I take the mug.
I sit with it for a moment.
“He tore it in half,” I say.
Mara’s eyebrows go up slightly. “The letter.”
“He read it, set it down, picked it up, and tore it in half. Then he told me I’m the most capable person in his organization and that he has no interest in replacing me and that the answer is no.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
She looks at her tea. “What did you say?”
“I pushed back. He ended the conversation.” I wrap my hands around the mug and feel the warmth of it and think about standing in his office this morning with the two halves of my letter sitting on his desk between us and his expression, not angry exactly, just completely and utterly immovable. “He didn’t even ask me why. He just said no, and that was the end of it.”
“Elena.”
“I know.”
“You have to tell him.”
“I know.”
“Not eventually. Not when you feel ready. Now. This week.” She looks at me directly. “You are pregnant with this man’s child, and he just refused your resignation, which means you cannot leave without telling him why, and the longer you wait, the worse this gets.”
“I am aware of the mathematics of my situation, Mara.”
“Then act like it.”
I look at my tea. The steam rises off it in a thin, pale column and disappears. “I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t know what happens after I tell him. I don’t know what kind of man he is when the thing in front of him is not a business problem he can solve by tearing something in half.”
“You’ve worked for him for two years.”
“I’ve worked for the version of him that exists inside that office. This is not an office problem.”
Mara is quiet for a moment. “Are you scared of him?”
I think about it honestly. “No. I’m scared of what telling him changes. I’m scared of what it doesn’t change.” I look up at her. “Either way, my life looks completely different on the other side of that conversation, and I’m not ready for that yet.”
“You don’t get to be ready, Elena. Ready is a luxury you don’t have right now.”
I know she’s right. I have known she’s right since the moment I sat on that park bench and watched her face when I told her.
“Give me a few days,” I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. “A few days,” she says. “That’s all I’m giving you.”
My father’s house in Queens on a Tuesday evening should feel the way it always feels, garlic and warmth and the low sound of the television from the front room.
It feels like all of those things when I come through the door, and it also feels like something else, something I notice before I can name it, a quietness underneath the familiar sounds that was not there the last time I visited.
Papa is in his chair by the window.
He looks up when I come in, and his face does the thing it always does, opening into something warm and immediate, and I cross the room and kiss his cheek and pull the footstool over and sit beside him the way I have sat since I was small enough to fit in the space between the chair and the wall.
He looks worse than last time.
