PART 8:

“She means it.” “I know.” Olivia looked down at the counter she’d been wiping, even though it was already clean. “Ethan, can I ask you something and have you answer me honestly? Yeah. Am I Is this She stopped, reorganized. Do you ever feel like I come over and I take up space and then I leave and you’re just supposed to go back to whatever you were doing?” He turned to face her fully.

“No.” “Because I think about it sometimes. After I go home, I think, what does that look like from the outside? Someone who keeps showing up. It looks like someone who decided she didn’t want to be alone in a particular way.” he said, “and who keeps being right about where to go instead.” She looked up at him.

“That’s not a burden.” he said. “Not to me.” She held his gaze for a moment. then You said that like you mean it. I do mean it. Another moment, the kind that had weight, the kind where something could have shifted if either of them had moved an inch in any direction. Sophie’s voice from down the hall. Daddy, can Olivia see my drawings? The moment held for one more second and then resolved itself peacefully, like a chord that doesn’t fully land, but doesn’t need to.

Come see the drawings, Ethan said. Olivia followed him down the hall. Sophie had laid six drawings out on her bed with the seriousness of a curator preparing a gallery showing. She walked Olivia through each one, the marine animals, the basketball court, a portrait of Ethan that she described as realistic, but with artistic license, which he thought was generous.

And Olivia crouched down to look at each one at eye level and asked questions, and Sophie glowed the way children glow when an adult actually sees what they’ve made. Ethan leaned in the doorway and watched and didn’t say anything. He was aware, in a way he hadn’t let himself be before, of how natural this was.

How it didn’t feel like an imposition or a performance. How Olivia wasn’t trying to make Sophie like her. She just genuinely found her interesting, which Sophie, with her infallible seven-year-old radar, clearly felt. He was aware that Marcus was right. He was already 20 ft down this road. Olivia left at noon.

Sophie hugged her, unsolicited, decisive, the hug of a child who has made up her mind. And Olivia looked startled for exactly 1 second and then hugged her back with both arms. At the door, she said quietly, so Sophie wouldn’t hear, She’s really something. Yeah, Ethan said. You did that. She mostly did herself.

You gave her the room, too. Olivia looked at him steadily. Not everyone knows how to do that. She left. He closed the door. Sophie appeared immediately at his elbow. I like her, she announced. I know you do. Do you like her? She’s a good neighbor. Daddy. Sophie’s voice carried the particular exhaustion of someone dealing with an adult who is being deliberately obtuse.

That’s not what I asked. He looked down at his daughter. Seven years old, sees everything. Yeah. He said quietly. I like her. Sophie nodded as if this confirmed what she had long suspected and went back to her room. Ethan stood in the hallway of his own apartment completely outmaneuvered by a second grader and thought about what Marcus had said.

Fear with better posture. He could feel it. The exact outline of the thing he’d been refusing to name. Not dramatic, not overwhelming, just present. The way a sound is present when you stop making noise long enough to hear it. He liked Olivia Heart. Not in the way you like a neighbor. Not in the way you like someone you feel sorry for.

In the specific, particular way that you like one specific, particular person when they’ve started to fit into the shape of your life in a way that you didn’t plan and can’t quite explain and wouldn’t trade. He knew it and what he did with it, that was the question. That was what kept him in the hallway another minute after Sophie had gone back to her room because knowing something and acting on it were separated by a distance that looked small from a distance and was anything but when you were standing at the edge

of it. He had been wrong before. He had been certain before and certain hadn’t protected him from anything. So he stood there and he knew and he didn’t move. Not yet, but the knowing was real. And real things, Marcus had once told him, don’t wait around forever. That evening, after Sophie was in bed, his phone lit up on the counter.

Olivia. Thank you for this morning. The pancakes. The hamster debate. All of it. He typed back, Sophie is going to be insufferable to Priya now. Good. The hamster deserves an advocate. He smiled at the phone, then he typed, You’re good with her. A pause. Longer than usual. Then, she makes it easy. Another pause.

Then a second message. So do you. He looked at that for a long time. He didn’t reply right away. Not because he didn’t know what to say, but because whatever he said next felt like it mattered in a way that required more than a text, and he wasn’t ready to have that conversation. Not tonight. Not with the knowing still new and the fear still doing its thing with its borrowed posture.

He set the phone down. He looked across the room at nothing. And somewhere across that hallway, behind a closed door, he knew she was looking at her phone, too. Waiting. Not for an answer, exactly. For something she didn’t have a column for yet. He picked the phone back up. Typed, Get some sleep, Olivia. She replied 3 minutes later.

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