The Husband Clause

Chapter 27

Sabrina asks at breakfast.

"Can I stay at Nancy's tonight?" She is eating toast and not looking at me, which is the posture she uses when she is asking something she expects resistance to. "Her parents said it's fine. They'll take us both to school in the morning."

I look at her. Nancy is her closest friend, a girl I have known since year seven, whose parents I trust entirely. There is no version of this where I say no.

"Of course," I say. "Do you need me to drive you?"

She looks up, slightly surprised I agreed so easily, and then schools her expression back to casual. "Half past five?"

"Half past five," I say.

She goes back to her toast. I drink my coffee and think: she is going to her friend's for the night. Christian and I will be alone in the house for the first time since — I stop the thought there, because finishing it would require admitting something, and I am still in the practice of not-admitting things before I have had enough coffee.

I drop her at Nancy's at half past five. Nancy's mother says she'll drive them both in the morning, I should rest, and I say thank you and sit in the car for a moment before starting the engine. Rest. I have not rested properly in months.

I drive home to a house that is empty on purpose. The quiet is different from the quiet when Sabrina is asleep upstairs — this quiet has no one in it at all, just me and the stillness of a Friday evening with nowhere to be.

I think: we are going to be alone. In this house. All evening.

I stand in the hallway and let that be a fact I am aware of.

Christian appears from the kitchen doorway with his jacket still on, the way he looks when he has just got back. He reads my face the way he always reads my face.

"Wine?" he says.

"Absolutely," I say.

He opens something good — the middle bottle, the one he bought because he has opinions about wine that he never imposes but quietly acts on. I notice this. I have been noticing everything about him for weeks and I have mostly stopped pretending I'm not.

"Dinner?" he says, and I say yes, and we cook together in the particular way we have found for this kitchen — he takes the things that require attention and I take the things that require patience, which is a division of labour that emerged without discussion and suits us both.

We move around each other without collision. The kitchen is warm and it smells like garlic and something herby and wine, and I think: this is the most domestic scene of my entire adult life and it is with a man I have known since I was fourteen and it feels entirely natural, which is either the wine or the truth or both.

We eat at the kitchen table with the good dishes out, not because of occasion but because why not. The wine goes down. The evening opens.

I ask him about a deal he has been careful not to let into the household noise. He tells me the actual version, not the summary, and I listen, and at some point I realise we have been talking for forty minutes and I have not once thought about Daniel or Cassie or anything that is not this kitchen and this wine.

Then I ask the thing I have been holding.

"Why didn't you date anyone?" I refill my glass and watch it rather than him, which is the coward's version of asking a direct question. "After I said no. The second time." I look up. "That was twelve years ago. You could have — anyone. You're not someone who should have spent twelve years alone."

He is quiet for a moment. He sets his glass down with the particular deliberateness of someone choosing his words, and I watch his hands and I think: I have been cataloguing his hands for weeks. The way they move. The way they hold things. This is not a normal amount of attention to pay to someone's hands.

"I tried," he says. "Twice. Both times I ended up thinking, in various ways, that she was not you." A pause. He looks at the table. Not avoiding me — considering, the way he considers things. "And that seemed unfair to her. So I stopped."

Something in my chest does something I was not expecting. Not surprise — I have known, some version of this, since the newspaper clipping. More like the weight of it arriving fully, all at once, now that he has said it out loud.

"That's a very large thing to do because of me," I say.

"Yes."

"I didn't ask you to."

"No." He looks at me then. "You didn't."

The kitchen is very quiet. Outside the window the evening is doing its Friday things.

I drink my wine and I think about what it costs to love someone that specifically — not generically, not approximately, but with the precision of not her and therefore no one — and I feel the weight of it, the full weight of it, sitting in the warm kitchen with the wine and the low candle and his hands around his glass.

I should say something. I do not know what to say.

"Can I ask you something," he says.

"Yes." I am grateful for the rescue.

"What did Daniel have that I didn't." He says it without edge, leaning back slightly in his chair, looking at me with an expression that is genuinely curious. "I've wondered."

I sit with it. I owe him an honest answer and I am going to give him one.

"He was close to art," I say. "That mattered to me. He spoke about it in a way that resonated with something I needed resonated with at twenty-three." I turn the wine glass by the stem.

"But the real reason I didn't choose you — the actual reason, the one I didn't say to myself clearly at the time — was that I was afraid. You were my oldest friend. The most important person in my life. And I did not know what happened to that if we tried and it didn't work." I look at him. "I was not willing to find out."

"So you chose someone you were willing to lose," he says.

The accuracy of that lands somewhere in my chest. "Yes," I say. "Apparently."

He is looking at me across the table. The candle between us is burning low, the wine is nearly finished, and the kitchen has the quality it has late in evenings when the occasion is over and what remains is just the people in it. I am warm from the wine and warm from the kitchen and warm from the way he said apparently with no judgment in it at all.

"The irony," I say, "is that I lost you anyway. The moment I listened to Daniel about the calls. The moment I let him make the decision that kept you at a distance." I put the glass down. "I chose you least, and lost you most."

He reaches across the table and takes my hand.

"Hey," he says. "Look at me."

I look at him.

"You didn't lose me," he says. "You couldn't. In any version of this — any version — I am always with you."

I look at him.

I look at his mouth.

The wine is making the thoughts that usually stop me feel smaller and further away than they normally feel. The thoughts that say: be careful, be certain, be sure before you move.

The thoughts that have been building arguments and running calculations for eleven weeks and have produced nothing but more arguments. I am tired of the arguments. I am tired of the calculations.

I am not careful.

I lean across the table and I kiss him.

Fully, without hedging, without the one-hand-on-the-desk careful pullback of an office at half past seven — and it is nothing like the first time, which was him moving before he decided to and me sitting very still and letting it happen.

This time I decide. I move. I close the distance between us and his hand tightens around mine. The other one comes up to my face and the candle between us is burning low

That’s it. This is what it was supposed to feel like. Now I regret that I have been not-doing this for thirty years.

I think nothing else for a while after that.