10. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
The grand gestures stop. The man doesn’t.
Day one, I come out of my building and there he is. Leaning against that ridiculous car with a coffee in his hand, stubble kept at exactly the length that says I am suffering but I remain a functioning adult.
I walk straight past him.
“Good morning.”
I keep walking.
“It’s supposed to rain later. You might want an umbrella.”
I definitely keep walking.
“Have a good day at work.”
I’m half a block gone before I let myself smile, and even then I check the angle first.
Day two, same spot, same car, different coffee, so at least he isn’t reheating.
“Morning.”
I adjust my bag and treat him as a lamppost with unusually good posture.
“I brought you tea. That ginger thing Tessa says you like.”
I stop. Only for a second, and I’d deny it in court.
“You called Tessa.”
“She’s remarkably helpful when she isn’t threatening to run me over.”
“She threatened to run you over?”
“Twice. The second time she specified the tire pressure. It was very detailed.”
I make it around the corner before I laugh, which I consider a personal victory.
Behind me, at volume. “The tea will be here tomorrow if you want it.”
The next day, the tea is waiting on the hood of the car in a paper cup with my name written on the side in marker.
I look at it.
“You’ll get tired of standing there.”
He drinks his coffee. “You first.”
“This is insane.”
“Probably.”
“You can’t camp outside my building like some kind of billionaire vagrant.”
“Technically I’m on public property. I checked.”
“You checked the property lines.”
“I had somebody check the property lines. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t trespassing.”
“Oh my God.”
“Is that a this is romantic oh my God, or a you need professional help oh my God?”
“Guess.”
I take the tea and walk off with it, and I absolutely do not notice that it’s the right temperature or that he remembered about the extra ginger.
***
Maria spots him.
She’s coming back from her break and stops dead in the doorway with her sandwich still in her hand.
“There’s a man across the road.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s been there since I got here.”
“Yep.”
“Solenn.” She sets the sandwich down. “Is that the hospital man?”
“That’s the hospital man.”
Miranda is out of her chair before the sentence lands, and then there are three of us at the front window pretending to check the weather.
“He’s not doing anything,” Miranda says, sounding cheated.
“He never does anything. That’s the whole business model.”
“Is he going to come in?”
“He came in three weeks ago. I told him to leave.”
Miranda turns and looks at me with an expression I intend to think about later. “And he’s still out there.”
On the way home, my back gives out about forty feet from my own front door and I have to sit down on the low wall by the steps for a minute like a woman of ninety.
He doesn’t come over. He doesn’t ask if I’m all right. He doesn’t do a single one of the things that would make me have to be rude to him.
He just stands there by the car with his coffee, looking at the middle distance, being extremely busy not watching me.
Next morning, there’s a folding chair by the wall.
Green canvas, three dollars if it cost a cent, set up neatly at the exact spot where I sat down. There’s no note on it. There is, God help me, a bow.
I stand and look at that chair for longer than I want to admit to.
Then I sit in it, because my back hurts and I am not an idiot, and across the road he doesn’t smile, doesn’t look over, doesn’t say one word about it. He’s learned not to make me say thank you.
Every morning he’s there. Every evening, walking back from the clinic, he’s there.
He doesn’t approach and he doesn’t push and he doesn’t try to start a conversation I’ve made clear I won’t be having.
He just exists at the edge of my day, refusing to give up or go away or do anything that would make it easier to keep hating him.
On day seven it rains. The sky opens over my little street and empties itself, and from my window I can see him standing next to the car getting comprehensively soaked, because apparently nobody in his tax bracket owns an umbrella.
I should let him stand there. I should absolutely let him catch pneumonia out of sheer stubbornness and learn something from it.
I go down with my umbrella and shove it at his chest.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I’ve been told.”
His shirt is stuck to him and his hair is flattened to his forehead and there’s water running off his jaw, and he’s close enough that I can smell rain and wet wool and, underneath it, him. My body files that away without asking me first.
“Go home.”
“No.”
“You’re going to die of exposure in a parking space and I’ll have to explain to everyone why my ex-husband drowned outside my apartment.”
“Would you come to the funeral?”
“I’d dance.”
“That’s fair.”
He’s shivering. The suit is finished. He looks like something pulled out of a lake, and my eyes go where they have no business going for about a second and a half.
His mouth twitches.
“Eyes up, Solenn.”
“I was assessing the pneumonia risk.”
“Of course.”
My face is on fire. “Take the umbrella.”
“Only if you take the tea.”
“You have tea? In this?”
He reaches into the car and produces a paper cup, steam and all. “I keep a thermos now. I learned things on day four.”
I take the tea. I keep the umbrella, because I’m not a saint.
I do look back once from the door. I’m only human.
***
Tessa’s kitchen is a war zone.
She’s chopping vegetables, the knife coming down hard enough that I’m concerned for the board.
“You could at least talk to him.”
“I did talk to him.” I steal a carrot. “In court. When I divorced him.”
“Sol.”
“He bought a hospital, Tess. An entire hospital. Who does that? Who sits down and thinks, my marriage is broken, better acquire a medical facility?”
“A man who doesn’t know another way to show he cares?”
“That’s capitalism.”
She puts the knife down, which is a relief for everyone.
“I’m not saying what he did was okay. The hospital was insane. The house was insane. Eduardo alone is going to haunt me.” She picks up a pepper. “But he’s out there every single day. Not asking for anything. Not pushing. Just waiting. That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not enough.”
“No.” The knife comes back down. “But it might be a start.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on the side of you two idiots working it out so I can stop hearing about it. My own life is very boring and this is all I have.”
“Doesn’t he have an empire to run? Meetings? Extremely important business to business?”
“Apparently,” she says, going after an onion, “it runs itself when its owner is properly motivated.”
I lean back against the counter.
“I almost smiled at him yesterday.”
The chopping stops.
“You what?”
“He had this hopeful face on. And I almost.” I put my hands over my eyes. “It’s the hormones.”
“It’s not the hormones.”
“It’s absolutely the hormones.”
“Sol. You were attracted to him before you were pregnant. That’s the mechanism by which you became pregnant.”
“That is not helpful.”
“I’m not here to be helpful, I’m here to chop vegetables - which by the way I don’t have to do if we have Eduardo - and tell the truth.” She scrapes the onion into a bowl. “You’re allowed to still find him attractive. Nobody’s revoking your divorce over it.”
“I can’t forgive a man because he looks good wet.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.” She shrugs. “I’m only suggesting you stop putting so much effort into pretending you didn’t notice.”
I pick at the edge of the counter.
“He bought me a chair.”
Tessa’s head comes up. “He what?”
“There’s a chair. By the wall outside my building. Because I sat down there once.” I hear how it sounds coming out of my mouth. “It’s three dollars of canvas and it has a bow on it and I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about the house.”
“Sol.”
“I know.”
“A house is a transaction.” She points the knife at me, which I choose not to take personally. “A chair means he watched you.”
“He watched me.”
“For a week. Without saying anything about it.” She goes back to the onion. “Sol, I want to be very clear that I still think he’s an idiot who deserves everything he got. But a man who buys a chair has been paying a completely different kind of attention than a man who buys a hospital.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Don’t just say, Tessa.”
***
The text comes on day ten, at night, from a number I don’t know.
UNKNOWN: Does he still park outside? He used to do that for me too.
I look at it for a long time.
There’s no name. There’s just that, sitting on my screen, written by somebody who knows where I live and what he does and how to make a few words do the work of a paragraph.
I don’t answer it.
I block the number and put the phone face down on the nightstand and lie there in the dark telling myself it’s a wrong number, which is a thing I might believe if I were a different woman with a different history.
Then I turn the phone back over and read it one more time, because apparently I’m a masochist, and the worst of it isn’t the me too.
It’s still.
Somebody has been keeping track of how long.
***
I’m walking back from the clinic, tired in the deep way that has nothing to do with sleep, and he’s in his spot.
He lifts a hand. I don’t wave. But I don’t look away either, and that’s new, and we both know it.
There’s a moment through the glass of my lobby door. I’m halfway to the elevator, he’s out there in the cold, and for one unguarded second I almost smile at him.
He sees it.
His whole face changes. Turns into something so hopeful that I have to look away before I do something I can’t take back, like go back outside.
I jab the elevator button and don’t look up again.
***
Two in the Morning
The pain wakes me out of a dream. Cramping and wrong.
I try to sit up, the room tips.
“Okay.” Out loud, to nobody. “Okay. This is fine.”
My phone is across the room on the desk, charging, because I am a person who thought the important thing was having a full battery in the morning.
I get one foot to the floor and my legs decide against it. I end up on the rug with one hand flat against my stomach, breathing through something that has hold of me and is squeezing.
“Okay. Okay, okay.”
Crawling works. Crawling I can do.
The terrace door is closer than the desk. If I can get air I can think, and if I can think I can work out what to do, and I get my fingers into the knob and drag it open and the cold comes over me like water.
I pull myself up on the railing.
The street below is empty and dark under one orange streetlight.
His car is there. And the driver’s seat is reclined, and there’s a shape in it, and my whole understanding of the last twelve days rearranges itself in about a second.
He’s been sleeping out there even though the motel owner told me he’s checked in.
The pain takes another turn through me and I stop caring how that makes either of us look. Pride is a luxury and I can’t afford one tonight.
I lean over the railing into the cold.
“Liam.”
It comes out as nothing. A breath with a name in it.
I get a better grip on the rail and try again.
“Liam!”