PART 10:

He could hear her in the kitchen. the tap, the kettle, the specific sound of her moving around a small space she’d learned completely. He’d grown so accustomed to the sounds of her in the apartment that their absence on the night she worked late, and he went to bed before she got home had started to register as a kind of quiet he didn’t prefer.

That was information. He was aware it was information. She came back with two mugs and set one in front of him without asking because she knew at this point how he took it. A splash of milk, no sugar, slightly too hot, and sat on the opposite end of the couch, sideways, one knee pulled up. The dress had been replaced at some point with the oversized university sweatshirt she wore on weekend mornings.

He hadn’t heard her change. The sweatshirt was from a school she hadn’t attended. She’d bought it years ago at a thrift store, and it was soft from washing and slightly fraying at one cuff, and it was the most unco thing she owned. and she wore it like armor of a different kind. They drank their tea. My mother actually apologized, Victoria said eventually.

She did. She’s never done that. Not in a way that meant it. She turned her mug in her hands. She apologizes for minor things. If she’s late, if she said a wrong date, but not for not for the actual things. People surprise you, he said, because he’d said it earlier and it had been true then. You said that already. Still applies.

She looked at her tea. I don’t know what to do with it. The apology. I want to believe it changes something, but I also know that a single sentence in a hotel ballroom doesn’t undo years of being overlooked. She paused. Is that ungrateful? No, it’s accurate. He shifted slightly on the couch to face her better. You can accept the apology and still need time for it to mean something.

Those aren’t opposites. She looked at him. How do you do that? Do what? Make complicated things sound simple without making them feel simple. I just say what seems true. Most people can’t do that. Most people are worried about how the truth sounds. She was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, rain had started.

A light, persistent city rain that blurred the lights across the alley into something impressionistic. He hadn’t heard it coming. October did that. Ethan, she said, “Yeah, what I said on the sidewalk,” she stopped, started again. “I meant it, but I also need you to know that I’m I’m not in a clean place yet about trusting things, my judgment specifically.

I’ve had it wrong before, and I She exhaled. I don’t want to do something tonight because tonight was emotional and then have it be different in the morning.” He looked at her steadily. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow. You say that now. I said it and I mean it. He set his mug down. I’m not asking for anything tonight, Victoria.

I’m sitting on a couch at 12:30 in the morning with someone I He stopped, choosing the word carefully. Someone I care about. That’s all this is. She held his gaze. Something in her face moved. the particular kind of movement that happens when someone is deciding whether to believe something and choosing to. Okay, she said. Okay, he said. The rain got slightly heavier.

Neither of them moved to go to bed. They talked until 2:30, the way they did sometimes in this apartment. The kind of talking that happened without agenda, that wandered from the party to Lily’s wedding plans to Ethan’s worst electrical job in a story that made her laugh until she had to set down her mug to a movie she’d watched twice on a plane and couldn’t explain why to what Ka had said on the phone about him making a face when the coffee was good.

Victoria laughed at that one again. She said that to your mother? My mother apparently already had theories. Mothers always do. Mine’s the type who says things out loud that most people keep to themselves. I would like your mother, Victoria said, and said it like she meant it, which meant something because she didn’t say things she didn’t mean.

She’d love you, he said. She’d probably also tell you things about me I’ve never told anyone. Just for context. Like what? I’m not creating that situation deliberately. She smiled. Really smiled. Not the managed version. the one that reached her eyes and changed the whole shape of her face. And he had a moment of thinking that he’d spent 4 months in proximity to that smile and had somehow not fully registered until tonight what it did to the general quality of a room.

He looked away. She was watching the rain on the window. I’m scared, she said quietly. Not to him exactly, just out into the room. I know, he said. Are you? He thought about Donna, about the four months of a baby and no sleep and learning how to do everything alone, and the decision he’d made then to keep his interior world small and navigable, about how he’d kept that decision for 6 years and had felt safe and diminished in equal measure, and how he was sitting here now at 2:30 in the morning feeling less safe than he had in years, and not

especially minding. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.” She looked at him and neither of them said anything else about it. And eventually she said she needed to sleep and he said he did too. And they said good night at the end of the hallway in the ordinary way they always did except that it was not ordinary.

Had not been ordinary in some time and they both knew it. Her door closed, his door closed. He lay in the dark for a while listening to the rain. Tripped. The following week was careful the way the first two weeks of living together had been careful, except it was a different kind of careful. Before they’d been strangers, learning to share space.

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