CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN #3
“Why now? You could have written all this down and sent it through Priya with the rest of the paperwork.”
“Because I’ve let people tell you things for seven years. Luca. Alessandra. My mother. I’ve let everyone carry messages about me to you. I didn’t want this to be one more thing you heard secondhand.”
* * *
He was quiet for a long time after that. I thought he’d finished. Then he said, “Do you want to know when?”
“When what?”
“When I fell in love with you.”
I didn’t answer. He took it as a yes, and I let him.
“Second year. The pneumonia. The third night, your fever finally broke around four in the morning. I’d been sitting in that chair by the bed reading you that terrible thriller about the submarine.
You woke up and you were soaked through and your voice was gone, and the first thing you said to me, the very first thing, was, did you eat anything?
” His voice went unsteady. “You’d been lying there three days unable to breathe, and you woke up worried whether I’d had dinner.
I remember sitting there with the book in my hands thinking, I’m finished.
That’s it. Whatever this was supposed to be, it isn’t that anymore. ”
I remembered it. I hadn’t remembered that he’d heard me. I’d been so sick I wasn’t sure I’d said it aloud.
“I went downstairs and made you toast,” he said. “Burned it. Brought it up anyway. You ate half of it to be polite and fell back asleep. And I sat in that chair until the sun came up, and I never told you. Not that morning. Not in five years since. I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. My eyes had filled, and I let them. “I hoped. There’s a difference.”
“I know there is. I know that now.” He looked at me, and his own eyes were wet, and I had seen Dante Moretti cry exactly once before, at his grandfather’s funeral.
“I love you. I’ve loved you since four o’clock in the morning in our second year.
I loved you through all of this. I loved you when I moved your chair and when I forgot our anniversary and when I stood next to you and let my mother say what she said.
I loved you when I told Luca you were an obligation.
” He stopped. “I loved you. I just loved you badly.”
I cried then, properly, on the bench in the park with my hands over my face, and he didn’t reach for me. I felt him move once at the other end of the bench, and then stop himself, and stay where he was.
When I could speak again, I said, “That doesn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to tell me you love me for the first time and have it mean everything’s all right.”
“I know. I’m not telling you so it’ll be all right. I’m telling you because you should have heard it seven years ago from me, and not last month from Alessandra. You should have heard it every morning. That’s all. There’s no other reason.”
“I’m still angry.”
“You should be.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to file. I don’t know what I want.”
“Then don’t decide today.” He said it gently. “Or decide today, if you want to. It’s yours either way.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Without thinking, I reached into my coat pocket, and my fingers closed around the soft square of the handkerchief.
I took it out. It was creased from two months in my pocket, the navy initials faded at the corner.
He looked at it for a long moment. I watched him recognize it.
“You kept that.”
“It was the first thing you ever gave me that didn’t want anything back,” I said. “It’s the only thing I took from that house that I wasn’t sure was mine.”
“It’s yours.” His voice was barely audible. “It’s been yours since that night.”
I used it. I wiped my eyes with it, and he watched me do it, and neither of us said anything for a long while.
* * *
When the bells had long stopped, he stood.
“I should let you get back to your day,” he said. “Thank you for listening. I know you didn’t owe me that.”
I looked up at him. “That’s it?”
“That’s all I came to say.”
“You’re not going to ask me to come home.”
“No.” He put his hands in his coat pockets, as if to keep them from doing anything he hadn’t decided on.
“If you ever want me in your life again, in any way, you’ll tell me.
You’ve never needed my permission for anything.
I’d just like to know, if the answer’s yes, so I can be there.
And if it’s no, I’ll still be glad you told me. ”
“And the divorce?”
“The divorce is yours. So is everything else.”
He waited a moment longer, in case I had anything to say.
I didn’t, yet. He nodded once, and turned, and walked out of the park toward Water Street, and I sat on the bench and watched him go.
He didn’t look back until he reached the corner.
Then he did, once, and lifted one hand, and went around it.
I sat there until my coffee was completely cold, holding his handkerchief in both hands. Then I went to the gallery, let myself in with my key, and spent the afternoon repairing a frame, because I needed my hands to do something steady while the rest of me worked out what I’d just heard.
* * *