10. The Long Way Home
Ten
The Long Way Home
Nathaniel offered to walk Grace home after their third coffee-shop meeting, a small thing, the kind of offer he’d have once made automatically and thoughtlessly, back before either of them had learned how much thought needed to go into even the smallest gestures now.
“You don’t have to,” Grace said, though without much resistance in it, already gathering her bag, already, if she was honest with herself, hoping he’d insist a little.
“I know I don’t have to. I’d like to, if that’s all right. No agenda. Just company for six blocks.”
She let him, and they walked slowly through the early autumn evening, the light gone soft and gold the way it does in Chicago for about twenty minutes before it disappears entirely, past the brownstones Grace had started noticing with a designer’s eye everywhere now, cataloguing rooflines and window trim and the particular color certain bricks turned at this hour, the way she used to before her attention had narrowed down to managing a life that revolved around someone else’s calendar.
“Tell me about the Lincoln Park project,” Nathaniel said.
Grace glanced at him, surprised by the specificity of the invitation. “You actually want to hear about kitchen renovations?”
“I want to hear about anything you want to tell me,” he said simply.
“I spent years not asking, or asking without really listening for the answer. I’m trying to fix that, and I don’t know how to do it except by actually asking, and then actually listening, even when it’s about built-in bookshelves and vendor delays. ”
“I want to hear about anything you want to tell me,” he said simply.
“I spent years not asking, or asking without really listening for the answer. I’m trying to fix that, and I don’t know how to do it except by actually asking, and then actually listening, even when it’s about built-in bookshelves and vendor delays. ”
So she told him — about the built-in bookshelves, about a plumbing complication that had set the timeline back two weeks and nearly given her an ulcer, about the particular satisfaction of watching a client’s face when they finally saw a space transformed into something they could actually imagine living inside, the specific alchemy of turning someone’s vague Pinterest board into an actual room they’d cook dinner in for the next twenty years.
Nathaniel listened without checking his phone once, asked genuine follow-up questions — good ones, the kind that showed he was actually picturing the space she was describing — laughed at the right moments, and Grace found herself talking longer and more freely than she had with anyone in months, surprised by how easily the old rhythm between them reasserted itself, the one from before, from the earliest years, when they used to talk for hours about nothing important, lying tangled together on a secondhand couch in their first apartment with no money and no obligations pulling either of them away.
“I forgot how much I liked talking to you,” she admitted, somewhere around the fourth block, more honest than she’d planned to be.
“I never forgot,” Nathaniel said quietly.
“I just stopped making the space for it. There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t look like one from the outside.
I used to tell myself I was too tired at the end of the day for real conversation, that I’d just decompress in front of the television instead.
I don’t think that was ever really true.
I think I was choosing to spend the part of myself capable of real conversation somewhere else, and telling you the tank was just empty. ”
Grace absorbed that, walking beside him in the fading light, and didn’t have a response ready, because it was the kind of honesty that didn’t really call for one.
They reached her building too soon, the six blocks passing faster than either of them seemed to want, the particular disappointment of a walk ending before you’re ready for it to end.
Grace lingered on the sidewalk, not quite ready to end the conversation, not quite sure what came next, keys already in her hand but not yet moving toward the door.
“Same time next week?” Nathaniel asked, careful not to presume, giving her every opening to say no.
“Same time next week,” Grace confirmed, and something eased in his expression — not triumph, just quiet relief, the particular gratitude of a man who understood he was being given something he hadn’t yet earned outright.
He didn’t try to kiss her. He didn’t linger past what the moment called for.
He simply said goodnight, turned, and walked back the way they’d come, hands in his pockets, unhurried, and Grace stood on her stoop for a long moment afterward, watching him go, feeling something warm and unfamiliar settle into the space where guardedness used to live.
It wasn’t a grand gesture. It wasn’t Milan, or a gallery opening, or a mirror-moment sacrifice.
It was just six ordinary blocks and an hour of easy conversation about kitchen renovations and vendor delays — and Grace was beginning to understand that this, more than any of the larger moments still ahead of them, was the actual foundation everything else would eventually be built on.
She let herself into her apartment, set her bag down, and stood for a moment in the quiet, replaying the walk, replaying his voice saying I never forgot, I just stopped making the space for it — and felt, for the first time in a long time, something that wasn’t quite hope yet, but was standing very close to where hope usually lived.