Adaeze left.
I pressed the elevator button for the lobby before I had decided to do so.
I drove to the Okafor house. Charles answered the door resigned. I sat down. I did not begin with preamble.
"What you said to her today cannot be undone," I said. "She is on bed rest. Stress is a direct medical risk factor. What you said to her today was designed to cause harm and it worked."
Adaeze looked at the table. She did not speak. Her hands were folded in front of her and her jaw was set and whatever she was feeling she was not going to give to me.
"She is not Nadia," I said. "I know that. I am not trying to replace Nadia. But this woman is carrying my children and she is alone in this city and she has done nothing to harm you or anyone else, and I am asking you, as someone who loves you, to stop."
Charles said, "Adaeze." Very quietly.
She did not respond. I waited for a moment and then I left.
I drove home and went into the house and stood in the hallway. The house was quiet. I went to the living room. Aoife was still on the couch. She had her grandmother's throw pulled up around her, and she was not reading, and she looked up when I came in. Her face was composed and her eyes were careful, the look of a person who has received something and put it away and is managing.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Fine," she said, in the tone that means something different from fine.
I looked at her. I wanted to say the thing I was not yet ready to say. So I said, "I'm going to make dinner. Stay where you are."
She stayed where she was. I made dinner. We ate it at the counter, side by side, and I told her something Callum had said on the phone that afternoon, and she laughed, and the sound of it settled over the kitchen like something being released.
It was not enough. I knew it was not enough. But it was what I had that night, and I gave it without reservation, and she accepted it, and we ate until the plates were empty.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The Appointments
Aoife
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves.” — Thomas Merton
He started coming to the prenatal appointments in week thirty.
The first time, he simply appeared in the kitchen on a Thursday morning with his jacket on and his keys in his hand at the time I normally left for the clinic, and he said, "I'll drive you." I told him it was a routine check, that there was nothing that needed his attention. He said, "I know. I'll drive you." He said it calmly, without any of the particular energy of a man staking a claim, just a statement of what was going to happen. I stood there for a moment and then I put on my coat.
He sat in the waiting room with a book. Not his phone, an actual book. I came out after the appointment and he was in the corner chair with the book open and he looked up and said, "How did it go?" I told him. He nodded and folded down the page corner and stood up, and we walked to the car.
He came to the next one and the one after that. On the fourth appointment, when Dr. Mehta was going over the monitoring results, she looked at him sitting in the chair by the wall and said, "Do you have questions, Mr. Shaw?" He had written them in a small notebook. Three questions, precise and medical. Dr. Mehta answered each one and looked at himafterward with the expression of a person who has revised their assessment of something upward.
I looked at the notebook. He has been reading about this. He sat somewhere alone with a medical book and he wrote down questions and brought them to my appointment. He did this without telling me.
After the appointment we stopped at the grocery store because I was out of chamomile tea. He came in with me, which he had not done before. He pushed the trolley because I could not manage it comfortably at thirty weeks with twins, and I walked beside him through the aisles and he held up the chamomile tea questioningly and I said yes, and he put it in the trolley, and we moved on to the fruit section. It was such a completely ordinary thing that I had to look away for a moment.
I bought the fruit. He carried both bags to the car. We drove home and he made lunch while I put my feet up, and we ate it at the counter, and I thought: I am not reading anything into this. This is just what is happening.
I was reading everything into it. I could not help it. I had never been able to help it, with him. That was the problem that had been the problem from the beginning.
?
The two in the morning conversation happened the night of the chamomile tea.
I had been sleeping badly for weeks. Jensen was in the kitchen when I came downstairs, at the counter with a glass of water, and he looked up when I came in with the expression of someone who had also been awake for a while and was not surprised to have company.
