“We stay here,” Alex said. “Sometimes—”
“I don’t need the details,” I said. Alex opened his mouth and I cut him off. “I don’twantthem.”
“What did you want, Doll?” Oona said. She glanced at the clock over the oven.
“What? Oh, you mean— Oh, right. Alex, someone’s in the pub. In the office. It wasn’t Ned, or he would have answered me. I should have just called the cops and saved myself this Freudian nightmare.”
Oona turned to Alex. “Someone is in the pub. Should you go check that out?”
“I should go check that out,” Alex said.
Oona nodded, and Alex went to get his coat. She rubbed at the spot between her eyes tiredly.
“It’s a lot of work, huh?” I said.
She didn’t pretend not to know what I meant. “It’s a lot of other stuff, too,” she said.
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DObut walk back to the pub with Alex. I scuffed along the heavily salted sidewalks, sulking, but he didn’t say anything. He would never say anything, unprompted.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“You could have told me,” I said to the back of his coat. “I’m not a bomb about to go off. Am I not the kind of person you can tell the truth to?”
“You weren’t the most important person to consider this time,” he said over his shoulder. “Oona wanted to wait awhile. We waited awhile.”
“So I guess you can keep a secret now?” I said. That knowledge gave me a chill, and I remembered that animal scent I’d caught on Alex the night Joey had died. Sweat? Or blood? What was he capable of? So much more than I’d given him credit for. I would have to think about this. “Why, though? Why the secrecy?”
He stopped for the light to change at the crosswalk, pressing the button three times as he always did. The streets were still empty at ridiculous o’clock, but Alex didn’t like to cross against the lights. “I assume Oona wanted to make sure,” he said.
“Make sure of what?”
“Make sure, before telling anyone, that I was worth the trouble.”
“Oh,” I said, scraping at ice on the sidewalk with my boot heel.
“Can you be okay with it? I think we’re happy. I’m happy.”
What could I say to that? “I was caught off guard, that’s all.”
“I know how that feels,” Alex said.
“You know I don’t like people making decisions behind my back. But then this—this decision is none of my business.”
“My business is your business,” he said. “I was going to tell you soon.”
I looked over at him. “Soon, as in you had set a deadline?”
The light changed, and he set off across Milwaukee Avenue. “Soon. I’m sure about her. Even if she needed some time to be sure about me.”
I stopped in the middle of the street and watched him walk away from me, then hurried to catch up.
“That sounds like… a big deal,” I said.
I had another block to think about why any of Alex’s good news should bother me. All the theories I could think of cast an unflattering light on me or choices I’d made that were too late to fix.
I couldn’t think of what to say. The lyrics, they had always been my problem.
I’d never seen Alex in love. I’d never even considered what that would look like. But it wasn’t just Alex. Had I ever seen it up close?Love.I remembered Sachin’s thumb, gentle on Heather’s skin. How? How did anyone place their hearts, total trust, in someone else? It could all end, any moment. You could claim forever, call someonemine, get comfortable—and it could, just, end.
