Chapter 13
She waited three weeks, and then another one, mostly to prove to herself that she could.
March came in wet and gray. The studio hit thirty-one names, which was not enough for May but was enough for April, and Elena sat down with Naomi on a Tuesday and told her the truth about the numbers, as she'd promised herself she always would.
"So April's covered," Naomi said.
"April's covered. May is a real question."
"Okay." Naomi thought about it for approximately four seconds. "Then let's fill May."
"That's not a plan, that's a slogan."
"It's a slogan and I've got eleven people in Queens who'd come in for a Saturday morning if we ran one, so it's also a plan." Naomi was already writing on the back of an intake form. "You keep waiting for permission to be bigger. I've noticed that about you."
Elena opened her mouth to argue and had nothing to argue with.
They ran the first Saturday class nine days later.
Twenty-two people in a four-hundred-square-foot room, coats in a pile again, and Elena stood at the front and coached for ninety minutes straight and afterward went into the tiny back office and sat down hard in a folding chair, because her legs had gone strange on her.
She was good at this. That was the thing. Not adequate — good, the way she'd been at twenty-six on Fourteenth Street, and she'd spent six years believing that had been a phase she'd grown out of, and it turned out it had just been a thing she stopped doing.
She texted Julian that night.
Saturday. 4pm. The bench past the third bridge on the river path, north side. Come alone and don't bring anything.
He wrote back in under a minute: I'll be there.
Then, a moment later: Thank you.
She looked at those two words for a while and then put the phone face down, because she had noticed something she did not entirely want to have noticed, which was that he had not asked a single question.
Not where exactly, not what it meant, not what he should expect.
Six years of a man who negotiated the terms of everything, and he'd said yes to a bench.
She picked the bench herself. Halfway along her running route, where the path widened out and the river came into full view past a gap in the trees, ordinary enough that nobody would look twice at two people sitting there, public enough that neither of them could turn it into anything staged.
He showed up five minutes early in a plain coat instead of a suit, sitting a careful distance away from her on the cold wood slats like he understood exactly how much space to leave.
"No lawyer this time," he said, by way of hello.
"No lawyer this time." She watched a barge move slow and steady down the middle of the river, unhurried, indifferent to either of them. "I wanted to see what you're actually like when nobody's arranged the room for you."
"Fair." He was quiet a moment, hands loose in his lap, none of the careful composure she remembered from a hundred boardrooms. "Ask me anything. I mean that. Whatever you actually want to know, not the version you think you're supposed to ask."
She'd come with a list in her head, weeks in the making, and sitting there with the cold coming up through the bench and the river moving steady beside them, most of it didn't matter anymore.
"Why her," Elena said instead, the one question she hadn't let herself ask directly until now. "Not the plan she built. I know about that part. I mean you. Out of everyone in the world, why did you let yourself say yes to that specific person."
Julian didn't flinch from it, which surprised her.
"Because she made me feel like the version of myself I missed being," he said slowly, working it out loud, like he was answering it honestly for the first time even to himself.
"Not better than you. Not more interesting.
Just — undemanding. You knew me too well to let me get away with the easy version of myself, the one who solves everything with a check and a room full of admirers.
She didn't know me at all. She just liked the surface, and for a while, being liked for the surface felt like relief instead of the hollow thing it actually was. "
"That's an honest answer."
"You said ask anything. I'm done giving you the rehearsed ones."
"Then here's the next one." Elena kept her eyes on the river. "Did you think about me? Not guilt. I know you felt guilty, guilt's easy. Did you think about me, as a person, in a room somewhere, while you were in that hotel."
He took a long time with that one.
"No," he said. "Not the way you mean. I thought about the marriage. I thought about the arrangement of my life and whether it was in danger. That's a different thing and I know it's a worse answer."
"It is a worse answer."
"I'm not going to give you a better one just because it's available."
Elena breathed out. Somewhere behind them a dog went past at speed, its owner jogging after it.
"Did you ever bring her anywhere I'd been?"
"No."
"Did she ask you to?"
A pause. "Twice."
"What did you say?"
"I said no, and I was proud of myself for it," Julian said, "and I want you to hear how disgusting that is, because I've had five months to sit with it. I gave myself credit for a rule. I thought having a rule made it smaller."
"It's not smaller."
"No. It's just tidier." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've been thinking about that a lot, actually. About how much of my whole life has been tidiness dressed up as character."
Elena watched the barge get smaller.
"Would you have told me?" she said. "If I hadn't seen the phone. Ten years from now, fifteen — is there a version where you sit me down?"
"No."
She turned her head.
"You said ask anything," Julian said. "That's the answer.
No. I've gone at that one from every direction I can find and I keep landing in the same place.
I'd have ended it eventually, probably that spring, and then I'd have carried it, and I'd have been a very good husband about it for thirty years.
" He wasn't looking at her. "I'd have died with it.
I'm almost sure of that. And I'd have told myself the whole time that not telling you was a kindness. "
"That's the worst thing you've said to me."
"Yes."
"You could have lied just then," Elena said. "I'd never have known. You could have said yes, eventually, and I'd have wanted to believe it, and it would have cost you nothing."
"I thought about it," he said. "For about a second and a half.
And then I thought — if I lie here, on this bench, about this, then I've spent five months doing all of it for nothing.
" He finally looked at her. "That's the actual test, isn't it.
Not the trust. Not the deal. Whether I'll tell you a true thing that makes you less likely to come back. "
Elena sat with that for a long moment, the cold coming up through the slats.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
"Did I pass?"
"Don't ask me that."
"Okay."
"Not because you didn't," Elena said. "Because you don't get to know the score. That's part of it now."
Julian nodded slowly, and took it, and said nothing at all — and that, more than the answer, was the thing she'd think about for the rest of the week.
They sat with the river a while.
Without deciding to, Elena told him something true in return.
"I've been building a life these past five months that doesn't need you in it," she said.
"And most days that feels like the strongest thing I've ever done.
But some days it just feels lonely, and I hate that those two things are true at the same time, because I want to only feel the strong version. "
"You're allowed to feel both."
"I know I'm allowed. Doesn't make it easier." She almost laughed, surprised by her own bluntness, and the sound that came out was rougher than she meant it to be. "God, this is a strange conversation to be having on a park bench."
"How's the studio?"
Elena turned her head and looked at him.
"Not — " He stopped, and started again, more carefully.
"I want to be clear about what I'm asking, because I've spent an hour on the drive deciding how to ask it.
I'm not asking whether you need anything.
If you needed something you'd get it yourself, and if you couldn't you'd ask Dana, and I'm about ninth on that list at best. I'm asking how it's going.
It's a question about you. That's all it is. "
She held onto her suspicion for another second or two, and then let it go, because there was genuinely nothing underneath the question.
So she told him. About the low spot in the floor and the eleven hundred dollars.
About thirty-one names and the Saturday class and Naomi writing a plan on the back of an intake form.
About Joy Adeyemi taking the six a.m. and refusing to hear the rates.
About sitting in a folding chair afterward with her legs gone strange because she'd found out she was still good at the thing.
He listened the way people don't. He asked what her retention looked like after week three, which was the exact right question and the one she'd been chewing on for a month, and when she said four out of nineteen had drifted he said that's better than most first quarters with the flat confidence of a man who had looked at several hundred small businesses in his life, and she believed him, and something eased in her about a problem she hadn't known was still sitting there.
Then he said, "Can I tell you the thing I wasn't going to tell you?"
"That's a terrible way to open."
"It's about the filing." He was looking at the water. "Priti's office sent over a schedule of assets in November. Your business was on it, because it had to be. One line. Name of owner."
Elena went still.
"Elena Cross," he said.
"Yes."