Chapter 24
JESS
Anne picked me up on Saturday morning in her ridiculous SUV with two coffees in the cupholders and a folder of MLS printouts on the passenger seat, and when I got in she handed me the good coffee — oat milk, the way I take it, which she has known since the boys were in diapers — and did not ask me how I was doing.
That’s the thing about Anne. She knows the difference between the people who need to be asked and the people who will start talking the second they’re sure you won’t make them.
“Three houses,” she said, pulling out. “Two in Webster Groves, one in Kirkwood I think is a reach but the yard’s insane. I told all three agents you’re a serious cash-adjacent buyer relocating for a hospital director job, which is true, and that you have exquisite taste, which is aspirational.”
“I have fine taste.”
“You bought a couch the color of oatmeal, Jess. You’re here for structural integrity and good light. I’m here for the taste.” She merged onto the highway. “Now. Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to look at houses for an hour first and then talk about it?”
“Houses first.”
“Perfect,” Anne said, and turned up the radio.
The first Webster Groves house was wrong in the way that’s hard to explain — a beautiful house that had been staged within an inch of its life, every room insisting on how happy you were going to be in it.
Gray walls. A bowl of decorative lemons on the island.
The kind of house that’s already decided who you are.
I walked through it doing the thing I do, the thing I have always done, which is to picture the actual mornings. Justin’s backpack by which door. Where the Christmas tree goes. Whether there’s a wall in the kitchen where I could mark his height in pencil and not feel like I was ruining anything.
And I got to the primary bedroom, which had a bay window and a view of a good maple tree, and without meaning to I thought: he’d like that light for his morning coffee.
I stopped in the doorway.
Anne, behind me, said nothing. But she’d seen my face. She always sees my face.
“It’s got a weird flow,” I said. “The kitchen’s cut off from everything.”
“Agreed,” Anne said. “Next.”
Here is what I had never told anyone, and what I found myself needing to say to Anne in the car between the first house and the second, staring out the window at other people’s lawns:
I had been happy before.
That was the part nobody understood, the part that made the whole thing so much more embarrassing to grieve. I had not been a sad woman waiting to be rescued.
I had built a life on purpose, brick by brick, exactly the way I’d built everything — the career, the fellowship, the decision to have Justin alone, the move, the whole architecture of a good full life with a person I adored at the center of it who happened to be six years old.
I had wanted for nothing. I had lain in bed at night in Chicago genuinely content, a woman with a son and a job that mattered and a best friend one time zone away, and if you had asked me I would have told you, truthfully, that I had everything I needed.
“And then he showed up,” I said.
Anne kept her eyes on the road. “Yeah.”
“And I didn’t need him, Anne. That’s the thing. That’s what I keep — I didn’t have a hole he filled. I wasn’t lonely.
I had done all the work of being okay by myself, years of it, I’d gotten good at it. I turned my coffee in my hands.
“And then this idiot man sits on my floor in Chicago and lets my kid explain a card game to him for forty-five minutes, and I find out that the life I’d built, the one that had everything I needed — it had a whole other floor on it I didn’t even know about.
An upstairs. And he just — walked me up there and showed me, and now I know it’s there, and I can’t unknow it. ”
“That’s the cruelest part,” Anne said quietly.
“That’s the cruelest part. I was fine. I’d made peace with the size of my life, and it was a good size, and now I’ve seen how much bigger it gets and I can’t make myself forget. My voice caught and I made it stop.
“I don’t want the house without the upstairs anymore. And I’m so angry at him for that, Anne. For showing me the upstairs and then getting scared of it. Because now every house I walk through, I’m measuring for a person who may not be in it.”
Anne reached over at a red light and squeezed my hand.
“What did he say to you?” she asked. “At the end. You never told me.”
And I found I still couldn’t.
“He said some cruel things,” I said. “Really cruel. The kind you can’t take back once they’re in the room.
” I looked out the window. “I keep hoping he said them out of pure desperation. That he was so scared he just grabbed the nearest sharp thing and swung, without thinking, without meaning it.” I pressed my lips together.
“I don’t know if that’s true. But I need it to be, so that’s the version I’m holding onto. ”
I did not tell her the actual words. I’m not sure I ever will.
Some things, once you say them out loud to a second person, become real in a way you can’t undo, and I had decided — sitting on my own kitchen floor that first night — that I was not going to give what he’d said about my choosing Justin the dignity of being repeated.
It could die in that apartment. That much I could control.
Anne, being Anne, did not push.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, as the light turned green, “Liam says he’s a wreck.
Won’t talk in the room. Scored a hat trick Tuesday and looked like he was at a funeral the whole time.
” She pulled through the intersection. “And he’s going to that counselor.
Every week. Liam checked — not to snoop, just, you know.
The way they check on each other.” A pause.
“Men are so strange. They’ll skate into a wall for you and never once ask how you slept. ”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” Anne said. “It’s supposed to make you feel accurate.
There’s a difference. You can decide how you feel.
But you should decide it based on what’s true, and what’s true is that he blew up his own life the day you asked him to be part of yours, and now he’s doing the hardest thing a man like that can do, which is sit in a room every week and let a stranger take him apart.
” She glanced at me. “I’m not telling you to forgive him.
I’m telling you he’s not sitting on a couch feeling sorry for himself.
He’s working. That’s all. That’s the only fact I came with. ”
The Kirkwood house was the one.
I knew it in the entryway, which is embarrassing, because Anne had called it a reach and I had agreed in the car, and then I walked in and the light came down the staircase in a way that made something in my chest go quiet, and there was a kitchen that opened onto a family room onto a yard, all of it connected, no walls cutting anybody off from anybody, and a wall by the back stairs — plaster, a little rough, the exact wall you’d mark a child’s height on for ten years and then never be able to sell the house because of.
There was a bedroom that would be Justin’s. It had a window that looked out on a tree.
And there was a second small room, a den or an office, that I stood in for a while too long, because I could see a hockey stick leaning in the corner of it, and I hated that I could see it, and I could not make myself stop seeing it.
“Jess,” Anne said, from the doorway. Gently. “You okay?”
“I want this house,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I want this house whether or not —” My voice did the thing.
I let it, this time. I was getting better at letting it.
“I want it for me and Justin. Not for a maybe. If it’s just the two of us, this is still the house I want, because it’s got the upstairs built in, you understand?
The connected part. The no-walls part. I’m not going to buy a smaller life just because I’m scared the bigger one won’t come.
” I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. “I’d rather have a house with a room in it I’m not sure about than go back to a life I’ve already outgrown. ”
Anne looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled — the real one, the one I’d first seen across a daycare pickup line six years ago, two exhausted single mothers recognizing something in each other before we’d even traded names.
“That,” she said, “is the least careful thing I have ever heard you say. I’ve been waiting six years for you to say something that reckless.”
“Is it reckless? It feels reckless.”
“It’s the opposite of reckless,” Anne said.
“It’s the bravest thing you’ve done since you sat down with that legal pad.
You’re buying the future you actually want instead of the one you can guarantee.
” She hooked her arm through mine. “Put in the offer. And then go home and hope those Monday appointments are working, because I have a feeling, Jess. I’m not promising. But I have a feeling.”
I put in the offer that afternoon.
And then I went home to my son, and I did not call Carter, and I hoped — with an intensity that surprised me, standing at my kitchen counter with a house under contract and a man out of reach — that somewhere across the river, in a room with a bowl of butterscotch candies on the table, somebody was helping him find the upstairs too.