Chapter Seven
Marcus left on Sunday, three days into a week-long visit he’d cut short without explaining why.
He knocked on Ivy’s door on his way to the airport, duffel bag over one shoulder, and stood on her porch with the particular awkwardness of a young man who’d decided something and wasn’t sure yet whether he was allowed to say it.
“I told him to stop being a coward,” Marcus said. “About you. I don’t know if that’s my business, but I said it anyway.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, which is how I know it landed.” He shifted the bag higher on his shoulder.
“My mom used to say he loved things the way he built things — slow, and only once he was sure the foundation would hold. I used to think that made him careful. Lately I think it just means he’s scared, same as anybody.
” He looked at her a second longer than the moment required.
“Anyway. Good luck with him. He’s worth the wait, if that helps. ”
It did, more than he could have known, and she was still turning the conversation over that evening when Sawyer showed up at her door with the good wine instead of the ordinary kind, which registered at once and which she didn’t comment on until they were both sitting at her kitchen table with the green notebook open between them out of habit, unopened, neither of them reaching for a pen.
“You brought the good stuff,” she said.
“I did.”
“That’s not maintenance wine.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
She waited. He’d never once, in two years, been the one to open a conversation neither of them had planned for; that had always been her role, back on the porch that September.
Watching him turn his glass a quarter turn against the table, she needed no more than that to know what it had cost him to arrive at whatever he was about to say.
“I keep the notebook because I told myself, a long time ago, that if I could put a thing in writing and revisit it on a schedule, it couldn’t sneak up on me,” he said.
“Everything with Rosa snuck up on me at the end — not the dying, I had time to see that coming, but the grief. I thought I’d grieved her already, in installments, while she was still alive and getting smaller by the month, and then she was gone and it turned out I hadn’t even started.
I built the notebook because I decided I was done being ambushed by my own feelings for anything, ever again.
Schedule it, name it, keep it contained.
That’s been the whole plan for two years, and it worked, right up until my son asked me a simple question and I discovered I didn’t have an honest short answer, and that scared me more than anything’s scared me since the hospital. ”
Ivy’s throat was tight. “What’s the honest answer?”
“That I’m not doing maintenance with you anymore,” he said.
“I don’t know when that stopped being true.
Maybe it was never entirely true. But I came here tonight to tell you I don’t want the notebook to be the only place this exists, and I understand if that’s not a door you’re ready to walk through, because I know exactly what it cost you to build the version where you didn’t have to ask for anything out loud, and I’m about to ask you for something out loud, which breaks the whole design. ”
She sat with that for a long moment, feeling the old scar tissue in her chest, the one that had first gone thin the night he’d told her he’d left rather than guess, pull further still, into something closer to an open wound than she’d let it be in years.
“I’m afraid of exactly two things,” she said.
“I’m afraid that if I ask for you plainly, in daylight, the way I ask for things I actually want, you’ll start doing what the others did: meeting me halfway right up until you decide halfway is too far, and pulling back an inch at a time until I can’t tell anymore whether I’m imagining the distance or not.
And I’m afraid that if I don’t ask, I’ll lose you anyway, slower, the same way, just with better manners about it. ”
“I can’t promise I’ll never disappoint you,” Sawyer said.
“I’m forty-four years old and I’ve already failed at loving someone all the way to the end once, through no fault of my own, and it still felt like failing.
But I can promise you this: I will never once make you ask for the same thing twice because I was too much of a coward to just say yes the first time.
I did that once, this summer, on your porch, and I’ve regretted the shape of it every day since, even knowing why I did it. ”
Ivy reached across the table and closed the green notebook. The terms in it still mattered. It had become, for the first time since September, the smaller of the two documents they were writing.
“Then ask me,” she said. “Out loud. In daylight. I want to hear what it sounds like.”
He did.