He said, "Where are you going?" His voice was careful and his face was not. He looked like a man who had received unexpected news and was deciding how to hold it, his eyes on mine with an intensity that was not the usual composure.
"Alderton Street," I said. "14C. It's a fifteen-minute drive from here."
He said, "Aoife. Don't go."
I looked at him. His expression had changed while I was looking, the carefulness falling away, replaced by something more exposed, the face of a man who is asking for something and is not certain he has the right to ask for it. He is saying that because he is used to me being here, I thought. He is saying it because the babies are here and it is easier to say don't go than to say what he actually wants. He is not saying it for the reason I want him to be saying it.
"Jensen," I said. "You don't have to do this. I know what this was. I do not want to be someone you feel obligated to house and feed because I am the mother of your children. That is not a life."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "What if I'm asking you to stay because I want you to stay?"
He said it steadily, looking at me, his hands flat on the counter, and there was something in his face that was neither performance nor management. Something simply there.Something that had decided to be there regardless of what came back at it.
I wanted to believe it. That was the problem. I always wanted to believe it.
"That's not enough," I said. "I need more than 'I want you to stay.' If there is something real you need to say, then say it. All of it. And I will listen. But if there isn't, then please let me go and let us do this properly as parents who live in separate places."
He looked at me for a long time. Something moved in his face, complicated and real, a working through of something interior that he was not hiding from me.
He said, "I need tonight. Can you give me tonight?"
I thought: this is how it has always worked. He asks for time and I give it. But he has never before asked for time to say something. He has asked for time to avoid things. Those are different requests.
"Tonight," I said. I picked up my tea. I went upstairs to listen for the babies.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
The Hallway
Jensen
Isat in the study for two hours after she went upstairs.
The study was where I had been keeping the things I had moved from the walls. The room had become a different kind of space than it had been, not a vigil exactly but somewhere I could still be with them without it taking over the rest of the house.
I sat in the chair in the corner and I thought about Nadia. Not as an absence with a particular shape, but as a person. Her laugh. Her handwriting on the recipe cards in the kitchen. The way she used to make a list for everything, not because she needed the list but because she liked crossing things off. The way she had looked at me on our wedding day as if we had already decided something important before we said the words.
I thought about what she would say, standing in this room, knowing what I knew and feeling what I was feeling. She would have looked at me with that particular expression she used when I was overthinking something I had already decided, the slight tilt of her head and the patience behind her eyes. She would have said: Jensen. You are doing the thing you do when you already know the answer. She would have said: go and say what you need to say.
I thought about the promise I had made at her grave. I thought about it honestly, which meant putting aside the version of the promise that had been about me, about my guilt andmy grief and my inability to imagine a future without her, and asking whether the woman who had known me completely and loved me completely would have wanted this, this particular form of fidelity that kept me frozen and alone in a house full of her things.
She would not. I had known this, somewhere, for some time.
I thought about Aoife. Not in the careful way I had been thinking about her for months, filing thoughts in the category of things to be managed, but directly. She made you laugh, I thought. She made you laugh in the kitchen in a way you had not laughed in three years and you stood at the stove and looked at her and you knew, and you have known since, and you are not going to receive permission from yourself by sitting in a study at ten o'clock at night.
I got up. I went upstairs.
I knocked on the guest room door. There was a pause, and then her voice said come in, and I opened the door. She was sitting up in bed with a book she was clearly not reading, and she looked at me with an expression that was prepared for either thing, whatever I had come to say. She was not going to collapse toward either outcome. She was simply waiting, steady and present, her hands in her lap, her face the face of a person who has learned that you wait for the real thing or you let it go.
I stood in the hallway. I held the doorframe and I said, "I want to tell you everything, if that's all right. All of it. And I want you to hear it before you decide anything."
She put the book down. She looked at me. "All right," she said.
?
I told her about the accident.
