23. What Ezra Asked
Twenty Three
What Ezra Asked
Ezra brought it up himself, three weeks later, on-site at the Hudson Valley property, both of us standing in a half-finished lobby that reminded me, painfully and pleasantly, of another lobby a long time ago.
“I think I already know the answer,” he said, setting down a roll of blueprints. “But I’d rather ask outright than keep wondering. Is there a future here, Olivia? For us, I mean. Not the hotel.”
I owed him an honest answer, the same way Sebastian had learned to owe me one.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I like you enormously, Ezra. You’ve given me back something professionally that I’d almost forgotten I had.
I don’t think that’s nothing. But I don’t think I can tell you it’s the same thing as wanting a life with you, and I’d rather tell you that plainly than let you wait around for an answer I’m not sure is coming. ”
He nodded slowly, absorbing it with the same steady grace he brought to everything else. “I had a feeling,” he said. “You talk about your husband differently than most people talk about someone they’re divorcing. There’s a whole conversation happening in what you don’t say.”
“I’m not sure what I’m doing yet,” I admitted. “I know that’s not fair to you.”
“It’s not unfair,” Ezra said. “It’s just honest, which is rarer than people think, and I’d rather have honesty from you than a comfortable lie that wastes both our time.
” He picked the blueprints back up, and something in his posture shifted, settling into a different kind of finality.
“For what it’s worth — I could wait for you.
I want to be clear-eyed about that, since we’re being honest. I think I would wait, if you asked me to.
But I don’t think that’s actually good for either of us, and I respect you too much to let you carry the weight of my waiting on top of everything else you’re carrying right now. ”
“Thank you for saying that instead of making me guess it.”
“I’m going to keep you as my designer, if you’ll have the project,” he said, with a small, genuine smile.
“You’re too good to lose over an answer that was never really about the work.
But I think it’s better if I stop asking the other question.
You’ll know where to find me, professionally, whenever you need to.
The rest of it isn’t mine to keep asking after. ”
We finished the site walkthrough as colleagues, easily, the way we’d started, and I drove home that evening with a complicated, grateful ache in my chest — for a man who’d taken my work seriously when I’d needed exactly that, and who’d had the dignity to name his own feelings honestly instead of making me responsible for managing them.
I called Renata that night, sitting in my car outside her house, not ready yet to go in and explain.
“Ezra asked,” I said. “About us. A future.”
“What did you say?”
“The truth. That I didn’t know.” I watched the porch light flicker against the dark. “He said he could wait for me. And then he said that was exactly the problem, and that he wasn’t going to ask again.”
“How do you feel?”
I thought about it honestly before answering — really thought, the way I’d been practicing all year, instead of reaching for the first feeling that arrived.
“Relieved,” I finally said. “Not because I don’t care about him.
Because some part of me has known for weeks what my actual answer was, and I think I needed someone else to ask the question out loud before I could stop avoiding it. ”
“And what’s the actual answer?”
I sat with that a moment longer, the porch light steady now, the whole quiet street holding still around me.
“I think I still want to go home,” I said. “Not the home we had before all this. Something new, that we’d have to actually build this time, on purpose, instead of just falling into it. I’m not sure I’m ready to say that to him yet. But I think it’s true.”