Chapter 12 The Fourth Supper and the Name
He asked her for the fourth supper on the twelfth day, and this time the asking was different.
Not in the content of it — the same simple invitation, the same direct manner.
But in the quality underneath it, the thing she had been watching with the attention she brought to everything: the quality was different.
Less managed. Less the professional doing something outside his usual domain and more simply a man asking a woman he wanted to see if she would see him.
She said yes. She had not been uncertain about this.
They met at the hotel again but sat at a different table — further from the window, more enclosed, the table for two at the back of the room that had the feeling of a conversation that was not intended to be public in the way that the window tables were public. He had chosen it. She noticed this.
"Nathaniel," she said, when they had ordered and the waiter had gone.
He looked up.
"I want to call you Nathaniel," she said. "Not Sheriff. Nathaniel."
He looked at her steadily. "All right," he said.
"And you should call me Mercy," she said.
"I have been," he said.
"In your head," she said. "You say Miss Alcott when you're being careful."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was the beginning of something she had not seen from him yet. "I have been careful," he said.
"I know," she said. "Less, recently."
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him across the table with the direct, uncomplicated look that she had brought to everything since he first saw her on the road. "I want to tell you something," she said. "I want to say it clearly so there is no ambiguity, because I find ambiguity unhelpful."
"Go ahead," he said. His voice was steady, but the steadiness itself was the steadiness of a man holding still for something.
"I came to Pinecrest for a commission," she said.
"I am going to leave Pinecrest having found something I was not expecting to find.
I don't know yet what I'm going to do about it — whether I'm going to stay in this part of Colorado, whether I'm going to take the Denver commission and come back, whether the thing I found is going to be the kind of thing that accommodates a decision or makes one.
I don't know these things yet." She paused.
"What I do know is that I found it here, and that you are part of what I found, and that I thought you should know that clearly rather than inferring it from context. "
Nathaniel looked at her for a long moment. The dining room was doing its dinner-hour thing around them. He was very still in the way of a man who was processing something large.
"You're telling me," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Not asking," he said.
"No," she said. "Telling. What you do with it is your decision. I'm just — removing the ambiguity so the decision is a real decision rather than one made on incomplete information."
He looked at the table. He looked at his hands. He looked at her.
"Mercy," he said. Just her name. Just that.
"Yes," she said.
"I have been — " He stopped. Started again. "I have spent twelve days trying to decide whether what I'm experiencing is something real or the product of eleven years of not allowing myself to experience anything at all and therefore responding to the first person who — " He stopped again.
"Who what?" she said.
"Who sees me," he said. "Specifically. The way you do. Not the sheriff. The man underneath."
She looked at him. She did not rush the silence.
"And have you decided?" she said. "Whether it's real."
He met her eyes. He had, she thought, the most specific eyes she had encountered in thirty years — not beautiful, not dramatic, but entirely there, the eyes of a man who looked at things directly when he was not managing, and who was not, right now, managing.
"Yes," he said. "It's real."
She breathed.
"Good," she said. "Then we have something to work with."
He looked at her with the expression that was new — the one she had not seen before, the one that was on the other side of the door he had described as closed.
Warm and specific and entirely his. The expression of a man who has decided something, finally, after a very long time, and found that the deciding felt like relief.
"We do," he said.
They ate supper. They talked about other things for a while, in the way that two people talked about other things once the important thing had been said and they were both breathing normally again and the room had returned to its regular temperature.
And underneath the other things was the important thing, warm and specific and real, and neither of them went back to it because it did not need to be revisited. It was simply there.