Later, when the dishes were a problem for tomorrow’s version of herself and the last of the guests had gone out into the mild April dark, Clare climbed down and sat on the bottom step of the stairs — the exact step, the exact square of hardwood — and put her grandmother’s enormous glasses on, crooked, and waited.
Theo came out of the kitchen, saw her, and sat down beside her without being asked, their shoulders touching from collarbone to elbow.
“You know,” he said, “most people fall down stairs once and then avoid them.”
“I’m not most people.” She took the glasses off and put them on his face, and he looked so magnificent and so ridiculous that she began to laugh, and then she wasn’t laughing, and he put his arm around her and let her cry into the shoulder of the jacket he’d worn the first day, and neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing left that needed saying.
The flip-flop he had picked up off the living room floor that afternoon was still hanging from the newel post where she’d tossed it hours ago, absurd and bright, and she decided it could stay there forever.
Outside, the street was quiet and the porch light hummed its small warm hum, and the house held them the way a house holds people it has decided to keep — quietly, completely, with all the doors unlocked and nobody coming up those stairs uninvited ever again. Clare leaned into him, and the boy from the pool pressed his lips to the top of her head, and the girl who had fallen at the bottom of her own front steps nine minutes into the worst day of her life sat up straight, and did not fall, and was home.
