CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
The next morning, he's already up when I wake.
I hear him before I see him, the low sound of the kettle, the small movements of someone trying not to make noise.
I lie still for a moment listening to it, this ordinary domestic sound, and something about it settles in my chest in a way I don't entirely examine.
He's at the kitchen table when I come out, a mug in front of him, looking out at the strip of gray sky through the window. He looks better than yesterday. Still pale, still careful in how he moves, but the worst of it has passed. His eyes aren't glassy anymore. He's here.
I find myself a mug.
"You don't have to keep doing that," he says. Not unkindly.
"Making tea?"
"Watching me."
I turn around. He's looking at me now, and there's something careful in it, something self-conscious. Like he's waiting for me to flinch from what he showed me during those three days.
"I'm not watching you," I say. "I'm making tea because I want tea."
He looks at me for a moment longer, then back at the window.
I make my tea.
On the fourth day, I get a pack of pasta out of the cupboard and a tin of chopped tomatoes, and I make something that's technically a meal.
It's not good. The pasta is the wrong shape for the sauce, and I put too much dried basil in it, and William stares at his bowl for a moment before he says, very seriously, "What did the pasta do to you? "
I laugh. It comes out sharp and surprised, and then it keeps going for longer than it should, and when I finally stop, I realize my eyes are stinging.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't apologize for laughing." He's watching me again. "You don't do it much."
"Neither do you."
He picks up his fork. Eats the pasta without any more commentary.
I watch him, trying not to be obvious about it.
He's eating. He ate yesterday, too. Not much, but something.
His color is coming back, the gray leaving his skin by degrees, like a bruise healing.
Four days ago, I held a bucket while he was sick for the third time that morning, and he couldn't look at me afterwards.
Now he's sitting across a table, eating pasta I burned, and making me laugh.
I don't entirely know what to do with that. With him.
We clean up together after. He washes, I dry.
The kitchen is too narrow, and we keep almost touching, and neither of us acknowledges it, but I'm aware of every inch of space between us.
The warmth coming off him. The way he moves, still careful, conserving energy like he's not entirely sure his body will do what he asks.
I think about what I read in the journals.
The handwriting that got steadier as the entries went on.
The way he wrote about his brothers, like they were a landscape he was always trying to map, always finding new terrain.
The way he wrote about the person he was trying to be, this ideal of himself that he kept returning to, even when he was at his worst.
He's trying. He has been trying, in the dark, for years.
Nobody saw it. Or if they did, they didn't say so.
I wonder what it costs a person to keep trying when nobody sees.
When we're done, he leans against the counter, and I lean against the wall across from him, and there are maybe four feet between us, and the evening light is coming through that gap in the curtains.
"I read your journals."
It comes out before I've decided to say it. He goes still.
"The first night," I say. "At the other safe house. I couldn't sleep, and I found them in the drawer and I—" I stop. "I read three entries. The black one." I make myself hold his gaze. "I shouldn't have."
"But you did," he says finally.
"Yes."
He's quiet for a moment. Not angry, I think. Something else. Working through it.
"I started writing them when I was nineteen," he says. "First time I got clean. Six weeks. I couldn't sleep more than two hours at a stretch, so I just...wrote. About Father. About the family. About what I wanted to be when I was twelve and what I turned into instead."
"It helped?"
"Made it real. Like it actually happened and I wasn't just going mad." He folds his arms. "When I use, I lose weeks. A month, once. The journals are so I can find my way back. So I know what I said and did when I was sober. Know who that person is." He pauses. "He's better than the other one."
Something tightens in my chest. "Yes. He is."
Something shifts in his face. He doesn't look away.
"Your father," he says after a moment. "Is he the one who taught you to cook?"
"God, no. My father thinks cooking is what restaurants are for." I lean back against the counter. "My mam taught me. She used to let me stand on a stool beside her, stir things, crack eggs. I was useless at it then." I pause. "Still am, if tonight was any indication."
It's the first time I've mentioned her. I can hear it land between us, light and breakable.
"She died," I say, before he has to navigate around it. "Eleven years ago. I was fifteen."
"I'm sorry."
"Cancer, officially," I say it the same way I always say it, flat and even. "She was sick for two years before that. Slow decline." I stare at the table. "But I don't think it was only cancer."
He doesn't fill the silence with platitudes. Just waits.
"She was frightened all the time," I say.
"Not of dying, not even of the cancer. Frightened of what my father's work might bring to our door.
She never slept properly. Never relaxed.
I'd come down in the middle of the night, and she'd be sitting at the kitchen window just watching the driveway.
" I flatten my hand against the counter.
"I watched her disappear for two years before she was actually gone. She just...used herself up. Worrying."
"You think this life killed her."
"I think it didn't give her a chance to survive." I look at him. "That's why I was so angry about the marriage. Not because I didn't understand the politics of it. I understood every piece of it. But I watched my mother die from what this life costs, and I didn't want—"
I stop.
"You didn't want what?" His tone is careful. Not pressing. Leaving me the option to not finish.
"I didn't want to be her." The words feel strange in the open air. True. "Strong enough to survive it but not to escape it. Scared for twenty years. I wanted to be different."
He's very still across the kitchen. Then: "You are different."
I almost say something dismissive. Almost deflect it. Instead, I just let it sit there, the way he let my words sit.
"She'd have liked you," I say, finally. "My mam. She liked people who were honest, even when the honesty was brutal." I glance at him. "You're honest."
"I don't have energy left for anything else."
"No." I study him. The lines of exhaustion still around his eyes. The way he's holding himself. Present, for the first time since I met him. Just here, in this kitchen, in his own skin. "I know."
Later, I can't sleep.
I lie in the dark listening to the house settle around me, and I think about my mother, which I don't let myself do very often.
The cost of opening that door. But it's already open now, cracked by the conversation in the kitchen, and I can't close it.
I think about her hands. The way she could make pastry without measuring anything.
The smell of her hair when I was small enough to lean against her.
Eleven years, and it still comes in waves.
I'm not sure when I start crying. I only notice it when the pillow is wet. Not loud. Just the quiet kind that happens when you've been holding something tightly for a long time and your grip finally slips.
The door is open. I didn't close it all the way.
Footsteps in the hall. I wipe my face with my sleeve.
William stops in the doorway. He doesn't ask. He can see. He's looking at me with an expression that has no calculation in it, none of the careful measuring I saw from him in those first days. Just open. Just present.
He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
Neither of us says anything.
After a while, he lies down beside me, on top of the covers, and stares at the ceiling, and I go back to staring at it, too. Our arms are close enough that I could feel the warmth of him without touching.
"Tell me something," I say.
"What?"
"Anything. Something true."
He thinks about it. "When I was eight," he says, "I was convinced I was going to be an architect. I drew buildings constantly. Covered notebooks. Jason caught me once, and I told him they were weapons designs so he wouldn't laugh."
I turn my head to look at him.
"Did he laugh anyway?"
"Obviously." There's something soft in it. "He kept one of them. Found it in his room years later. He'd never told me." A pause. "He's a good man, Jason. Better than me."
"That's not true."
"I've done things—"
"He has too. You all have." I shift to face him. "You're not a list of your worst moments."
He turns his head. We're close. The lamplight from the hall is just enough to see by. His eyes are darker than usual, the shadows under them softened now, a little. Like something in his face has eased.
He reaches up and touches my face. Slowly. Asking.
I lean into it.
The first time he kissed me it was violent and terrified and electric. This is nothing like that. His thumb traces along my cheekbone, the gentleness of it so unexpected that my eyes sting again, and I don't look away from him, and he doesn't look away from me.
"Aoife." Just my name. Not a question. Not a warning. Something else.
"I know," I say.
His phone buzzes from the sitting room.
Neither of us moves. It buzzes again. Then again.