He squeezed my ankle once and stood and shrugged his jacket off, draping it over the arm of the chair. He loosened his collar. Sat back down on the coffee table and reached into the bakery bag and produced a small wax paper parcel and held it out.
“Eat something,” he said.
I took it.
The lemon pastry was good — bright and sweet; it cut through nausea without demanding anything. I ate half of it and he finished the rest. The television murmured something about open floor plans and natural light, and the sitting room held us both in its amber lamp glow like nothing in the world was wrong.
“How was Baton Rouge?” I asked.
“Long.” He leaned back on his hands. “The diocese budget committee takes four hours to do two hours of work.”
“Sounds familiar.” I smiled despite myself.
So did he. “The Henderson grant came through, by the way. Full amount.”
“That's good. The September intake needs the storage expansion.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “You wrote a good proposal.”
I finished the pastry. Folded the wax paper small. The television said something about load-bearing walls.
Judah reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.
There it was. That gesture.
I let him do it. I sat in his blanket on his sofa in his house and I let him tuck my hair back and look at me with those pale eyes that saw everything and had apparently not seen what I'd done today, and I thought:this is what they all do. Everyone in this town. They sit in the warmth of it and they let the man do the gesture and they don't ask the question.
I understood them now. That was the terrible part.
I understood exactly how it worked.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“Probably.”
He stood. Held his hand out.
I took it. Let him pull me up. Let him walk me up the stairs with his hand at my back.
He tucked me in. Actually tucked me in — pulled the sheet up, pressed his mouth to my forehead, the same spot, always the same spot.
“I'll be up later,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
He left the door open the way I'd told him I liked it, because I'd grown up in a house where closed doors meant something, and he had remembered that without being reminded.
At times I caught myself thinking that this Judah could not be the one who had those files in his study. It couldn’t be so. This Judah was attentive and calm, and…
I lay in the dark and listened to him move through the house below me. The study. I heard the study door.
I closed my eyes.
I had lied to Judah’s face and he had tucked me in and brought me lemon pastry. And tomorrow I was going to have to do it again and the day after that and I didn't know yet how many days I had before one of us broke.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
The nausea was still there.
