It's later — with Iris finally asleep against me and the house gone quiet — that I let myself think the thing I've been not-thinking all afternoon.
Her mother offered her a flight home. Her job. Her whole old life handed back to her, on one condition.
Leave the woman behind.
And she said no.
She said notoday.
And I lie there in the dark, in a house I love, beside a woman I love, running the arithmetic I have run my entire life. How long. How much. How many times can somebody choose you before they get tired of what it costs them.
I hate that I'm doing it.
I do it anyway.
27
IRIS
I wake at three and know immediately I'm not going back to sleep.
Cat is a warm weight against my back, breathing slow. The house is making its night noises — the loose shutter, the beam above the hallway that ticks as it cools. Everything is exactly as it should be.
And I feel like someone has died.
That's the part nobody warns you about. Iwon. I said every single thing I've wanted to say to my mother since I was five years old, and she got into her car and drove away, and I won.
And now I'm lying in the dark grieving a woman who is alive and well and asleep in a hotel in Avignon.
I get up.
The kitchen is cold. I sit at the table in one of Cat's shirts and don't turn the light on, because turning the light on would make it a thing.
I'm still sitting there when the floor creaks behind me.
"Don't," I say, without turning around. "Please don't ask if I'm okay."
A pause.
Then the little light over the stove comes on — just that one, low and yellow — and Cat crosses to the fridge in her t-shirt and her ridiculous socks and starts taking things out of it.
"What are you doing?"
"Making you an omelette."
"Cat. It's three in the morning."
"Yes." She cracks an egg one-handed against the bowl. "And you haven't eaten since lunch yesterday, and you were sick in the lavender, and you're sitting in the dark in my shirt like a Victorian widow. So I'm making you an omelette."
She doesn't sayare you okay.She doesn't sayshe doesn't deserve you,oryou did the right thing,or any of the things I'd have had to be gracious about.
She just cooks. Butter into the pan. The good knife out of the block. Hair a disaster, face still creased from the pillow, working with the unhurried competence of a woman who has done this ten thousand times for people who couldn't say what was wrong with them.
I watch her, and something in my chest gives out.
"I feel like she's dead," I say.
Cat doesn't stop moving. "I know."
