TWENTY-ONE
What the Cameras Caught
Jensen
Isaw the whole thing on my phone, pulled over on the highway.
I watched Adaeze. I had known her for nine years. I loved her in the way you love the people who were present in the worst moment of your life, who bore witness to your loss because they shared it. I loved her and I watched what she said to Aoife on my front step and something in me went very still.
Aoife did not move. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and she did not respond to any of it, and she held herself with a stillness that I recognised from the hospital, from the Wednesday shifts at Harrington's, from the morning after I had walked out of her apartment on Carver Street. She had learned, this woman, to absorb things without moving. To stand in the middle of something that was trying to knock her down and simply not be knocked down.
I drove faster.
I arrived as Adaeze was leaving. I said her name. She turned. Her face was different from what I expected, not triumphant, not even fully angry anymore, but exhausted, emptied out, the face of a woman who has spent herself entirely on something and is standing in the aftermath of it. I said, "Go home. I'll call you tonight." She looked at me for a moment, and something flickered in her expression that was not quiteremorse and was something in its vicinity, and then she went to her car.
I went inside. Aoife was on the couch with a book open in her lap that she was not reading, and she looked up when I came in and said, "I'm fine," before I had said anything. She said it with the steadiness she used when she was protecting herself from having to explain something, the voice of someone who has decided how much to show.
I looked at her. I wanted to say something that would address what Adaeze had said and I could not locate the words in that moment. So I said the wrong thing. I said: "She's having my kids. I didn't have a choice about any of this."
I heard it as I said it. I watched it land on her face for a fraction of a second before she arranged it away, the brief, involuntary expression of a person who has absorbed a blow they were half-expecting. She said she wanted to rest and went upstairs.
I stood in the living room after she had gone and I thought about what I had said. That is not all she is, I thought. You know that is not all she is. You have known for some time that it is not all she is.
The following morning I drove to the Okafor house. Charles answered the door with the expression of a man who had been expecting this visit and was resigned to it. I sat at their kitchen table and Adaeze sat across from me with Charles beside her and I spoke plainly.
I said, "What you said to her yesterday cannot happen again. She is twenty-five weeks pregnant with twins and she has a preeclampsia diagnosis that puts her at real risk for stroke and seizure if her blood pressure is not managed. What happened on that doorstep put my children in danger."
Adaeze said, "I was entitled to go to that house. Those are my daughter's things."
"Yes," I said. "And you will always be welcome there. But not unannounced, and not to do what you did yesterday. I need the emergency key back."
She looked at me for a long time. Her face was closed. Then she opened her purse and set the key on the table. Charles walked me to the door and said, quietly, "She is not handling this well." I said I knew. He said, "Neither are you, necessarily." I looked at him. He looked at the floor. He said, "I'm not taking sides. I'm just saying what I see."
I drove home. I stood in the hallway and I looked at the wedding photograph by the door, Nadia laughing, entirely unaware and entirely alive. I looked at it for a long time. Then I went to the study and I began, slowly and carefully, to decide which photographs to move.
I did not take down Imani's portrait or Noah's giraffe. Those were not moving. But some of the others, I wrapped carefully and placed in storage boxes. I came downstairs in the morning to find Aoife in the kitchen with her tea and she looked up at me, and then she looked at the wall where the wedding photograph had been, and she looked back at me.
She said nothing. She looked back down at her tea.
That was enough.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Taking Some of It Down
Jensen
Adaeze came a second time on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after the first visit. She had calculated it: a day she knew I would be at the office, at an hour she knew the cleaning service did not come. She had used a second key I had not known she had.
I was in a meeting with the Carmichael partners when the notification came through. I excused myself. I stood in the corridor and I watched it on my phone.
Aoife was on the couch, feet elevated, reading. The knock at the living room door clearly surprised her because she looked up with an expression of open attentiveness that changed when she saw who it was. She went very still, that specific stillness of hers, and she looked at Adaeze with a face that gave nothing away.
Adaeze sat down. She had decided on this approach, the sitting, the composed arrival. She began by saying that she was not there to cause trouble. What followed was the kind of cruelty that is more precise than rage because it is premeditated. She told Aoife that Jensen had loved Nadia in a way that left no room for anyone else. She said Aoife was not the first woman Jensen had sought comfort from in the years since the accident, an implication delivered so carefully that its malice was insulated from direct challenge. She said the moment the babies were born Jensen's obligation to Aoife would be complete. She said: "My daughter was the love of his life. Whatever you are, you are notthat, and you will never be that, and you deserve to know it before you build your hopes any higher."
Aoife looked at her hands in her lap. The camera caught her face, and I could read it from twenty miles away. She had received the words exactly where they were aimed.
