I told her about the phone call and what Nadia had said and the forty-five minutes I thought I had. I told her about arrivingon Briar Hill Lane and Mrs. Parrish walking toward me with her hands clasped, and what I had seen in her face before she said a word.
I told her about the corridor at Mercy General. About Adaeze shaking her head. About the room at Eastside Children's Hospital and the lamp in the corner giving off a warm light, and the two cribs side by side, and the fifty-four minutes, and kissing their foreheads. I told her about the morgue and my father having to remove me at one in the morning.
I told her about the year. The drinking and the graves and the company held together by my father and my brother. The facility. Coming back.
I told her about the promise. I said, "I went to her grave the week I returned to work. I told her there would not be anyone else. I meant it. I kept it for two and a half years, until the Tuesday night I walked out of the cemetery and ended up at Mae's and you brought me coffee without being asked."
She was very still. She had been still through all of it. Her hands were in her lap and her face was quiet and completely open, listening with her whole self the way she did when something mattered to her.
"I knew what I was doing, when I started coming to your apartment," I said. "I knew it was not fair. I told myself you understood the terms. You didn't. That is on me. Not you."
She did not say anything. She was listening.
"The name," I said. "I know you heard it. I know what that cost you, and I am sorry. I am sorry for the months and the patterns and the things I said when you told me about the pregnancy, and the money on the table, which I will regret for the rest of my life. And I am sorry for the months you spent alone after, working three jobs, carrying them alone. You deserved to be sought. You should have been sought."
Her eyes were full. She had not cried yet. Her face was doing a particular thing, holding the fullness carefully, waiting to hear the rest.
She said, very quietly, "Go on."
I said, "You are not Nadia. I am not asking you to be. I loved her and she is gone and I will carry that for the rest of my life. What I am telling you is that it does not leave no room. I thought it did. I was wrong."
I said, "Somewhere in these months, you became the person I want to tell things to. The first person. You became the one whose laugh I have stored away and thought about. You became the person I pack a hospital bag for in secret and research preeclampsia protocols for at midnight and buy chamomile tea for because the kind with the blue label is the one you actually want." I stopped. Then I said, "I do not know what to call any of that other than what it is. I know what it is. I have known for some time. I have been afraid of it for the same amount of time, and I am less afraid of it tonight than I was this morning, and I expect I will be less afraid of it tomorrow than I am tonight."
She was crying now. Quietly, without performance, her face entirely undone, tears she did not move to wipe because she was listening too hard to do anything else.
"I am standing in this hallway at eleven at night telling you that I want to try," I said. "Not because of the babies, though I love them already in a way I could not have prepared for. Because of you. Because you are the person who has been in this house for twelve weeks and made it feel like somewhere other than a monument, and I did not know how badly I needed that until you were here."
A silence. She looked at me with a face that was entirely open now, the guard entirely down, not because she had decided to trust me but because she had been moved past the point where the decision was available.
She said, "I don't want to be the person you settled for."
"You are the person who made me want to try again," I said. "That is not settling. That is the most terrifying thing I have done since I walked back out of Hargrove Recovery Center. Because at least then I had already lost everything and there was nothing left to be afraid of. This is different. I have something to be afraid of now and I am doing it anyway." I paused. "I think that might be the bravest thing I've managed in three years."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then the corner of her mouth moved, and something broke open gently in her expression, the last of it, the last of the guarding, and she said, "Come in, then."
I went in.
I held her for a long time without saying anything, which was the right thing to do, and which I had learned from her, over twelve weeks in the same house, the value of a silence that holds rather than hides.
The babies made a sound from their bassinet. We both turned toward it at the same moment, and Brigid settled back into sleep, and Seamus made his skeptical face at the ceiling, and then he settled too.
Aoife laughed quietly against my shoulder.
I held on.
EPILOGUE
One Year Later
“We loved with a love that was more than love.” — Edgar Allan Poe
Jensen — One Year Later
I go to the graves on Thursdays. This has not changed. I do not think it will.
I park on the lane by the east gate and I walk in past the older section and I turn at the oak tree and I walk to where they are. I bring yellow flowers for Imani, which I buy on the way from the stand on Clement Street where the woman knows what I want and has it ready before I ask. I bring a small stuffed rabbit for Noah, which I replace every few months when the weather has had its way with the previous one.
I sit on the ground between the headstones the way I always have. I tell Nadia about the week. I told her last Thursday about Seamus, who has started pulling himself upright against the coffee table with the focused determination of someone who has identified a goal and does not intend obstacles to be relevant. I told her about Brigid, who has discovered that if she makes a specific sound in a specific register, someone in the household will come to investigate, and who has been conducting this experiment with the scientific rigour of someone who intends to publish her findings.
