Chapter 18 #3
She had got better at it. That was the truth of the two years and it was not romantic and she loved it: it had been a skill, and she had been bad at it, and she had practiced.
There had been a period around the spring where she had said things so blunt that they had both had to stop, and one occasion in February when she had asked for something and then been so embarrassed by having asked that she had put her hands over her face, and Adrian had pulled them away and said, "No.
Look at me. Ask me again," and she had, and he had said, "Thank you," and meant it.
Tonight there was none of that.
Tonight was easy, which was the astonishing part — a Tuesday, at the end of a long day, in a house they had chosen off a list, with a hideous lampshade on a shelf downstairs and a court order in a folder in the kitchen drawer.
He said her name into her shoulder near the end and she said his back, and when it was over neither of them moved for a while, and then Adrian said, into her hair:
"I love you."
"I know," Clara said.
And he laughed — hard, with his whole chest, so that she felt it under her cheek — because she had told him two years ago in an empty room that one day she would say exactly that, and he had told her he would take it as a fair trade.
"I love you too," she said. "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"Clara. I'm going to say it every day for the rest of my life.
" He propped himself up so she could see his face, and there was nothing arranged about it at all.
"That's the promise. Not a gesture, not a document, no lawyer in it.
Every day, out loud, whether or not you're in a good mood, whether or not anybody's watching, until one of us dies. That's what I'm for now."
"That's what you're for?"
"That's what I'm for," Adrian said. "I ran a hotel company for twenty years and I was mediocre at it and my wife did the actual work. I'm extremely good at this. Let me have it."
Clara Devlin Whitmore lay in a bed in Carpinteria with her hand flat on her husband's chest and felt her own face doing something ridiculous.
"Okay," she said. "You can have it."
They lay there a while with the light from the hall coming in.
"Can I say a thing," Clara said, "and you don't get to fix it or apologize for it."
"Yes."
"I'm never going to be able to explain this to anybody." She was looking at the ceiling. "If somebody asked me — a stranger, at a dinner — how I ended up here, there is no version I can tell that doesn't sound like a woman who went back. And people are going to think that for the rest of my life."
"Does it bother you?"
"It did." She turned her head. "For about a year. It doesn't now, and I worked out why in about March, and I've been waiting for a good moment to tell you and there isn't going to be one, so."
"Go on."
"It's because I know what I turned down," Clara said.
"Nobody else does. Hugo knows, and Imani knows, and that's it.
Everybody else in that county thinks I got taken back.
" She put her hand flat on his chest again.
"And I had a company on the table with my name first and a clean exit, from a good man, in writing, and I read it four times and I said no in a kitchen garden in Ojai on a Tuesday.
Nobody made me. You didn't even know it was happening. "
"I know."
"So they can think what they want. I'm the only person who has to know what this cost, and it cost something, and I paid it on purpose." She shrugged against the pillow. "That's the difference between going back and choosing. You don't get to see it from outside. It's not visible. It's just mine."
Adrian did not say anything for a moment.
Then he said, "That's the best thing anybody's ever said to me," and Clara said, "I'm aware," and he laughed and pulled the covers up over both of them.
In the morning Willa came home at eight and made an unreasonable amount of noise in the kitchen and shouted up the stairs that there was no bread.
Adrian shouted back that there was bread, in the freezer, where bread lives.
Willa shouted that frozen bread was not bread.
Clara lay in bed for one more minute listening to her family argue about bread in a house with both their names on it, and then she got up, and put on her husband's shirt, and went down.
They were at the counter. Willa had the last of the coffee and was refusing to give it up on the grounds of having been legally adopted the day before, which she had already established as a trump card and which she intended to use for at least a decade. Adrian was making more, badly.
Clara came in and took the mug out of her daughter's hand and drank from it.
"That's mine."
"It's mine. Everything in this house is mine, I picked it."
"You did not pick the lamp."
"Thank you," Clara said.
"Oh, don't," Adrian said. "Not both of you."
And Willa laughed, and Clara laughed, and Adrian put down the coffee thing and came around the counter and put his arms around his wife from behind and his chin on her shoulder, in front of his daughter, in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary Wednesday.
"Good morning," he said.
"Good morning."
"I love you."
"That's day one," Clara said.
"That's day one," Adrian agreed. "Only about twelve thousand to go."
And Clara Devlin Whitmore stood in her own kitchen with her name on the building she was going to drive to, and her daughter stealing her coffee, and her husband's arms around her saying it out loud where everyone could hear — and she turned around in them, and kissed him, and said it back.