of her and she let each one go, the catch of breath, the low open moan, my name coming apart in the middle, and I learned the real volume of her, the voice she’d been packing away behind a closed casita door all fall.

“Keep making that sound,” I said against her jaw. “There’s nobody in this house but me to hear it.”

“Eli—”

“I know. Right there.” I slid a hand under the small of her back and changed the angle, and she came up into me loud and unguarded, her heels digging into the backs of my thighs. “Let me hear what I do to you.”

I told her every plain thing I had that I was allowed to tell her, out loud, because the house was empty and for one night I could say them at full voice. I told her she was the best part of my house, that I thought about this on the ice, and that I’d have her like this every night once Iris was asleep, for as long as she’d let me. I said all of it into her neck with her hands fisted in my hair and her voice climbing with no wall to stop it, and the one word I didn’t have a right to yet stayed behind my teeth.

When she came she came loud, her body clenching down around me and her back arching off the mattress and my name said at full volume into a quiet room, her nails dragging two lines down my spine. I worked her through every second of it and didn’t ease off until she’d spent all of it, and then I followed her over, buried deep and driving into her hard enough she’d feel it in the morning, my mouth at her ear and her name the only word I had left in me.

After, I got rid of the condom and came back and pulled her in against me, and she let me, boneless, her face against my chest and one leg thrown over mine, and the house stayed quiet around us, the rare quiet of a night with no child in it.

“The whole house,” she said against my collarbone, wrecked, a little amazed at herself.

“Every room.”

“I’d have been doing that a lot sooner if I’d known about the volume.”

“Noted,” I said, and her laugh went through my ribs, out loud, no wall between it and me for once, and I lay there and had what I wanted and the ache of what I couldn’t say, both in me at once, and didn’t sleep for a while after she did.

On Katya’s last night, she finally took a good look at the watch.

She’d brought Iris back to drop off a bag, and Iris had gone straight to brief Zamboni on the week, and Katya stood in my kitchen for the first time all visit, and picked the watch up off the counter where Iris had abandoned it, and turned it over in her hand, considering it.

“This is smart,” she said. “She can reach you from anywhere.”

“That’s the idea.”

She thumbed it on. The little screen lit, the contacts came up, and she read them, two names on a screen built for three, and her face changed.

I knew her face. I’d been with her for two years, stayed angry at her a long time after, and co-parented with her from a distance ever since, and I knew the catalog of what it did, and this was one I’d never seen, because there’d never been an occasion for it. She read Dad. She read Delaney. She saw the third field, empty, the one where a mother went, and she understood almost at once what the watch was telling her, the same message it had given me in the store with the cursor blinking, except I’d had an hour alone to not say it to myself and she had it all at once in a bright kitchen.

There were two people in the world my daughter could reach from anywhere, any hour, no reason required, and neither of them was the woman holding the watch.

“Who’s Delaney to her?” Katya said. She kept it light. She’d always been good at light.

I could have said the nanny. It was on my tongue, flat and true and the smallest version, the one for the arrangement on paper. I thought about Delaney stepping back first every single time, about her keeping her face composed at a recital and at the pillar after the game, about a woman who’d been in this house since August and still didn’t have a word she was allowed to use for herself out loud.

“She’s the person who’s here,” I said.