Chapter 17 #3
"I love you." He lifted his head. In the dark she could see almost nothing of him, which she found she preferred. "I'm going to keep saying it, and one day you're going to say I know, and I want you to understand in advance that I will take that as a fair trade."
"I'll say it back."
"You don't have to —"
"Adrian." She put her hand flat on his chest, over the heart, which was still going hard.
"I've spent a year learning to say what I want out loud and you're going to have to let me be good at it.
I love you. I have loved you since the second year and I built a company so you couldn't leave me, and I'd like the rest of my life to be about not doing that. "
He put his forehead down against hers and did not say anything for a while, and Clara felt his breathing change and did not remark on it, and that was the closest she ever came, in the whole of their marriage, to seeing him cry.
Afterward he pulled the quilt over both of them, and she lay with her head on his chest on a bare mattress in an empty room with the door open, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then Adrian said, "Clara."
"Mm."
"Marry me."
She lifted her head.
"We're married," she said.
"I'm aware." In the dark she could just about see him.
"We've been married for eight years and I have never once asked you.
There was a conversation nine years ago in an office about terms and there was a garden and a lawyer, and at no point in any of it did I ask you a question and wait for the answer. "
Clara put her hand on his face.
"That's the worst proposal in the history of the county," she said.
"It is. I've had a year and it's the best I could do."
"Yes," Clara said.
"Yes?"
"Yes. Ask me things for the rest of my life and I'll answer every one of them, and I will be bad at it for about two years, and you're not allowed to be patient about that where I can see it."
"I'll be patient where you can't see it."
"That's acceptable."
And Adrian Whitmore laughed — actually laughed, out loud, in the dark, a sound Clara had heard perhaps nine times in nine years — and pulled her in, and she went.
They lay there a while.
"There's a thing we have to do before any of this," Clara said, "and it isn't the house."
"Willa."
"Willa."
"I know." He was looking at the ceiling. "I've known since about March. I've been waiting for you to say it because it isn't mine to raise."
"It's entirely yours to raise, she's your daughter."
"Yes," Adrian said. "And she has a mother, and the mother is in this bed, and I'd have got that wrong for the ninth time if I'd raised it first."
Clara propped herself up on one arm.
"Say that again."
"Which part?"
"The mother part."
He turned his head.
"You raised her from nine," he said. "You have been her mother for eight years and I have called you her stepmother in about a hundred rooms because that was the accurate word and I liked accurate words.
" His voice did something. "And in September I put her on a schedule to be introduced to a woman she'd never met, and I did it in a document I handed to her mother, and I have not been able to get past that in a year. "
"She has to be asked," Clara said. "Whatever we do. She gets asked first and she gets a real answer and if the answer is no then it's no."
"Yes."
"I mean it, Adrian. Not consulted. Asked. With the option of saying no and nothing bad happening."
"Clara." He sat up on one elbow to face her. "I have spent a year being taken apart over exactly this. I'm not going to do it to her in the last chapter."
And Clara — who had come to that house with three terms and had delivered all three, and had not planned a fourth — heard herself say:
"I want to adopt her."
The room went very quiet.
"I've wanted it since she was twelve," Clara said, "and I never said it, because saying it would have been asking you for something, and because I thought there was a version where you said of course, whatever you need, in the supplier voice, and I would have had to live in this house with that answer forever. "
Adrian did not say anything for a long moment.
"Ask me properly," he said.
"What?"
"You said you want it. That's not asking." He was completely steady. "Ask me, out loud, for the thing you want, and let me answer. You've made me promise to ask you things for the rest of my life. This is the other half of it."
Clara lay in the dark on a bare mattress and found that her heart was going like she was about to walk into a boardroom.
"Adrian," she said. "I would like to adopt your daughter. Will you agree to it?"
"Yes," he said. "God, yes."
And then, immediately, before she could take a breath:
"And if she says no, we ask again in two years, and I'll be the one who tells her that nothing changes either way."
At about two in the morning she got up and went down for water.
She stood in the kitchen in his shirt with the light over the range on, in a house she owned and was not going to live in, and looked at the pantry door.
Then she opened it.
The calendar was still hanging there. Somebody had kept it going — the handwriting was Willa's, and there were four things on September in purple pen, and one of them was 20th — dinner, and underneath it, in the same hand, in letters about half a centimeter high, it said: she'll be there.
Clara stood in a pantry at two in the morning.
Then she took the pen off the hook where the pen had always hung, and turned to October, and wrote in the fourth of the month:
Clara & Adrian — house hunting. Willa comes or it doesn't count.
And went back upstairs.