202 days:
And yet
It's impossible to talk to Annie on the phone. She goes into lapses for minutes, hours, at a time, and half of the time you have to call her back days later to get an answer to a question as simple as "How are you?"
But she is more than just a rarity in these times after the war: She has possession of the only child yet born to two people who have won.
Peeta tells me to leave her alone, tells me that it would be unnecessarily cruel to call and remind her that my child will have a father while hers does not, but he also claims that Gale's warning was the combination of alcohol and jealousy, so I ignore him and call her while he and Haymitch are presumably shoveling sidewalks.
At first she is easy with me, quick to ask after us, to update me on Kai, but then I tell her about Gale and she goes quiet for long enough that I sigh and start to hang up.
"You can't let it bother you," she says right as I'm about to give up. "What might happen, I mean. That's one thing I've had to learn the hard way. I never thought that I'd have to tell some clump of dirt that I was pregnant, but that's the only way I could lie to myself and pretend that Finnick knew he was going to be a dad."
There is a tiny catch in her voice when she adds, "I imagined telling him a thousand times. If I'd ever let myself think that that was how it would actually happen, I would have gone crazy."
I think about the way her eyes sometimes go in two different directions, and decide to let it slide.
"You don't ever worry that they'll do something to Kai to hurt you?" I ask her, and her laugh jangles, grating.
"I fight it every second of every day," she tells me. "But it doesn't make me love Kai any less. I never regret having him. Even if someday I have to talk to him through a slab of marble, I'll still be grateful for the times when he smiles like Finnick, or laughs like him, or hugs me tight enough that…"
She trails off, and I sigh and sit down at the kitchen table, dragging a finger across the honey colored wood, watching the hands on the clock move, watching the sun slip across the floor.
"…it reminds me to just enjoy the present and not worry about what might happen," she says finally, as seamlessly as if she hadn't kept me waiting for sixteen minutes and forty-three seconds. "It's worth it, Katniss. Every second that you get."
"Do you really think so?" I ask her, and she goes silent again.
"You know what Peeta told me once?" she grabs me back, right before I am about to hang up, "We had that meeting where they wanted to re-instate the Games one last time, remember? Peeta and I were the only ones who voted no."
I force out a noise of affirmation that somehow sounds more like a squeak.
"After it was over, I asked him why he didn't vote yes when it would have been the easiest way to get back at them for what they did to him. He told me that if it hadn't been for the Games he never would have fallen in love with you."
She sucks in a breath and then plows ahead.
"It's all about your priorities, really. I've had Finnick ripped away from me more times than I can count. But you know the weird thing? If I had the chance I'd take him back again, and again, and again. I'd take the hurt as many times as I could because it would come with his laugh, and his arms around me, and the way his eyes looked when he said my name.
"Peeta loves you so much, Katniss. So much. I've never seen anyone look at another person the way he looks at you. After that quack doctor got through with us, Peeta thought he'd lost you forever, he thought there was every chance you'd hurt him again, and he still went after you. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what would drive him to go after a certain heartbreak just because he wanted to see you one more time?"
I make another muffled noise, not entirely sure it's audible, and Annie tells me one more thing before she hangs up.
"Peeta's the only person I've ever met," she says, "who really gets it right."