"I'm going to call Dad," he said.
"Callum."
"I'm calling Dad. And then we're going to figure out what you owe that woman and make sure you pay it." He stood up. "I'll get us both coffee," he said. "And then I'm making the call."
He made the call.
?
The intervention was at my parents' house four days later. I told them everything, sober, which made it harder in some ways and necessary in all of them. I told the whole of it from the beginning, the diner and the months and the name in the dark and the morning after and the pregnancy and the money on the table and the door.
The room received it in different ways. My mother looked at the floor for a moment, and when she looked up her face had the colour of someone who has just felt something physical, a woman receiving news she had been hoping would not arrive. My father looked at me with the expression he used when he was arriving at a judgment, not unkind, but unsparing, and he did not look away while I was talking. Callum's jaw was set in the way that meant he had already decided what he thought.
Adaeze erupted. She called Aoife names that no one in the room repeated afterward. She said Jensen was dishonouring Nadia's memory, that he had made a promise at her grave andit had apparently meant nothing, that he had been out sleeping with some woman for months, getting her pregnant, while her daughter and grandchildren had been in the ground barely three years. Her voice was shaking. She pressed her hands flat on her knees as she spoke, as if anchoring herself, and she did not look at me when she said the worst things, she looked at the wall. She was not wrong about the promise. That was the worst part.
Charles put his hand on his wife's arm and said her name quietly. She did not stop, but she lowered her voice.
My father waited until the room was quiet again. Then he looked at me and spoke in the way he spoke when he had something to say that he was not going to ornament.
"You got a woman pregnant," he said, "and you put money on her table and you walked out. You don't know where she is. You don't know if she is all right. You don't know if she kept the baby. You sat in this room and told us about a woman you spent seven months with and you do not know her last name." He let that stand. "She did not do anything to you. She walked into something without understanding what it was and you let her stay in it because it suited you. And when the consequences arrived, you left her alone with them and four hundred dollars and a door slammed in her face."
I had nothing to say to this. Everything he said was accurate.
My mother said, quietly, "I want to meet her." Her voice was careful, controlled, but there was something in her eyes when she said it that was not controlled at all.
My father told me I was on leave from the company for six months. I did not discuss it.
On the drive home I sat in the car outside my house for a long time before going in. I thought about a girl on the other side of the city working I didn't know how many jobs with a pregnancy she had not planned and no family and adisconnected phone and a new address I did not have. I thought about what my father had said. She did not do anything to you.
He was right. She had done nothing to me. She had been kind to me, consistently and without conditions, for seven months, and I had taken the kindness and given her nothing in return except access to a grief I had never explained and a door I slammed on my way out.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The Big Man at the Door
Jensen
It took me two weeks to build the words. Not to find them exactly, because the things I needed to say were simply the truth, and the truth was available to me the moment I stopped defending myself against it. What took two weeks was deciding that I was going to say them regardless of whether I was ready.
I went to her apartment on Carver Street on a Thursday morning. I knew the address from the months I had been going there and I had not thought, until I pressed the buzzer and nothing happened, to consider that she might no longer be there.
The man who answered the door was large and broad-shouldered, with the bearing of someone who had recently moved into a space and was still deciding whether it suited him. He looked at me with the mild suspicion that strangers at one's door generally merit.
"I’m looking for the woman who lived here before you," I said. "Her name is Aoife. Dark hair. She moved in sometime last year."
He thought about this for a moment. "Don't know that name. I moved in six weeks ago. Place was empty when I got here."
Six weeks ago. She had left the same week I had walked out of her apartment. I stood on the pavement and looked upat the fourth-floor window, the window I had stood at many times looking out at the side of the building next door, and I understood that she had not waited to see what I would do. She had made her decision immediately and she had acted on it, and the practical difficulty I was now facing was a consequence I had created entirely for myself.
I did not know her last name.
I stood on the pavement outside her empty apartment and I thought about what it said about me, the totality of what I did not know about her. I had kept her at a specific distance in all the ways that mattered, never asking for the information that would have made her real in the parts of my life I kept separate from her, and now that distance had become physical. You made this, I thought. This is exactly what you designed, and now you're standing in it.
I went to Mae's Diner that afternoon. The woman behind the counter looked at me with a professional neutrality that contained something beneath it that was not neutral at all, the look of a woman who had been briefed.
"I'm looking for Aoife," I said. "She used to work here."
