I looked at the pizza again. Aggressively at the pizza.
“So,” she said.
“So,” I said.
“Gus.” She set her slice down on the plate and turned to face me more fully. “Sandra said Whitfield’s coming tomorrow, and she doesn’t think it’s going to be bad news. Which is everything I wanted.” She said it like a disclaimer. “I want to be clear that it’s everything I wanted.”
“But.”
“But when we came up with this plan, he had a week. Maybe less. It felt contained. Manageable.” She picked up her beer. “What if he actually gets better, Daniel? What if he gets better enough to come home?”
There it was. The thing that had sat in the back of my mind all afternoon, unnamed, waiting for tonight.
“Then we deal with it,” I said.
“He’ll expect us to be—“ She gestured between us. “He’s going to want to see it. The whole town already believes we’re married. If they don’t see us acting like it, someone’s going to say something to Gus. You know how this town?—“
“I’m aware of how this town works,” I said. “Yeah.”
She looked at me. I looked at her. The smear of tomato sauce was still there at the corner of her mouth, and I was doing an absolutely heroic job of not looking at it.
“The fiction has to hold,” she said. “However long it takes.”
“Right,” I said. I set my beer down and pondered the logistics of it, because logistics were useful right now. Logistics were concrete and manageable and did not involve tomato sauce or the memory of ten seconds in a hospital room. “Which means if he comes home…”
“We’d need to be living together,” Ellie said. “Obviously. He’s going to?—”
“You have the house,” I said. “More room. Ground floor bedroom for him; we’d be upstairs.” I said it like I was describing a floor plan and not the arrangement of where I would be sleeping in proximity to my wife. My actual legal wife. “I’ve still got the lease here through April. It’s not like I’d be giving anything up permanently.”
She blinked at me. “You want to move in with me.”
“It’s the practical solution, yeah.”
“Into my house.”
“Gus has a better chance of getting home to his own space than to a new one. And your house has the layout for it.” I watched her work through it, the logic catching before the implications did, and then the implications catching up all atonce. “It would be temporary,” I said. “Same as everything else. Until we figure out the annulment.”
The word landed between us and sat there.
Annulment. The off-ramp. The part of the plan that was supposed to make all of this manageable. Except that every time I said it, I had to actively talk myself into meaning it, which was a thing I was going to need to actually analyze at some point in the near future.
After a moment, she said, “Okay, yes. That’s the logical thing.” She reached for her pizza again, and I watched her take a bite, and the tomato sauce situation resolved itself when she grabbed a napkin, which should have helped and somehow only made things worse because now I knew the taste of that mouth and could easily?—
She is your best friend,I reminded myself.
She’s also your wife, said the considerably less helpful part of my brain, with the smug energy of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity to say it.
We are not doing this, I told that part.
She’s literally wearing your ring.
We are absolutely not doing this, and I need you to be quiet.
Ellie was saying something about the timeline, about whether Patrice could keep covering the store through a transition. I nodded and made the appropriate sounds, keeping my eyes at a responsible altitude while I thought of the annulment, and about April, and about all the sensible and mature reasons why I was going to keep things exactly as they were.
I was a responsible adult. I was her best friend. I was not going to take advantage of a situation she hadn’t signed up for, regardless of what the paperwork said.
“Daniel,” she said.
