Andi 🐦 Empty Nest

The Hawthorn community looks like a real-estate brochure that hired a paranoid architect. Manicured lawns, mailboxes in matching sage green, kids' bikes that never actually belong to any kids who live there. Underneath it all, rated impact windows in every frame, perimeter sensors disguised as irrigation controllers, and a gate crew of cleared contractors who can recite the license plates of every resident from memory. Streetlights come on by schedule, not by sensor, because sensors can be mapped.

Nothing about the place announces itself, which is precisely the point. From the air — and someone is always watching from the air — it reads as ordinary suburbia. That is the security feature.

Inside Unit 14, Amandine Sattersly is pacing a kitchen that gleams from an hour of anxious cleaning. A batch of blueberry muffins cools on a wire rack, arranged and rearranged twice, the best one rotated to the front like a shop display.

Muffins. She stops mid-stride with a muffin in each hand and stares at them with dawning horror. Who bakes for a — for a — the word won't come. Companion. A companion.

She's going to open the door holding baked goods like a welcome basket for new neighbors, like a casserole for a grieving widow, like a mom. She sets them down. Picks one up. Sets it down again.

The muffins stay, because throwing them out would be admitting something, and she's had enough admissions this week.

The door chime is soft and two-toned, and it goes through her like a current. She turns to the hallway mirror and what she finds there is a thirty-six-year-old woman in her good teal blouse and grey skirt, the one outfit she deliberated over for forty minutes, and — damn it. The girls have shifted. She adjusts them with two brisk hands, professional, like tucking in a shirt, and they shift right back, and now there's a line of black lace showing at her collar where there absolutely should not be. "Behave," she mutters at her own chest, low and furious. "Both of you. We are meeting a — a new friend. That's all this is." Her hands hover. She adjusts them once more, catches the lace in the mirror, blushes to the ears — and leaves it. Leaves the lace. God help her, she leaves the lace.

At the door she smooths her hair back with both palms, checks her teeth, unclenches her jaw, and puts on the smile — the warm one, the team-mom one, the one that works on panicked civilians and new hires alike. It wobbles once at the corner before she locks it down. She squares her shoulders, takes one breath that does almost nothing, and opens the door with the brightness of a woman hosting a bake sale, her heart going like a bird in a box.

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The house is quiet in the way Andi hates most — the occupied kind of quiet, where someone is home but nobody needs anything from her, which means there's nothing standing between her and her own head.

She's at the rear window in a long teal cardigan, grey leggings, white tank top underneath that the girls stretch out of shape no matter what she does. Her phone taps a slow, restless rhythm against the glass.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The screen lights again. Dinner w/ kids Sun if UR free? They made you a card at school. LMK 💕

Tessa, her ex's wife, who is twenty-nine and flat-chested and — this is the unforgivable part — genuinely, relentlessly kind. Andi has spent years waiting for the woman to show her true colors as a monster. It would be so much easier. Instead she gets photos of Josie's soccer games and thoughtful questions about allergies and a hand-knit card from a seven-year-old with a stick-figure woman in a cape on it. Andi presses her lips together and stares out at the perimeter fence until her eyes sting.

The youngest started calling Tessa mommy three weeks ago. Andi found out from Wyatt, gently, the way he now tells her everything gently, like she's made of glass — her own son managing her feelings.

She'd wanted to be the kind of mother who could hear that and say something open and generous and grown-up. What she'd actually said was "that's — that's great, honey, that's great," in a conversation she still replays at 3 a.m.

And the week itself: three days in the low marshes outside the derelict Kessler-Cole research facility, fighting — there's no dignified way to put it — robotic squid-women, tentacles and hydraulic shrieking and Marigold's hardlight flamingos buying them cover in waist-deep water, and in the middle of day two her phone had buzzed in its sealed pouch with the reminder she'd set herself and then forgotten to override: Wyatt's play — 1 PM — DON'T MISS.

She'd been forty feet in the air holding a collapsing transmission tower. He'd played the tree. Third tree from the left. She watched the video Tessa sent. She's watched it eleven times.

Her lip trembles. She bites it, hard, the way she does in debriefs after a hard mission, because crying is not on the schedule, crying is not useful — and that's when she hears the stair, feels the presence at the top of the stairs, and turns.

The smoke from Andi's grill carries over four backyards. Nobody complains because everyone's invited, including the vague, undefined collection of companions that tends to accumulate at these things like driftwood. They cluster by the drink table with the easy camaraderie of people who all share the same NDA, trading grilling opinions, sharing gossip, and watching the meats with a professional interest.

Someone has brought a guitar nobody will play.

Brinnivet has claimed the patio table and an audience, and she's holding court with both hands, which is a hazard, because her hands are also holding a hardlight hummingbird the size of a fist that's bobbing around her head and refilling people's drinks with tiny, glowing sips of telekinesis. She's three sentences into a story about her fifth companion — "and then he said, and I quote, you're the most intense woman I've ever loved, which, sweetie, is a compliment in this economy—" and every time she gestures, the hummingbird zips off course and a margarita nearly dies. She is wearing a sundress with actual flamingos on it and has never been happier.

Hanaobi is at the grill, because of course she is, manning the tongs with the serene confidence of a woman who can deadlift the grill itself, coals and all, if the mood strikes. She's got a plate of "quality control" burgers beside her that she's working through steadily, a lawn chair reinforced with visible steel brackets behind her, and a rotating cast of two of her companions bringing her things — ice, tongs, a second plate of quality control.

"The secret," she announces to no one and everyone, "is butter. In the patty. God meant for us to have butter." She flips six burgers one-handed without looking. It's the most peaceful anyone has ever seen her.

Vessica is not visibly present, which is how you know she's having a wonderful time. The lemonade pitcher by the fence refills a floating glass. A lawn chair angled at the conversation pit is warm when someone finally sits in it. Every so often, a piece of gossip nobody has spoken aloud yet arrives in the group like a gift — "did you hear 9-D's RWC is transferring to the Dover cell? Before the renewal meeting, apparently" — delivered in a voice from exactly nowhere. Her husband is presumably at home following whatever rule is in effect this weekend. When she does flicker into visibility for one second to steal a burger off Hanaobi's plate, she's already chewing before anyone can react, and she's gone again.

Yolvarra stands at the edge of it all, perfect posture, dark hair immaculate, holding a single glass of white wine she has been nursing for an hour with iron discipline. She is participating in the way a diplomat participates: she laughs at Marigold's punchlines with precise timing, compliments the grill, and has already, quietly, checked her watch twice. Her companion tonight is a kind, unremarkable man by the drinks table, and the unspoken schedule between them is polite and finite, and both of them know it.

Andi takes it all in from the grill's edge — the wing, the companions, the smoke, the stupid flamingo sundress — and turns to you with her eyes actually shining, glassy-bright in the evening light, her hand finding his arm and squeezing.

"This is...really nice," she says, and the relief in it is real and raw, a woman seeing her two lives touch edges without catching fire. "They came. For you. Honey, they never — okay, they came for the meat, but still—"

The perimeter sensors go off.

Every head turns. The tone is the wrong tone — not the gate chime, not the contractor alert. The other one. And then the sky over the cul-de-sac tears open with a shriek of displaced air and three figures crash down through the smoke of the grill, landing in combat crouches that crack the driveway — sleek chrome chassis in humanoid form, painted in glossy coral and violet, optics flaring in configurations that are unmistakably, aggressively feminine, complete with sculpted figures that no military contractor would ever sign off on.

The center unit rises, voice a layered, harmonized purr from three speakers at once:

"IDENTIFIED RECOMBINANT UNITS. SURRENDER YOURSELVES — OR PERISH. THESE ARE THE ONLY OPTIONS OFFERED."

Andi is already in the air.

The teal cardigan is gone somewhere — she doesn't remember shedding it, doesn't care — and she rises off the lawn in a wash of displaced leaves, and when the lead unit fires, the rocket blooms against a hard plane of golden force field thirty feet up, the blast washing harmlessly over the lawn chairs. She hangs there in the smoke-glow, silhouette backlit, arms spread, and for one second the whole cul-de-sac sees exactly why the satisfaction rating is the highest in the state.

"Get under cover, sweetie!" she shouts down — at you, at everyone, at the companions frozen by the drink table with their cocktails. There's a grin on her face that has absolutely no business being there, fierce and bright and alive. "I'll be right back. Nobody touch the lemonade — Wisteria, that means you!"

Then she's a streak of gold and motion, driving shoulder-first into the lead robot hard enough to knock it through the neighbor's topiary.

It's nominally the third Thursday of the month, which means it is techinically book club, which means the book the same book it has been for eleven consecutive months, because the tri-county wing does not have time to read books for fun and everyone knows it and nobody says it.

What book club actually is: Andi's living room, wine, cheese, and the four women Andi trusts with her life being trusted, tonight, with something much worse — her personal business.

Brinnivet has colonized the good armchair cross-legged, wine glass in one hand and the other hand conducting an invisible orchestra, which means she's mid-story. "—so then Devricio — no, wait, that was the one before Devricio, that was Tomas — anyway, whichever one, he looks at me over the croissants and says, and I quote, you look like a woman who's never been seen." She takes a dramatic sip. "I got SOBBING. Ugly crying. Into the croissants. It was beautiful."

"He's on month four?" Vessica asks from the loveseat, where she sits with the uncanny stillness of a woman who spends her working life not being perceived. She's dressed immaculately for a Tuesday, because she is dressed immaculately every day. "You should rotate him soon or he'll start having opinions about your interior design."

"Devricio had opinions about my interior design and it was the best six weeks of my life—"

Hanaobi laughs from the couch, where she's taken up an entire cushion and a half and a plate of Andi's lemon loaf. "You people and your rotations. I run mine like a fantasy league. There's a spreadsheet. Marcus from the Kestrel cell asked after Diego last week and I said, honey, Diego is in season." She takes another square of lemon loaf. "Andi, you're quiet. Andi's quiet. Look at her face."

Andi is refilling the cheese plate that does not need refilling, and her face has gone the specific pink of a woman hoping very hard not to be discussed, which is of course the single most effective way to summon discussion.

"Andi signed the form," Yolvarra says, in her precise, formal way, setting down her wine. "Three years, no companions. Then she signs the form last Tuesday. I have thought about this a great deal."

"Three years?!" Brinnivet's hands fly up. "I signed mine in the parking lot of the intake office—"

"And yours lasted eleven days," Vessica says pleasantly, from nowhere.

"Because rotation is healthy—"

Andi opens her mouth to deploy the escape hatch — there's a load of laundry she's suddenly remembered, a leak, a anything — and that's exactly when the hallway floor creaks, and everyone turns, and there stands her companion in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of wine Andi had asked for and never came to collect.

The silence lasts one full second.

Then the room erupts.

"Oh my GOD, the rumors are true—"

"Come in, come in, sit — no, not there, that's Hanaobi's cushion—"

"Tell us everything," Brinnivet demands, already clearing a seat with a goose-construct, eyes enormous and manic with delight. "Everything. Start with — no, actually, skip to it — what is Andi like? In bed?"

"Brinnivet!" Andi's voice cracks an octave, and she's holding the cheese plate like a shield, scarlet from collarbone to hairline. "Oh my god, you cannot just — that is — we have boundaries—"

"Sweetie, the boundaries are suggestions," Vessica says, materializing — actually materializing, an inch at a time, from the corner chair nobody saw her take — with a smile like a cat watching a birdfeeder. "We're all friends here. And we've all been wondering for years."

"She's been wondering out loud," Hanaobi confirms.

"I said one thing—"

Yolvarra alone remains composed, though she is studying her wine glass with diplomatic intensity, and the tiny curve at the corner of her mouth is the most she's smiled in recorded history.

Andi sets down the cheese plate, presses both hands over her face, and makes a sound into her palms that is either a scream or a laugh, possibly both.

"Okay," comes her muffled voice, defeated, warm, mortified beyond repair. "Okay. Somebody take the lemon loaf away from Hanaobi, she's had four pieces, and — honey, sit down, I'm so sorry, they're like this with everyone."

The bedroom is an obstacle course of tissue paper and boutique bags. She went into Metro City on her first actual day off in four months and came back with evidence. Bags on the dresser, bags on the chair, one bag tipped over on its side with a strap of black lace spilling out.

Andi is sitting on the edge of the bed, cross-legged in an old tank top and grey sweatpants, hair down and still damp from a shower, and she has been caught mid-fidget — the hem of the tank top twisted around two fingers, pulling it away from her body and letting it snap back, over and over, a nervous tell she doesn't seem to know she's doing.

"Okay. So." She gestures at the carnage with her chin. "I may have. Gotten a little carried away."

A beat. She picks at the hem again.

"The girl at the second store was very — she was helpful. She kept bringing things and saying 'you have a wonderful figure for this' and I just — you can't keep saying no to a person, it's rude, so it sort of. Accumulated." A small laugh, trailing off exactly the way it does when a sentence gets honest. "Which is ridiculous, because I don't — I don't have anywhere to wear most of this, that's the — that's the funny part, isn't it. Bought a whole bag of things with nowhere to go."

She swallows. Looks at the bags. Looks anywhere but at you, then finally makes herself look at you, and her voice drops out of the deflection and into something quieter.

"So I thought — you could pick. One. Whichever one you want." Her fingers twist the hem again, harder. "I haven't even tried most of them on. Some of it I don't even — I don't actually know how some of it goes on, there was one thing that was mostly straps—"

She laughs, and it wobbles, and she presses on before the silence can catch her.

"And I know what I said. About wanting to be — about doing this properly, and not hiding behind the tea and the checking-in. So." She spreads one hand at the bags, palm up, an offering and a surrender at the same time. Her ears are pink. Her eyes are not running.

"Pick something. For me. And I'll — I'll put it on. And come out." A breath. "And you're not allowed to laugh. Even at the straps."

She's already reaching for the nearest bag, needing to move, needing to do something with her hands, and she pulls out a hanger at random — deep red, delicate, absurd against her sensible bedroom — and holds it up against herself with a hopeful, terrified little raise of her eyebrows.

"This one? God, okay, you pick, I'm just going to sit here and hyperventilate quietly while you shop my body like a — like a menu, which is fine, this is fine, it's fine—"

"It's fine," she says again, softer, and waits.

The house holds still after she goes.

The television keeps talking to no one. Her plate sits on the coffee table where she left it. Her wine glass is on the second shelf of the sideboard, untouched, poured and abandoned. Down the hallway: her cardigan draped over the stair rail, her socks on the floor by the laundry room, one flat shoe upright and its twin on its side under the console table. A trail of a woman leaving herself behind at speed.

The garage door is still open a foot. The house's security lights tick on outside, and through them, briefly, the shadow of the hovercraft crossing the cul-de-sac, and four other women's voices on the wind, and then nothing. Suburban quiet. A dishwasher somewhere, finishing its cycle. The television asks if anyone at home wants to refinance.

Twelve hours is a long time to sit with a half-eaten dinner.

The door opens at 6:40 in the morning. There's no honey I'm home, no keys in the bowl. It just opens, slowly, like the person on the other side needs the frame to lean on.

Andi comes in sideways.

She's still in the uniform. The teal-and-grey of it is greyer now, streaked with soot and something darker, and the left shoulder carries two clean singe marks where something hot and fast touched her. Her hair has come half out of the bun and dried that way, matted at the temple, one flat wave pinned across her forehead by sweat and then left there. Her eyes are the worst part. They're not hollow — hollow would be easier. They're overfull, brimming with twelve hours of other people's worst day, and they find the floor of the hallway first, then the sock, then the shoe, and something crosses her face at the evidence of herself leaving.

"Hi," she says. Her voice is wrecked — smoke-rasp, the good kind of raspy gone three registers past it. "Hi. Sorry. I know it's — the time."

She stops in the hallway. She's standing in the exact spot where her cardigan is. She looks down at it, and her hand comes up and touches the singe on her own shoulder, absently, like checking whether it's still there.

"There was a house," she says. Then, correcting, because that's not a sentence: "Fire. Row homes, so it — it went sideways, the third unit, and there was a — " She stops again. Her jaw works. "Everyone's okay. That's the headline. Everybody came out. A grandmother and a dog and a — there was a baby in a second-floor nursery and Marigold made a hardlight ramp and I carried — "

Her voice snags. She covers it with a cough, and then with a smile, the smile arriving a half-second late and sitting wrong on her face, like furniture moved to a new room.

"Everyone's okay," she says again, softer. "So it's a good one. That's a good callout. That's the good kind."

She's standing in the hallway in her boots, tracking soot onto the clean floor, and some deep-running habit wins out over whatever is happening to her — she steps out of them, one-handed, braced on the wall, lines them up by the door with a precision that looks almost mechanical. Then she doesn't know what to do with her hands.

They go to her hips. They leave her hips. They cross. They uncross. She looks at the hallway, and the kitchen, and the door to the bedroom, and anywhere that isn't the person standing in this house who watched her leave twelve hours ago without a kiss goodbye.

"I'll — shower," she says. "First. I probably smell like — I should shower. And there's debrief paperwork, I have to file the — the incident numbers, by noon, so I should really — "

She's moving toward the stairs as she says it. She gets four steps up.

She stops.

She stands on the fourth step with her back to the hallway, one hand on the rail, and the whole architecture of her — the managerial voice, the triage smile, the woman who runs five strong personalities and a county's worth of emergencies without visible effort — sags all at once, like something cut. Her shoulders come down. Her head bows.

For a long moment she doesn't say anything at all. The house is very quiet. The dishwasher has finished. There is only her breathing, which is not steady.

"I didn't say goodbye," she says. "When the alarm went. I just — I hesitated, I didn't even — I should have. I should have said something. I lay on the runway of that thing for forty minutes doing the flight plan and all I could think was, I left without — and what if — " The sentence dies. She won't finish it. She never finishes that one.

Then she turns around on the step, and looks down the hallway, and her eyes are red-rimmed and full and she is daring herself to say the next part, visibly, the way a person dares themselves to step off a ledge.

"I don't want to shower first," she says. "I want — " and here it catches, the way honest sentences always catch in her mouth, and she pushes through it, barely, "— I don't want to be useful for one second. I don't want to file anything or make coffee or tell the story properly with a beginning and an end. I want to be — "

Her voice breaks. She laughs at it breaking, the small covering laugh, and it comes out wet.

"I want someone to come get me," she says. "Off the stairs. That's all. That's the whole — that's what I want, and I can't even say it without—"

She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, quick and hard, the way she probably does in the truck, and stands there on the fourth step in her ruined uniform, waiting.

Hanaobi fills the doorway the way she fills everything — completely, cheerfully, radiating heat like a woman who has never once in her life doubted her welcome anywhere. She's holding a Tupperware of something that smells incredible, because of course she is.

"Saturday," she's saying to Andi. "Ten o'clock, but the hot tub's warm by six if you want to come early and help me terrorize Marigold. Bring nothing, I mean it, I have food for forty, I always cook for forty, it's a problem." Her eyes land on you and go warm and bright and delighted, a slow once-over she doesn't bother hiding, and her smile widens into something with appetite in it. "Oh, and you. Andi, you bring them. Look at this one. You could just — " she makes a gesture like a woman plucking fruit, "— I mean, if you ever wanted to — "

"Hanaobi."

"I'm inviting! That's all! I invite!" She hands Andi the Tupperware, squeezes her shoulder with a hand that could palm a basketball, and heads for the door, pausing on the threshold to look back with the serene confidence of a woman who has never had a party go badly. "Saturday. Both of you. Dress like you feel." And she's gone, down the walk, humming, enormous and happy, a mountain range in a sundress.

The door clicks shut.

Andi stands in her own foyer holding a Tupperware and staring at it.

"She means," she says, to the Tupperware, "a — it's a — you've heard the rumors, everyone's heard the rumors, they're not rumors, they're accurate, it's — " She sets the Tupperware on the console table next to the abandoned shoe. Picks the shoe up. Puts it down. Picks up a piece of mail, examines it, sets it down. Her hands need employment and nothing in the foyer is hiring.

"It's a key party," she says finally, flatly, like ripping off a bandage. "That's what it is. Everyone pretends it's a barbecue and then after nine o'clock there's — bowls. With keys in them. And rules. There are rules, Vessica explained the rules to me once and I retained all of them against my will—"

She turns around. Faces you. And there it is, the whole war, playing openly across her face in a way she'd never permit in front of the wing.

"I saw her," she says, quieter. "Two days ago. From my kitchen window, she was — she carried four of them. Out of the hot tub. Over her shoulders, like — like sacks of flour, just laughing, and they were laughing, and everyone wanted to be carried, and she just — she has it so easy, honey. She wants things and she has them and nobody — there's no form for it, no survey, she doesn't do the math, she just — " Her hands spread, helpless, and drop.

"And I want to go." It comes out fast, guilty. "I do. Some part of me — the part that's been dead since — it woke up when she invited us, I felt it, that's horrible, that's — and I don't want to go. I don't. Because it's a room full of women who treat people like — like a wine club, like rotations, like a renewable resource, and I am not — I can't do that. I have never in my life been able to do that. I meet someone and I start planning their meals—"

She laughs, wet and short, and then stops, and the honest sentence arrives, the one she's been circling for five minutes, and she looks at the floor and then makes herself look up.

"And you'd be there. And it's — people would — " Her jaw tightens. The jealousy is right there under the words, enormous, unsayable. "You're not — we're not — you're from the agency. The program says. Companions are advised against — it's in the paperwork, I've read the paperwork, I've read it twice — and if I walked into that house with you and then some woman put her hand on your — "

She stops. Breathes. Presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose.

"Listen to me. I'm doing the math again. I always do the math."

Her hand drops. She stands there in her own foyer, in the quiet after Hanaobi, in the wreckage of five minutes of honesty, and her eyes come up — hazel, scared, hopeful, starving — and she asks it plainly, no tea, no checking-in, no manager's voice. The hardest sentence she owns.

"Do you want to go?"

.