The names in her mouth undid something in me that I had been holding very tightly for a very long time. I felt the full force of it, not grief exactly, but the combined weight of having kept this separate and the awareness that the separation had now failed.
"They were my wife and children," I said. "They died three years ago. I would prefer not to discuss it."
I said it the way you say something when you are keeping a door shut through force of will. I watched her face receive it. The quietness on her face did not change, but something beneath it shifted, a barely perceptible tightening, the way a person absorbs a blow they were half-expecting. She did not flinch. She did not look away.
"Okay," she said. She looked at the table. Then she looked at me again and said, very quietly, "I'm sorry. For what happened to them."
I said nothing. I finished my coffee. I left.
On the walk to my car I was consumed by a shame that was not about the drinking but about something more specific, the shame of a man who had spent seven months using another woman's warmth to approximate the warmth of his dead wife, and who had now been caught doing it. You could have told her, I thought. You could have told her what this was and what you were carrying and let her decide. But you didn't, because telling her would have made her a person with a choice and you needed her not to leave.
She did not contact me for nearly three weeks. I visited the graves twice that week and both times I sat between the headstones and I felt not the usual release of talking out loudbut only the particular guilt of a man who has been unkind to someone who did not deserve it.
Three weeks felt like a long time.
CHAPTER
NINE
Twenty Days
Aoife
Idid not contact him for twenty days.
I thought about what he had told me, which was very little but which was, in its way, everything. A wife and children, deceased, three years ago, and a tone of voice that communicated with perfect clarity that these were not things I was permitted to ask about. I sat with those three facts and I turned them over and I began to understand the shape of the thing I had been inside for seven months.
He was grieving. He was still, three years later, actively and completely grieving, and I was something he had found in the middle of it that had nothing to do with healing. I was warmth, not chosen but utilised.
I sat with this for twenty days. I went to work. On a Sunday afternoon I reread my grandfather's letter and let it make me cry the way it occasionally did, not from sadness exactly but from the fullness of being loved by someone who had taken the time to write it all down. I thought about what my grandmother would say about this situation. She would have looked at me across the kitchen table with steady eyes and said it plainly and kindly. Tabhair aire duit féin, she would have told me. Take care of yourself.
Simone knew something was wrong. She brought me soup on a Wednesday evening without calling first, which was the Simone version of a hug, and she sat on the couch with meand we watched something on television that neither of us paid attention to and she said nothing about anything that mattered and it was one of the best evenings I had in those three weeks.
On the twentieth day he came to my door.
?
He had flowers, which surprised me. Not the act of flowers in itself but the specific flowers, which were the kind you find in a corporate reception area, large and expensive and perfectly arranged, and which he was holding with the slight awkwardness of a man who had made a decision and was committed to it but had not entirely worked out all the details of execution. They were slightly wilted at the edges. I gathered later, putting things together, that he had taken them from his office on the way over.
He was wearing his suit still, the jacket slightly open, his tie loosened. He looked like a man who had come from somewhere serious and had not stopped to reconsider. His expression was not quite an apology but it was in the same territory, stripped of the usual containment, something more open and uncertain than I had ever seen on his face before.
"I was unkind to you," he said. "I'm sorry."
I stood in the doorway and I looked at him and I thought about the twenty days and the name in the dark and the cold way he had said I would prefer not to discuss it and I thought about everything Simone had been right about. I thought about the decision I had been turning over for twenty days, whether there was a version of this that I was allowed to want, knowing what I now knew.
I opened the door wider. He came in.
I told myself: you know what this is now. You have no excuse for not knowing. Whatever happens from here you are choosing with your eyes open.
I knew. I chose. I have thought about that moment many times since. I was choosing something I knew was not enough, because having something that was not enough felt, when you had been alone for long enough, more survivable than having nothing at all.
Simone texted the next morning. She said: "Did he come back?" I said yes. There was a long pause. Then she said: "Okay. I love you. Be careful." I said I would. I was not, in the end, careful enough. But I loved her for saying it.
CHAPTER
TEN
Stolen Flowers
