Chapter 12 #3
"You do what you always do, Lucy. You assess the foundation.
You check the load-bearing walls. You see if the structure can take the weight.
" A pause. "And if it can't, you walk away and you call me and I'll fly to whatever island you're on and we'll drink something with an umbrella in it and I'll tell you bad jokes until you laugh. "
"Your jokes are terrible."
"My jokes are perfect. You're just too stressed to appreciate the craftsmanship."
I almost laugh. Almost. The almost-laugh lives in the same place as the almost-smile — the space where joy used to fit before the earthquake filled it with rubble and the groveling filled it with questions.
"I love you, Lottie."
"I love you too. Go to sleep. Decide nothing tonight. Deciding things at — what time is it there?"
"Seven PM."
"Deciding things at seven PM in Bali is like deciding things at three AM in New York. Nothing good comes from it. Sleep. Call me tomorrow."
I hang up. The jungle sounds rise around the balcony — insects, birds, the river at the bottom of the ravine. Ubud at night is louder than Siem Reap, more layered, the noise of a place where the jungle is always trying to reclaim what the humans built.
My phone buzzes. A message from Finn. A photo: the sunset from the Angkor compound, the sky orange behind the temple spires, the mango tree a dark shape in the foreground. Below it: Niran fixed the generator. Now it quits at 2:15. He considers this a personal victory.
I laugh. The sound comes out wet — half laugh, half something else — and I sit on the balcony with my phone and I look at the photo and I think about a man who is here, in this picture, in this place, sending me evidence of where he is and what he's doing without asking anything in return.
Finn is not testing me. Finn is not grovelling.
Finn is not flying to new countries with news of opportunities that make his hands move.
Finn is standing in a compound in Cambodia with a broken generator and a sunset and a man named Niran who considers 2:15 a personal victory, and he is sending me a picture because he wants me to see it.
The contrast — between the man on the balcony in Bali who flew here with a deal he can't refuse and the man in the photo who is happy where he is — is so sharp I can feel it in my sternum.
I type a response to Finn. Tell Niran the generator and I are on the same schedule.
He responds in a minute. She misses you. The generator. Not me. I'm doing fine. The generator, however, has been inconsolable.
I smile. I close the phone. I stand on the balcony and look at the dark canopy of the ravine and I think about reflexes.
Silas's reflex is to build. To see an opportunity and reach for it, the way a hand reaches for a falling object — not a decision but a motion, preverbal, prethought, the body responding before the mind has a chance to intervene.
My reflex is to leave. To see danger and move — new country, new project, new guesthouse, the motion itself a kind of armor.
I've been running since Tokyo, and calling it recovery, and the running has been good — the work is real, the growth is real, the version of myself that lives in one bag and tests water quality in villages is closer to the truth than the woman who stood behind Silas Ryland at premieres.
But running is also a reflex. And Lottie's question — is going back bravery or a purchase?
— has a mirror image that she didn't ask: is staying away bravery or avoidance?
Am I running toward something or running from the possibility that the man who sold his company might also be able to sell his reflex?
I don't know. I don't know and the not-knowing is the worst feeling I've had since the building fell, because at least under the rubble the questions had clean edges.
Am I alive? Will someone come? Does he know I'm here?
Yes, yes, no. Clean. Answerable. The questions I'm asking now — is the change real, is the reflex survivable, can a man dismantle the part of himself that destroyed his marriage without dismantling the part that makes him who he is — have no clean edges.
They are soft and blurred and they resist the kind of structural assessment I am trained to do.
That night I sleep badly. Not the nightmare — the nightmare has faded, the building has stopped falling in my dreams. But a restless, turning sleep, the kind where you surface every hour and check the clock and wonder if the morning will bring clarity or just more of the same fog.
The morning brings Bali. Green, humid, beautiful, indifferent to my problems. I eat fruit on the balcony.
I drink coffee. I look at the jungle and the river and the sky and I make one decision, which is not the big decision but a step: I will not see Silas today.
I will not text him. I will go to the villages with Wayan and test water and do the work I came here to do, and I will let the question sit.
The question being: is the reflex the man, or is the reflex the habit?
And if it's the habit, can the habit be broken?
And if it can be broken, who breaks it — him, or the woman who keeps running?