“Are you staying for dinner?”
The question broke something open in all of us.
Ethan looked at me.
I could see how badly he wanted to say yes.
I could also see him waiting.
“One dinner,” I said.
Theo smiled.
“Rosie makes pie on Fridays.”
“It is Thursday,” Rosie said.
Theo looked at her.
“You can still make pie.”
She laughed through tears.
“Bossy child.”
“Mom says confident.”
“I regret teaching you words,” I told him.
We left through the alley behind the diner.
Ethan’s car waited nearby, but I refused it.
“We walk.”
“It is raining.”
“It is three blocks.”
He looked at Theo’s thin jacket.
Then removed his own coat and held it out.
Theo looked at me.
“Can I?”
I nodded.
Ethan wrapped the coat around him.
It nearly reached the ground.
Theo laughed and lifted both arms.
“I’m a blanket king.”
Ethan watched him with an expression I could not name.
Grief.
Wonder.
Love arriving too quickly to be trusted.
We walked home together.
Rosie followed with an umbrella and the authority of a woman who would fight a hurricane if it inconvenienced someone she loved.
My apartment sat above an old pharmacy with green awnings and narrow stairs.
Ethan looked up at it.
“This is where you live?”
“It has walls and heat.”
“That was not criticism.”
“It sounded like it.”
“I was thinking about the sedan.”
I glanced toward the street.
No black car.
Still, unease followed us upstairs.
Theo ran to show Ethan his room before I could stop him.
“Look. Dinosaurs.”
Ethan stood in the doorway.
The room was small.
One bed.
A bookshelf made from painted fruit crates.
Glow-in-the-dark stars across the ceiling.
Theo dragged out a box of plastic animals.
“This one is a T. rex. He is mean because his arms are too short.”
“That seems understandable,” Ethan said.
Theo handed him a triceratops.
“You be this one.”
Ethan sat on the floor.
The most powerful businessman in America folded his expensive trousers beneath him and accepted a green plastic dinosaur.
Rosie stood beside me in the hallway.
“You still love him,” she whispered.
“No.”
She gave me a look.
“You are a terrible liar.”
“I loved who I thought he was.”
“Maybe you both thought wrong.”
I looked at Ethan.
He was listening with complete seriousness while Theo explained which dinosaurs were allowed near the cardboard volcano.
“He could take him from me,” I whispered.
Rosie’s face softened.
“That is what you are really afraid of.”
“He has lawyers. Money. Influence.”
“He also asked before following you home.”
“That doesn’t erase six years.”
“No.”
“Or the people around him.”
“No.”
She took my hand.
“But fear kept you alive. It does not have to make every choice forever.”