Chapter 13
She left.
Nia looked at the kitchen she had eaten cup ramen in at midnight while watching a security feed, and then at Leo on the floor playing with Mr. Bun Bun’s enormous successor, and then at Jyn standing in her kitchen as if he had been standing in her kitchen for years and had simply been waiting for the timeline to acknowledge it.
“Welcome home,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Thank you,” he said, “for not taking the check.”
She thought about the torn paper on his polished driveway. About everything that had followed.
“Thank you for sending it,” she said. “You were trying to protect us even then.”
“Poorly.”
“You couldn’t have known about the dog.”
“I should have watched the footage more carefully.” A pause, and in the pause was the particular self-correction of a man who had made an error and was filing it. “I was watching you. I was not watching what was watching Leo.”
“Well,” Nia said. “Thor was watching Leo.”
“Thor,” Jyn agreed, “was watching Leo.”
The dog in question came back through the dog door Jyn had apparently also arranged in his home improvements — she would catalog that quietly for later, the fact that he had made the compound of her ordinary life more accommodating to her life in it, and think about what that said — and sat down in front of Leo with the air of an animal completing a perimeter check and finding everything acceptable.
Leo offered him the Mr. Bun Bun.
Thor took it. Gently, with the delicacy he’d shown with the ribeye steak. He held it for exactly five seconds and then set it back down in front of Leo with the precision of an animal returning something that had been entrusted to him for safekeeping.
Leo retrieved his rabbit. Looked at Thor. Looked at Jyn. “Doggie give back,” he informed them both solemnly.
“Yes,” Nia said.
“Daddy’s doggie,” Leo said, and went back to his blocks.
The word landed in the room with the weight that it had, the weight of a two-and-a-half-year-old’s impeccable logic and the weight of two people who had needed thirty-seven days in a Swiss compound to catch up to what the dog had understood from the beginning.
Jyn sat down on the floor.
Not on the furniture. On the floor, where Leo was, at Leo’s level. He picked up a block and examined it with the seriousness he gave everything.
“This one goes here,” he said, fitting it into the corner of Leo’s current structure.
Leo looked at this contribution with the architectural assessment of a very small engineer. “Yes,” he said, satisfied, and handed Jyn another block.
Nia stood in her kitchen watching her son and his father build something together, and she thought about fences and dogs and five million dollars and the specific weight of what it meant to be somewhere safe.
She thought about the ring in the velvet box, which she had put in her bedside drawer in Switzerland and had carried home in her bag because she was not ready and she was also not willing to leave it behind.
She thought: eventually is not as far away as it used to be.
She made coffee.
Outside, the neighborhood continued its ordinary extraordinary business, and inside, in the backyard of the house she had refused to leave, the fence stood reinforced between her world and Jyn’s, and the gate in the fence stood open, because they had agreed that was how it should be now — no lock, no intercom, no mechanism of separation.
Just the gate.
Just open.
__The end__
