Chapter 11 #2
"2019. Four years." I look out the window.
"I found Elise's old Nikon in the cottage.
She was a photographer. I don't know why I didn't know that. Or maybe I did know, and I forgot, because I'd stopped being someone who thought about cameras and seeing things in honest lighting.” Like people, but I don’t add that.
He doesn't say you should take it up again. He doesn't say that's a shame, or he sounds awful, or any of the things a person says when they want to be helpful and end up being adjacent to it.
He says, “What did you see in the workshop that you couldn't unsee?"
I look at him.
"You said you saw things you couldn't unsee, what were they?"
Something happens in my chest that I don't have a name for.
"The way light doesn't lie," I say softly.
"You can stage a room, you can arrange everything perfectly, but when you look at it through a lens, the light tells you what's actually there.
Where the thing is hollow. Where the weight is.
I photographed a house once— someone's living room, for the workshop, and I could see through the viewfinder that nobody actually lived in the room.
Everything was arranged for showing. No indentation in the couch cushions.
No worn spot on the floor by the good chair— I thought about that house for a long time. "
Ethan is quiet for a beat. "Were you thinking about the house?"
He's not pressing it. He asked the question, and now he's just there, with his coffee, letting me decide what to do with it.
I know what he means. I've known it for a while. The living room I photographed, which had no indentation in the couch cushions, where everything was arranged for showing. The house Jason and I bought, with the finishes we spent three weeks on.
"No," I say. "I don't think I was."
He nods once.
"I found the Nikon," I say again, softer. "Elise's. It's a film camera, so I have no idea if, but I found it."
"Film is harder," he says. "No instant feedback. You have to know what you're doing before you press the shutter."
"Is that a metaphor?"
"It's a photography fact." But the corner of his mouth twitches in what I’m going to interpret as a smile. "Could also be a metaphor."
I laugh, and this time the guilt doesn't follow it. It's just…a laugh, belonging to me, about a metaphor that landed right. He smiles when I laugh, not a full smile, but the edges of one. I catch it before it disappears and think I want to see that again.
We leave Bellamy's at half past twelve.
On the sidewalk outside, we're going different directions — he's got a site visit, I'm heading to the library to return Helen's book and pick up the next one — and there's a brief moment where neither of us moves immediately, the way there is when a conversation has been long enough that a regular goodbye feels insufficient.
"Thank you, for the conversation."
"I didn't do anything."
"You listened." I say it plainly. "You asked what I couldn't unsee instead of telling me to pick the camera back up. Most people tell you what to do with a thing like that."
He looks at me for a second. "It's your camera. Your call."
I hold that for a moment.
"Late November, you can take care of the pear tree."
"Late November," I confirm.
He lifts a hand and heads down the sidewalk. I watch him for a second with the attention of someone trying to understand what just happened to her. Two hours. The coffee shop didn't clear out. Neither did we. At some point, Mags stopped asking if we needed refills and just left the pot.
I'm not sure when it became safe.
I've been running words for it in my head since the table by the window, since the photography conversation, since it's your camera, your call. Comfortable. Easy. Honest. Good.
Safe.
I'm in the library when it arrives, in the S section where Helen keeps the good fiction, and I just stop in the middle of the aisle with a book in my hand and think I feel safe with him.
Not safe like nothing can happen to me. The feeling of safety allowed me to exist exactly as I am, my size and all, without any requirement to apologize, manage, or edit myself. Safe like I could say, the soffit questions were personal to me and have it received as a genuine answer.
I haven't felt that with a man, with anyone but specifically with a man, in longer than I want to count.
Safe like the version of me that researches bristle density and prunes rosebushes wrong and finds her grandmother's camera and cries on the kitchen floor is not too much or too specific or too difficult to account for.
He sees all of that and keeps asking questions. The thought scares me.
Not because it's bad. Because it's real.
And real things require real responses. Real choices and consequences.
And I'm eight weeks out of a marriage, and my judgment recently looked like ten years with a man who toasted about commitment while actively betraying it, and I don't know what my judgment is worth right now.
I know I feel safe with Ethan Mercer.
I know my track record on knowing things about people is recent and poor.
I know both of those things simultaneously and have absolutely no idea what to do with them.
I take Helen's recommendation off the shelf, and I walk home in the November air thinking about light that doesn't lie and indentations in couch cushions and a man who asked what I couldn't unsee instead of telling me to pick the camera back up.
It's 1 a.m.
The reason I know this is that I’ve glanced at my phone twice, not for messages from Jason–those are now infrequent, occurring only twice a week, which Patricia considers valuable documentation—but solely to check the time.
The cottage is quiet. Gerald is off. The garden is dark, and the wall is repaired and the rosebushes are pruned and the spring bulbs are in the ground and I'm lying on Elise's couch — I've migrated to the bedroom but sometimes I come back to the couch when I can't sleep; I think it's because the quilt is here — staring at the ceiling.
I'm thinking about Ethan.
I'm thinking about the way he told me about his father without requiring sympathy. About the way he said it was like reading what the house actually wanted to be and meaning it completely. About it's your camera, your call — the specific refusal to tell me what to do with my own thing.
I'm thinking about how different it is. Not from my marriage, specifically that comparison is too easy, too obvious, the deck too stacked.
From the version of being known that I had available to me for the past decade, which was the version that required me to be a certain size and make certain adjustments and not take the Asheville project and not register for the photography class.
With Ethan, I keep finding that the size I am is fine.
More than fine. He seems to find it worth paying attention to.
I stare at the ceiling.
This is not something you're allowed to be thinking, I tell myself. You are eight weeks out of the worst thing that happened to you, and you know nothing about your own judgment right now, and he is your contractor and your neighbor, and you are?—
I'm lying on my grandmother's couch at 1 a.m. thinking about a man who asked what I couldn't unsee.
I know, I tell myself. I know. I'm just thinking.
The cottage creaks and settles around me, filled with the usual November sounds of an old house, with the furnace kicking on and the trees outside the window rustling with the wind.
I'm thinking about Ethan at 1 a.m. and I know I shouldn't, and I'm doing it anyway, and the thing keeping me awake isn't the attraction, or not only the attraction. It's the thing underneath it, the thing that's harder to dismiss.
He makes me feel like the right-sized version of myself.
I don’t remember the last time I felt that.
I close my eyes. I open them again almost immediately.
Late November, he said. The pear tree.
I have something to look forward to. I fall asleep thinking about that instead, which is only marginally better, and I know it, and I let myself have it anyway.