She stopped.
"Don't have to what," I said.
Her thumbs pressed into the space over my heart.
"You don't have to become a door," she said.
Then her eyes filled and she got furious about it, blinking hard and shaking her head like she could throw the tears out through the sides, and I did the only useful thing I've ever learned how to do, which was shut up and let her hold on.
She held on for a while.
When she pulled back she wiped her face with the sleeve of her cardigan, sniffed once, and wrote something in the notebook with a hand that shook enough to make the letters lean.
"You have to eat again at one," she said.
"I ate at six thirty."
"You have thirty four primary channels burning calories doing construction. You need four thousand a day minimum and you're getting maybe twenty five hundred." She snapped the notebook closed. "I did the math. Don't argue with the math."
"I wasn't going to argue with the math."
"You were absolutely going to argue with the math."
