Protecting Him

“No,” I said, for the second time that week, and turned my phone face down on Kit’s kitchen table before Vic could finish his sentence, though I’d heard enough of it already to know the shape of the rest.

Kit had been watching me from the sink, a tea towel over one shoulder. Something in his face had gone very still, the particular way I’d learned meant he was working out how much of what he’d just heard he was allowed to ask about.

“That was him again.”

“Helen’s flying to New York on Thursday. Vic wanted one more answer before she left the country, in case distance made me braver about it.” I sat down across from him, at the small matched table that had felt like such a strange, ordinary miracle three weeks earlier and was now just a place we sat, the way rooms stop being remarkable…