17. First Attempt
Seventeen
First Attempt
He sent flowers three days later — an enormous, extravagant arrangement that arrived at Renata’s door and made her raise her eyebrows the way you do at a gesture that’s trying too hard.
The card read: I know this doesn’t fix anything. I wanted you to have something beautiful anyway. — S
I appreciated the restraint of it, actually — no grand promise, no demand for a response.
But three days after that, a car arrived to take me to a “surprise,” which turned out to be a private dinner at the restaurant where we’d had our first anniversary, the whole place cleared out for just the two of us, candles, the works.
I stood in the doorway and felt something in me go cold instead of moved.
“Sebastian.”
“I wanted to do something to show you—”
“You cleared out an entire restaurant.”
“I wanted it to be right. Special. I know flowers weren’t enough, so I thought—”
“You thought bigger would be the answer,” I said.
“That’s the problem, Sebastian. That’s exactly the problem.
You’re still deciding what I need without asking me.
You didn’t ask if I wanted a grand gesture.
You didn’t ask if I was even ready to have dinner with you at all.
You just decided, the way you always decide, and executed it beautifully, and expected me to be swept up in how well-executed it was. ”
He stood there, genuinely stricken, and I watched him try to recalibrate in real time. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “I did exactly the thing I told you I understood I was doing. I’m sorry. Do you want to leave?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’ll stay for twenty minutes, because you went to the trouble, and because leaving without a word isn’t who I want to be either.”
We sat at the candlelit table, both of us aware of how absurd the twenty-minute compromise looked against the scale of the gesture surrounding it, and I watched him understand, slowly, that grand gestures and genuine change were not the same currency, and that he’d been trying to pay a debt in the wrong denomination entirely.
“What would asking have looked like?” he said, finally, quietly. “I’m not being rhetorical. I actually don’t know. I’ve spent nine years solving problems by deciding things efficiently. I don’t know how to just… ask, and wait, and not already have an answer ready.”
“That’s the actual work, Sebastian,” I said.
“Not this.” I gestured at the candles, the empty restaurant, the absurd beautiful waste of it.
“This is you being excellent at grand gestures, which you’ve always been.
I need you to be ordinary and patient instead.
I need you to ask me small things and actually wait for the answer instead of already knowing what you’re going to do next. ”
He nodded slowly, and I could see him filing it away — not dismissively, but like a man taking real notes for the first time in a class he’d been failing.
“Can I ask you one small thing right now?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Can I call you on Thursdays? Not to see you. Just to ask how your week is going. No agenda. You can say no.”
It was, I noted, the smallest possible thing he could have asked, after clearing out an entire restaurant twenty minutes earlier. I think some part of him had actually heard me.
“You can call,” I said. “I might not always answer. That has to be allowed too.”
“It’s allowed.”
I left before the entrées arrived. It wasn’t cruelty — it was, I think, the first time in the whole marriage I’d left a room on my own terms, at my own pace, without waiting to see whether he needed me to stay.
He called the following Thursday. I let it ring twice before answering, not out of games, but because I genuinely needed the two rings to decide I wanted to.
“How was your week,” he said, and nothing else — no agenda, no case being built, just the question, sitting there, waiting.
“I had a second call with a developer about some design work,” I said. “It went well.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to tell me more?”
“Not yet,” I said. “You asked a small thing. I’m giving you a small answer. That’s the deal, remember?”
He laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of him. “Fair enough. Same time next week?”
“Maybe,” I said, and meant it as an actual maybe, for the first time since the ring landed on the kitchen counter — not a yes dressed up as uncertainty, not a no I didn’t have the strength to say outright.
A real, open, unresolved maybe, which was, strange as it sounds, the first entirely honest thing I’d offered him in weeks.